Bordeaux 2

Istanbul

Hannover

Agen

Saint Etienne

Berlin

Istanbul 2

Paris

Istanbul

You reluctantly agreed to spend a Saturday night without any purpose meandering in your more than substandard hotel room 2 blocks from the venue you played at the previous nights to save the promoter over a thousand U.S. dollars in flight costs, not breaking the equally arbitrary and sacred Saturday night stay airline rule. Sleeping off several low budget ruby red Red Bull substitute-vodkas and a pair of lines of free equally low quality amphetamine you rise and shine around 3 pm . You got the call to play the 2 concerts with a turkish-swedish expatriate and a Turkey-based gypsy clarinet player who has recently achieved pop star stardom on Monday, looking for a flight with an available window seat for Wednesday the same week proved difficult, you happily booked yourself onto a Delta codeshare flight on an Al Italia plane out of Newark's international airport, which you confirmed on an obscure internet portal was very lightly occupied, almost immediately after you purchased the ticket that and all other international Al Italia flights were cancelled. Miraculously, 17 G opened up on a Delta flight through Rome and you managed to secure it within minutes. Surprisingly smooth, you even got to sleep a few hours during the flight, zoning out on the generic dose of the 400 mg ibuprofen and 60 mg pseudoephedrine cold medication pills you have packed in wise foresight since you've been battling a cold for a couple days.You shower, waiting for another dose of the aforementioned pill to kick in. Checking your email with the free and therefore painfully slow wireless internet signal, including a trip to Starbucks for a $5 cappuccino culminating in the return to your laptop finding the 3 websites you cleverly opened before departing still only partially loaded brings around sundown effortlessly. Mustering all your motivation you complete a loveless 30 minutes of yoga in 3 different spots of the room since you either hit your hand or foot on the TV, bed or nightstand or the mat slides around involuntarily on the 60 year old carpet. Disgruntled, you succumb to a hot shower and contacting an acquaintance from New York to make plans for the evening. Putting much effort into avoiding the treacherous Saturday night traffic jams you meet him a few blocks from the hotel where you share a taxi cab to a restaurant and venue in a converted power plant in a neighbourhood referred to as "ghetto" by various people throughout the evening, which is helpful since you can't pronounce its real name properly anyhow. A female friend runs a new restaurant there which manages to leave out entirely and substitute with the scorned fava member of the bean family the two ingredients of the salad that played the predominant role in your election of this particular salad over its numerous competitors in the menu's "green's" section, green olives and croutons. Most of the staff is forced to wear handyman overalls as to play along with some far fetched theme manifested in logos of a fork and a hammer crossed evoking the freemason's seal plastered on every printable surface. The girl joining you at the table is probably to be held responsible for this but enjoys wearing a rather casual 96 outfit, and is sheepishly picking at your mate's octopus carpaccio. She doesn't seem to mind the conversation between you and your friend revolving mostly around vagina sizes, his newly acquired singlehood and intentions to sodomize as many females under 30 as possible, which makes her affable, though she ruins it shortly after by pointing out her favourite song, an unforgivable remix of a groundbreaking 60's jazz recording, a definitive low point in the murky hodgepodge of abhorrent 90's acid jazz the DJ with immaculately tidy dread locks has been serving, accompanying your meal. Seemingly a good move, she orders a few rounds of free vodka shots, though she picks the kind she proudly describes as self-infused, proving it to be more of a wrong turn since its taste resembles a harsh combination of jaegermeister and biting into a stick of incense. It is decided to go over to the venue where a hairdresser and a failed jazz musician from southern Germany are supposed to battle each other on the turntables, barely making it past the extraterrestrial looking uniformed eastern european models handing out useless compilations and flyers, all backed by your least favourite american tobacco company upon entry, you decide to leave after a $12 glass of turkish merlot and two house tracks with brazilian flavoured jazz flute solos by the opening DJ.You find the girl from the restaurant who earlier mentioned she will drive to your hotel's neighbourhood around midnight to meet up with her friend who is celebrating her birthday and try to catch a ride with her since you have no cash and there are no cabs in sight. The ride turns out to be more than uncomfortable, spanning an astonishing hour and a half, mostly stuck in traffic, or trying to avoid traffic by zipping up and down steep wet cobblestone one-way side streets in the wrong direction. Not unimpressed by her driving skills and remarkable chutzpa, shooing away macho cab drivers and cutting off most other vehicles in sight, you decide she deserves to be bought a drink, so you enter a club that used to be an ok coffee place, your swedo-turkish boss from the night before is helplessly struggling through his set of tenor saxophone, delay pedal, DJ and intonation problems quartet improvisation.The place is packed to the brim and ordering a vodka tonic that includes a garnish of 3 pomegranate seeds that try to divert your