The Stans 2026

 It feels like we've had a full holiday, and we're still on the way there. After a long sleep we felt a bit better, more so after starting the day with a good Turkish breakfast - mainly meze type things. It's been another fine day, clear and in the high 20s. The people in the hotel were very mixed and there was at least one guest in Turkiye for medical tourism - a hair transplant, judging by the banadaged and shaved scalp. We walked around the local area a bit. Mostly shops selling spices and turkish delight to tourists but also rug shops, street vendors selling grilled sweetcorn and chestnuts (we got some nuts yesterday, quite good). Well cared-for cats (there are occasional machines that dispense food for homeless cats) but few dogs. We reached the grand bazaar and wandered for a while, rebuffing shop owners and not buying anything. Eventually we walked back to Sultanahmet square, had a coffee and too the HOHO bus that wound past multiple palaces and mosques, eventually o...

 When last we left off, we were sitting in Changi Airport. Well, that went on for quite some time. By the time the flight boarded, some time after 1am, we were exhausted and overfed - as it's easy to eat when you're bored. The upside of eating all evening was that once the flight took off we could go to sleep and not wait around to be fed. The downside was that it was a new seating arrangement. Technically a lie-flat bed, but you don't recline it until it's flat. No, you put it upright and then a flight attendant, who knows what they're doing, folds the seat back down - and there's a thin mattress on the back, and a separate seatbelt! All that was actually pretty good. The problem is captured in the photo below. In this flat bed, the room for your legs is the small area below and to the left of the screen. Quite a narrow hole, and off-centre. So it doesn't really work, and every time I rolled over I'd wake up and fidget around trying to get into some com...