Unfortunate Travel Adventures is a series of articles that start with Belgrade and extend to Ukraine and never end. Because me and @vitruvianman will continue to travel and our bad luck will always follow us (this is our curse) . All the adventures we've been through will be cool new episode. So, if you ready let’s start!
I have a team for my travels. One of them @vitruvianman and the other one is Murat, but he hasn’t an account here. So, before we create that team I had already been Prague in the Czech Republic. But for the rest of the team Belgrade will be first journey. So, we search and ın the end of April, we decided to go on vacation. Belgrade for one week! Everything was good but we didn’t know how unlucky we are.
Anyway, we had a flight at 18:45.But we came at Ataturk Airport early and took care of the procedures. We started planning our days at 16:00. We were planning every day with care, which restaurants we will eat, which club we will go. We were marked every one of them on the our offline map. We were trying to be prepared for everything (As you see, I’m a good student Batman). We were going to stay for a week and we wanted to make the best of it. After a while, everything started, like a domino effect. There were warnings on the screen next to our plane. We were late!
The door we had to go to was on the 700’s, and we were still in the 200's. And Ataturk Airport is very big airport. It's easy to get lost inside. When we saw the warning text on the screen, we started running (Barry Allen bless us!). We hit people, run into it without stopping, sweat and blood... It’s like an arena at Roma, glory and fear! But we can not reach a destination. As my friends started to plan what we would do if we missed the flight. I think it is an unforgettable moment for all of us. It was very weird moment for us. Because our journey can be finished before start.
I guess, we ran for 10 minutes. And now, we were leaving the door. Last time, we had the passport as the last confirmed passenger. We were barely breathing and terribly sweated. But we got caught up in the plane. When we were in panic and fear ended, we started laughing. We were glad but actually everything was just starting. At around 9 pm we landed at Nicola Tesla Airport.
As I said before, my friends were going abroad for the first time, but I had already gone to Prague, which entered the Shengen region, and I had the Green Passport. So I had no problems getting into Belgrade when I did not want a visa. But as you can imagine, I lived with everyone. Because I’m Turkish. I had a diplomatic passport with an entrance permit to Shengen. And Serbia was not the country of Shengen. He didn't want a visa. But these privileges have become insignificant because of the country in which I was born. I do not know what you think of this, but I call it racism!
Anyway, the passports of all Turkish passengers were confiscated at the airport, without any explanation. We waited about half an hour and then we were interrogated. The police officer started first with me because I went to Shengen country. I mentioned that I was a tourist, I was having a vacation. He asked me about my vacation plan, reservation for my stay, how much cash I had, whether I received my return ticket. Fortunately, we had guessed and prepared all of these documents and I had the implication. I showed the documents to remove the file itself. But there was a problem! Sure, there was!
The documents were all in Turkish. The date information was written in documents in the form of day - month (in writing) - year. And we were in April. In other words, in the form of 22nd April 20, but the Turkish acronym of April is Nis. So history is what you think it is probably now. If you were going to another country this would be a trivial detail. But that was not the case for Serbia because Nis was also the name of Serbia's third largest city.
So the police thought it was Nis city. He told us that we were in Belgrade where we came from the wrong city, but according to the ticket and reservation we had to go to Nis. So he said he could not approve our passport. It's like every bad luck in the world was gathering around us and accumulating every hour. We tried to explain that he was the Turkish acronym of April. It's like a nightmare because her english is not good.
Fortunately, at the end of half an hour, the officer understood the matter. We have had many misfortunes in our journey to Belgrade and after there at Kiev. We learned a lot of things in these travels. And these was a really funny and educational holiday for us. But, for now I guess it’s all. See you next content, adios amigos!