attention from the flatness of the soda and the fact it costs $14 takes another 20 minutes, helping your decision to simply drink it while walking to the other bar where the now 3rd degree friend is having her birthday celebration in. Succeeding in being even more crowded and packed than the place before, the club sticks to Turkey's interminable obsession with spinning depeche mode and everybody singing along to their songs without understanding or pronouncing the words correctly. By the drum break of "to have and to hold" you down your $18 red bull vodka and decide to call it a night since your pocket is filling up with crumbled up credit card receipts from the drinks you have been buying and probably will be furious about in about a week's time when you receive your statement. Also, the birthday cake which has its classification "Sacher" written on it, has an irritating flavour but is somehow being discussed as a very lucky find since the birthday girl's name is apparently just one letter off, too bad she is chastened with a first name recalling this vulgar concoction of cherry and chocolate, while the rest of Turkey's girls enjoy first names that translate into things like "rose petal".Without purchasing a pack of cigarettes and smoking before going to bed, which you would have done have you had cash or would cigarettes be available by credit card or would there not be dubious suspects hanging around the cash machine at this time of the night, you slip under the duvet fully clothed, knowing the radiator next to the bed will most likely not be turned on now, at 3 am. You wake up 2 h before your alarm will go off and you'll have to go to the airport to fly home on Delta's direct flight 73 to John F Kennedy airport which gives you plenty of time to fluster yourself by surfing the internet reading about snow storms at your destination and on the way to your destination and the inbound aircraft being over an hour late. Also it has been raining forcefully since last night so your walk to Starbucks turns out to be a bad idea , the rain penetrating your last set of clothes, especially since you have to wait a few minutes outside before it opens at 7 am plus the evidently sleepwalking barista manages to burn the milk even more as already common at this outlet, adding insult to injury. A short stop at a cash machine and small convenience store converts 20 new Turkish Lira plus the inevitable "foreign fee" later subtracted from your checking account into 4 packs of Camel lights. The european and turkish packs are designed in baby blue, opposing the U.S hazel layout and you can't wait till you return to New York and people at a bar or imaginably a private function inquire about the origin of the curiously coloured pack in your possession upon you get to answer simply with "Turkey.", startling your interrogator and fortifying your status as a true understated cosmopolite. A quick cab ride gets you to Istanbul's international airport which is named after Mustafa Ataturk, along with any other building or street of any significance at all throughout the country. Owing to your Delta silver medallion status and your unwillingness to bring cymbals on this trip, checkin and security checks are unproblematic and you even get to board the plane in a somewhat acceptable timeframe. Squashing your lifted spirits, the pilot announces that "we" are "very heavy" today and has to unburden the 767-300ER of some of it's wheigty cargo. You notice that you are not in the -200ER model of this line of aircraft, which has the additional 600 miles range over the 300ER, which would have eased your nervousness about the possibility of running out of fuel on your search for an airport with conditions allowing a safe landing during the snowstorm along the eastern seaboard. About an hour late leaving the gate, you notice that the plane is definitely acting sluggish, obviously at maximum take off weight, which makes it all the more scarier when the pilot abandons the take off about a third into the sequence. The plane veers off the runway back into the taxi cue while the pilot makes an apologetic announcement about a warning light coming on during full throttle, whose utility he pointedly avoids defining to the passengers. With your heart rate another 20 beats per minute higher than the already elevated rate during the first try, he circles around for a second attempt at getting the vessel airborne. This time he revs the engines to full throttle while still holding the brakes, a procedure you have observed being carried out on short runways, but probably just some pilot compensating for a small set of genitals or some other bodily shortcoming perhaps. After letting go of the brakes the pilot terminates the run a little earlier than on the first try and comes on the intercom again, revealing the purpose of the admittedly flickering warning light to be pointing out a malfunction of the engines "bleed" function, which is essential in keeping the cabin pressurized and, more importantly, warming the ailerons, spoilers and other steering elements on the wings so they won't freeze over in the 30C below conditions attributed to altitudes assigned to regular air traffic. Pulling into a remote parking spot you wait for 45 minutes for the maintenance truck to arrive. First, Ahmet and Mustafa from turkish airlines tech department monkey around in the cockpit then both climb a little ladder on the ground to inspect the left engine which is in your view from 36A. For years now you and your band mates have mockingly used the term "turknology" frequently, usually when confronted with something like a succession of feedback during soundcheck, but