10.03.10:
I dropped the passport, photos, photocopies and receipts off at the Iranian Embassy, expecting a ‘great stuff Graham, here’s your visa!’, but instead got a ‘come back tomorrow’. One more night in Istanbul, then? Humph. Sans passport, there was little I could do about getting my Azerbaijan nightmare solved today, but I went to the embassy anyway to make sure everything was in order.
I was told that the Letter of Invitation which I had paid £80 for was now invalid. Why? Because it was addressed to London, not Istanbul. So what?! I hear you cry. Man, this lot LOVE their paperwork. Just love it. Like a teenage boy likes to lock himself in his room. Maybe they kneel down with all their juiciest paperwork spread out in a horseshoe in front of them, undo their flies and… and… oh, never mind…
The short of it all was that I needed a brand new Letter of Invitation. I had spent an hour being pushed about in what was the equivalent of the front row of a Foo Fighter’s gig trying to get to the front desk (queuing (patently) is for WIMPS!) just to be told that there was no way I was going to get a new visa any time this week. I felt like screaming.
In fact, I think I will…
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
That’s better.
You need a nice primal scream every now and then, clears the windpipes.
Then I set off in search of a travel agency who would whip me up a new letter of invitation. In short, I spent over two hours wandering the streets and came up with nothin’. Nobody could help me.
There was one thing that could help… oh yes, you lovely amber nectar, you sweet barley-hop concoction. I needed a beer and I needed one NOW. So it was back to the backpackers and drinks with Atheer and a lovely couple from Canada (who, Luke and Leia style, turned out to be brother and sister). They were from the Frenchy bit of The Cold Australia, which give me tons of ammunition to take the mick, and to Atheer’s delight, they were Jewish, so he got the big guns out on security barriers and fruit pastilles; unfortunately for the sake of comedy, they kept on agreeing with us. Where are the die-hard curly-sided settlers when you need them?!
Afterwards, Atheer and I ventured into the night for another drink or two and ended up on the maddest pub crawl I’ve undertaken in an age. There were a bunch of places that we couldn’t get into unless we had girls with us, so we had to hang about on the street hiding our cans of lager (you’re not supposed to drink on the street in Turkey) and hassling female passers by like a pair of midnight cowboys in the hope of somebody taking pity on us and getting us inside one of these places.
The night soon collapsed into a cacophony of drunken antics which somehow involved a vodka Redbull, stolen nuts and a shopping trolley. I can’t remember too much after that. Merry Christmas Everyone!
