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Paris and Istanbul First Day

The long flight over from Chicago to Paris was pleasant. Air France provides wonderful service. A good selection of movies to make the flight go by quickly. I a huge fan of airline food so I was happy when they served a wonderfully compartmentalized dinner consisting of chicken, tapioca pudding, cheese, rolls, and rice. After getting a bit of sleep we awoke to a nice light breakfast (again served in compartments) before we finally arrived at Charles De Gaulle Airport. We have been bumming around the airport for the last few hours cringing at how expensive everything is. I think I just consumed the most expensive Diet Coke of my life. I have enjoyed watching all of our wrestlers speak all of the French they know in any sort of accent they can muster. I even heard one ponder the idea that if they curse in France would they say 'Pardon my English' rather than 'Pardon my French.' I am not sure about that one. We were treated to a free 15 minute trial internet session. Everyone used the time to quickly check email, but most importantly to get on facebook and throw up a quick status update and to check in at the airport. I am guilty of this. How often do you get to update your status from Paris, France? I will not get this posted before my 15 minute session runs out so it will have to do till we find some connectivity in Istanbul. UPDATE - We arrived to Istanbul in the late afternoon. Getting through customs is always a bit of a hassle when you have thirty people to account for. Tyler Baker had some unfortunate luck in losing his baggage, but Air France assured us that it will be delivered to our hotel tomorrow. We got to see a true master at work seeing our Bulgarian Bus Driver navigate the extremely narrow Turkish streets. This guy was like a surgeon. He brought us to the Kecik Hotel. This hotel seems like it was really classy when it was first built, but then they decided to not do any maintenence on it for 25 years. We had a short time to get some much needed showers, that felt really nice as many (by many I mean all) of us hadn't showered showered for around 60 hours. The hotel has free wifi so we all had to have a quick internet check to get our first posts on facebook from Turkey. We immediately headed down to dinner in the hotel restaurant. The dinner consisted mostly of vegetables. Cabbage, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, and a brothy soup that had a mint like after taste. The only meat that we hade was a chicken dish that was delivered to table and some beef looking items that I am pretty sure was liver. We also had some of the darkest hottest tea that I have ever seen in my life. We thought it was coffee at first. After dinner we did a bit of walking in the nearby shopping district. We quickly learned that the Turkish Vendors are very aggresive. We have some workouts planned for tomorrow and a competition planned for the day after. I will keep you up to date on the results. Until then....

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