The LONG road to Batumi....

Hi there, well, things are totally messed up. The driver picked up two "fake people" who wanted a ride to Batumi and said they were another person and me. I was waiting here and after about half an hour I saw another lady who looked like she was also waiting. She looked more professional than everyone else so I walked up to her with my laptop and the email message from the coordinator enlarged and pointed to the four other names on the list and asked if she was one of them. Sure enough she was... So luckily she had a phone number for the coordinator and was SMS'ing him about where the driver was. After a few hours they tracked him down and found out that he was already in Batumi, apparently it is only a few hours, not 13 (that was the only good news I got today). He had discovered at the border that he had the wrong people and threw them out and continued on to drop off the 3 people he did have who were correct. The driver was then dispatched to pick us up and apparently was really rude to this lady that is with me when she called him. She is from Belarus and we've had a nice chat and she's seen all our Sri Lanka photos. She was all dressed up and did not have anything to make herself comfortable. Luckily I had a blanket and pillow and some food and she was able to go to sleep. She had to fly to Moscow to get a visa and then to Istanbul and then to Trabzon... The airport emptied a few hours after we got there and even the security eventually left. I think Gajane was very happy I found her, she also didn't have any Turkish money so I bought her a tea. We started to watch Master and Commander but she fell asleep so I ended up watching it myself.

Okay, now it is 8:45 AM and I still haven't slept. I did manage a few minutes in the car, then we got pulled over for speeding. Then we stopped to switch drivers, they were both falling asleep. Then they stopped to pee. Then we stopped for Turkish customs, then Georgian Customs, and for gas twice... I couldn't sleep.... I even offered to drive as they kept falling asleep. When we got the hotel I started to work on the presentation and made a few changes that made me have to change all the slides text ( I made the slides bigger)... So, now I have to meet the group in 45 minutes and there isn't time to sleep. I did have a great shower, lots of pressure and hot water. There wasn't an iron in the room so, so I did the steam trick to my outfit, hope it is good enough...