I made a mess of my flight tickets for this trip, relying on a scammy operator. The consequences of that are that I had to repurchase my flight tickets at double the original price, albeit from a reliable source this time. Lesson learnt? Be prepared to pay a bit more to actually get what you pay for! My tickets between Johannesburg and Istanbul were purchased from Turkish Airlines, and from Istanbul to Krakow and back, I am relying on LOT, the Polish national airline.
Today, however, is a good day. Not only because the people around me are finally starting to understand that I am serious about traveling to Ukraine during wartime, but also because I have finally started on the final preparations for the trip itself: the packing!
I found a packing list for “Carry-On Only”. It’s aimed at females (woo-hoo!) and surprisingly simple. There are some things that I plan to subtract and others that I want to add, so hopefully I can keep the total weight under 7 Kg (8 Kg is the max!) to make room for any souvenirs I might want to come back with. Not big things, though. Some fridge magnets and the odd bottle opener.
As I am flying the day after Easter Weekend, most of what I intend to take is already at my mom’s place. What’s basically left for me to take there are the gadgets, some warm clothes, and my ginger cat, Punkin! (No, he’s not going with me, but staying at my mom’s place while I am away!) That means that this coming weekend will be spent packing, checking, rechecking, weighing, unpacking, repacking and weighing again! I have a sneaky feeling that it’s going to be down to available space rather than weight in the end.
Someone that I admire said that “nobody wants to see your airport photographs,” with reference to all the airport pics on social media. I am taking his words to heart, so I won’t post any pictures from this trip on Facebook or other social media pages. What I will do, however, is to blog my journey, and then post it here, with links from those social media pages. I can give more information in a blog and post lots of pictures that I can’t put in a SM post. So that’s what I shall do! It’s going to be an interesting exercise, given that I am only taking my smartphone with me, but I’ve never backed down from a challenge, and I am sure that there will be an Internet café or two somewhere! If I spend an hour or so every day on this blog, I’ll not only hit my word target, but should produce a decent account of my journey. And that’s the end goal, isn’t it?
So…
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The artwork at the start of this entry can be downloaded from here.