somehow you don't manage to see the humor in this particular situation. A test is performed during which the engines are revved to the maximum for a few minutes each, on stand with the brakes reinforced by little blocks fixating the wheels, with all passengers on board and not very far from the terminal, which makes the plane move similarly as in heavy winds but when you look out the window you see cars drive past without trouble. After this surreal experience the pilot announces everything to be in working order so he refuels and gets back in the cue. Taking off over 3 h late is pretty bad, but you are relieved when you don't crash into the Bosphorus. While the plane climbs to 30000 feet you realize the sun has almost set so you expect to having to absolve the rest of the 11 h flight in darkness, which is another big factor in triggering your flight anxiety. Over Frankfurt, finally accepting the conditions of the trip and feeling slightly safer since 2h of flight have been completed without obvious incident, halfway into the 3rd showing of a straight to video Christmas movie on the single screen in the main cabin you succumb to the urge to take half a dose of bromazepam 6 and slumber off into sedated half-sleep. About 2h later a sudden full 90 degree extension of the speedbrakes forces the plane into a rapid decent and jolts you into consciousness, coinciding with a call on the intercom for a doctor. You realize the cabin is very hot contrary to the usual american airline standard of energy wasting full blast air conditioning rendering the flimsy excuse of a blanket they give you to keep you warm completely inadequate. The pilot comes back on the intercom and announces with rehearsed unconcernedness he will perform an unscheduled stop in London's Gatwick due some persistent problems, which only confirms your notion that "those cunts in Istanbul fixed fuck all" and just took off with the same warning light still flashing to get to some airport with some Delta staff easily available. Two people pass out from the heat and pressure changes but the oxygen masks don't make an appearance, landing in Gatwick is unusually quick due to the nosedive action but appears to be a routine affair. Taxiing in Gatwick on a normal day is already as much fun as a colonoscopy but having no gate to go to or clearance for 200 assumed Turks on the plane to enter the United Kingdom makes it an ordeal of unprecedented proportions. 2 h later, finally on stand on a remote location the Delta truck with even less trustworthy looking technicians than in Turkey arrives. It is announces they will once again check the bleed functions of the engines but even with them running on the back-up pressurization system they now admit to have been flying on the last 4 h the trip to JFK from Gatwick is announced to be over 10 h, about 3 h longer than the usual travel time since the Federal Aviation Agency requires any plane running on any back-up system to chose a route where it is possible to land in less than an hour on just one engine, i.e. half hour on two engines, the atlantic ocean separating you from your now nostalgically longed-for destination, the possible route would take you much further up the arctic circle, over Iceland, Greenland and remote parts of northern Canada. Having flown a similar route from Finland before and remembering the absence of jetstream-related turbulence which you welcome, you refrain from yelling and throwing empty cups in the air like the rest of the passengers. After another hour of confusing announcements the pilots probably realize that they will most definitely go over the allowed 16 h duty and 8h flying time restrictions imposed on them, god knows how many times they are allowed to take off during a day on top of that. The flight is cancelled and your favourite part of any trip involving airports, the dreaded transfer bus is called. Switching to your spare battery on your video player you prepare for the expected disaster of Gatwick having to scramble 3 unscheduled bus transfers for an unannounced aircraft. Same problem at immigration but surprisingly the check-in at the Gatwick Hilton is handled in a streamlined manner, you get to your room by 8.30 pm Greenwich mean time, 10.30 pm in Istanbul; you realize you've had one measly Delta airlines chicken ragout all day. You spend the half hour till the buffet is to be served in one of the ballrooms drinking a $9 lager and raising your data roaming charges on your cell phone to $40. The buffet seems to be designed to flatter the airline food, on the other hand you are in England. Back in your room you have a $16 jack and coke from the mini bar and start writing this after you praise the gods of technical advancement for including a U.S. power outlet in your room so you can power up your laptop. By midnight it is time to go call it a day, masturbating yourself to sleep seems a good idea, clean sheets and all, but somehow trying to fantasize about a possible orgy with all the young turkish women on the plane, stuck in this hotel and looking for some fun, gets you hard as marshmallow, since the fit girls probably booked themselves on the far superior straight turkish airlines flight, due to higher selfesteem, perhaps, so you are stuck with the trolls cowardly choosing Delta for your illusory debauchery. 