Istanbul slingshot:
A story so short that it's not really a story

Back in 2016, I did another complex set of flights, but they were all on time, so no story emerged. And that's despite the fact that I was flying two days after a failed military coup in Turkey. You wouldn't say from the looks of their airport that anything unusual happened recently, though. The day before, everything was swimming in chaos and nobody knew anything (I was following news on Twitter). Two days later? Business as usual.

But that was how I found my favourite airport, Atatürk Airport, which makes as much sense as having a favourite shopping mall, which I also happened to have had at some stage of my life (it's M1 in Cracow if you're curious, but this was 22 years ago and the flame is long gone). Human thing to have unusual favourite things, I suppose.

In any case, I flew on that day from Cracow in Poland to Vienna in Austria, where I caught a plane to Istanbul in Turkey, from where I finally took off to Batumi in Georgia (country, not state).

• Cracow to Vienna had the smallest airplane I flew in my life: one side had only two seats. It was also my shortest flight as it took mere 45 minutes.
• Vienna to Istanbul had, on the other hand, the biggest plane I flew, and I could feel it due to different inertia, which was quite an interesting experience. It was a Turkish Airlines airplane. I managed to see "Batman v Superman" on a screen built in the seat in front of me (half the movie one way and the other half on my way back). They also had a delicious full lunch, which scaled down to a sandwich in the next year.
• Istanbul to Batumi was the only time where communication was in languages which I didn't understand, Turkish and Georgian. But they always say the same things, so I nodded and smiled, and no one figured that out.

But back to Ataturk. In total, I've been there four times and every time, I had enough time to wander around. Years later, it's blurry and it's hard to name many things in particular, but let's try to juggle my memory. It's the only way, in any event, because the airport has been closed to commercial flights in 2019. I remember a wooden floor across all the main passage. It was also the first airport with a place to pray and toilet seats with built-in bidets (not sure if those two are connected, but in my mind, they are). I bought there a bottle of perfumes for my wife and a Barbie set for my daugher. Tax-free zone also makes LEGO more affordable, at least if you live in Malta. Another thing I remember was this laboratory-themed restaurant where drinks would be served in a triangular test tubes. On another time, we where in a different restaurant and an Italian co-worker ordered Italian food and complained afterwards that it was not the proper Italian food. I also remember the biggest board with arrivals and departures to that date, connecting all the continents I knew of. You could really feel that you were in a pulsating hub of the world, unlike other airports that I visited. And this cosmopolism stuck with me the most.

So, generally this. A fragment of a story that's otherwise not there. Or a footnote to another story.