April 26, 2015
Yesterday, I arrived in Bishkek! After a grueling journey, I managed to arrive safe and sound with only my two-checked luggage missing. Oh, don’t worry, about 2/3 of my group lost at least one luggage. Let me start from the beginning….
April 24, 2015: We arrived at Dulles Airport at approximately 1PM. Our flight was scheduled for 6:35PM. This whole time, we had been thinking that we would have pleeeeeeennnntttttyyyyyy of time before our flight. How would we spend the whole 5 hours of time in between?!?! That is until 1/3 of us had already passed through security and I was almost to the screening section, when we were told that the Lufthansa check-in had completely messed up our luggage and needed us to all return to the check-in desks and re-do our checked luggage. We had been told that we would have to re-check our luggage in Istanbul. However, that was not supposed to be the case and instead, was actually supposed to go through all the way to Bishkek. Apparently, we would also have to get our boarding pass for the second flight in Frankfurt and our third boarding pass in Istanbul. So, off to a GREAT start. Most of us came back and waited in line for about 30 minutes, when a few members of our group volunteered to stay and finish the process for us. Security: Round 2. We finally got to our gate and had about 2 hours left before our flight. About 1.5 hour before boarding, we were told that we all needed to get our visa and passport double checked with the airline. Only our group. The process took about the rest of our waiting time.
April 25, 2015: We landed in Frankfurt and had an hour between flights. It took us about 40 minutes to land, de-board and run to our next gate. Don’t forget, we still had to check-in at the gate to get our boarding pass for this flight. All 60 of us. Needless to say, we caused the flight to be delayed for 1 hour and our fellow passengers were NOT thrilled. 2.5 hours later, we landed in Istanbul! Thank goodness! Now, to check-in with our airline AGAIN to receive our boarding pass for our last flight! This took well over 2 hours and in the middle of the process, the line for ‘Transfers without Boarding Passes’ grew longer and was also filled with angry passengers. We would later find out that all flights were delayed and some even cancelled. Apparently, an earlier flight had landed and one of its engines had caught on fire. We were supposed to have a 5 hour layover in Istanbul. It actually ended up being 9 hours and we had to change gates in the midst of the ordeal. The cool part about our layover was the fact that the Kyrgyz Olympic Hockey Team was on the same flight and we totally took a picture with them. FINALLY arriving in Bishkek at 7:00AM… we discovered that only 1/4 of our luggage actually arrived with us.
We ended up arriving at our hotel (the 5-Star Ak-Keme) at 8:30AM with only 4 hours until our orientation and the beginning of our training at noon. We had language lessons and introductions from 12-7pm. Needless to say, we were a sad group of volunteers. Everyone was exhausted.
Here's a view from my hotel room:
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