7.5 mg of Doxylamine, a strong antihistamine with similar effects as Zolpidam tartrate, procured in high quantities on your last trip to France where it is widely available without prescription and also one of the 5 substances found in the toxicology report for a recent fatal accidental overdose of a young australian actor complaining about sleeplessness while filming a movie with him starring as the extremely sick and twisted supervillain, does a much better job at putting you to well-deserved sleep. After getting up at 8 am and eating a small complimentary serving of some cooked-up powdered substance they try to pass on as "scrambled eggs" in hotels around the world, it is now time to make your way to Delta check-in, your new flight was announced at breakfast to be in the same plane, with the same crew, most certainly showing the same movie a fourth time, but with a shiny new exciting flight number, one digit more than the old one, at noon. Cok guzel. Estimated flight time is matching a direct route, thankfully, so you assume the system has to be fixed completely. You walk the maze-like mile to the south terminal, past some amusing inappropriate British Airways ads, one exclaims boldly " just get on and see where it takes you", showing the cable car in Bairro Alto, Lisbon's bar district, yeah, it goes in a straight line, 3 blocks downhill and then back up again. All day long, but not at night as it's pictured here. Next up is "put down the map and get wonderfully lost ", possibly not endorsed by their pilot's union. Finally "Discover a city when it sleeps" showing an underpass in Central park at night, a good spot to get raped. Or maybe just preparing the public for new 3 am arrivals of all BA flights, trying to avoid airport rush hour congestion charges. Undeniably pleased to not be walking along the endless stream of conceited HSBC ads that point out opposing adjectives for the illustrated identical item as to make you finally understand how different cultures regard the same thing inversely, traditionally placed along places where the ad agency thinks most people that "get it" are located, international airport terminals, you reach the Delta check-in which has a cue winding throughout the terminal and then out the door all the way to the bus stop outside in the freezing cold. Great, a place you are allowed to smoke, since this trip turned out to be somewhat of a tour of the most militantly smoke-free airports of the world. You get stopped by one of the many polish girls flooding England since Poland's insertion into the european union looking for great job opportunities like doubting your carry-on suitcase will fit in the plane that you just took it out of last night and asking you to show her that it fits in the provided carry-on size checker, a box of metal tubes you're supposed to slip your bag in. Somehow one of the wheels is sticking about a quarter of an inch too far out to insert your bag. When she demands you check it, you brutally kick the suitcase in at an angle, first using your foot and then sitting on it with your full weight. It fits and now you demand she try to remove it since she was the one who wanted it in there so passionately, which proves way more complex. Extracting the bag takes up another 10 minutes, passengers stuck in line behind you first start yelling, then helping, followed by the toppling of the apparatus and destruction of the attached yard high instruction signs. At the bag check you have to wait another 10 minutes for a discussion between the inspector and a young british woman who is in tears over having to discard a medium sized tube of sunblock to end, her shamed boyfriend who probably did read the numerous warning signs about the 100ml restrictions, standing by, rolling his eyes and swaying between mollifying or told-you-so-ing her afterwards. You hope he decides for the latter and are the first one on your trusty friend, the transfer bus to your plane. Fresh blankets, earplugs and headphones look promising though it takes another 2 hours to cart all the remaining passengers on board. The very lParisast traveler to enter the flying machine is a tubby white female wearing a giant knitted sweater with a colossal american flag situated on her ample bosom with a "Polo" logo incorporated in the right bottom corner, as to evenly enrage possible muslim fundamentalists and fashion police present. When she takes the seat next to you, you softly whimper "argh" instead of saying "oh hey, how are you-where are you headed today?". She gets the message and is feverishly looking around for her friend who knows about her proportions and is trying to arrange a less hostile situation for her in one of the few empty seats left. When the front door closes she makes her move to an aisle seat even further back and you feel equal amounts of relief and guilt, not really deserving the serendipity of having the empty seat next to you after being this cruel to the horizontally challenged. Without apologizing or giving any updates on what exactly has been fixed on the aircraft the pilot steers the plane skyward, at this point you really don't care anymore, specially since you took your last dose of bromazepam which unfortunately wears off before you hit some gnarly turbulence off the coast of Nova Scotia. You manage to pinpoint some unsettling odours that you earlier assumed to be emerging from the sweat soaked shirt you've been wearing for the last 30 plus hours, to a growing patch of black mold comfortably nestled in the track the windowshade sits in. You finally land at JFK at 4.45pm though you don't reach your gate till 6.30, 26 h later than scheduled, at which point you actually start to cry. Being monday night rush-hour and freezing cold, the cab line is immense, hence you taking the air train to the Howard Beach subway station where not one, but two out of service A trains pass by the open air station.

Ankara

Clermont- Ferrand

Weimar 1

Weimar 2

Porto

Paris 2

Gatwick

Copenhagen

Cologne

Stuttgart

Tokyo