Return to Motherland/Blogging

Hi all. Figure I might as well bring this back prior to my family's trip back to Sri Lanka as the whole point of this blog was to document my world travels (forgot to do that when we ventured up to the great white north last year). Anyways, we're leaving tomorrow night with a layover (8.5 hours) in Istanbul. As of now we plan on having dinner at a restaurant recommended by my sister's Turkish coworker, but beyond that I don't think we'll be doing much with our time there (much to my dismay), as it'll be the evening when we arrive. We'll hopefully get to do more on our way back, since we'll have a layover of a comparable length, but we'll be there at a better hour. All I really want to do there is see the Hagia Sofia, but I'll have to wait ~3 weeks for that opportunity. I hope to be able to check back in sometime after our brief excursion in Istanbul, although I'm not entirely sure when the next opportunity will actually be (to that point, I don't even know how frequently I'll be able to blog since I don't know how frequently I'll be able to access the Internet/be able to charge my laptop (the latter is a bigger issue since my battery life is poor in the twilight years of my laptop and we only have 3-4 adapters)).

In regards to Sri Lanka, I'm starting to get excited about going. It's been over half a lifetime ago since I was last there and I only have vague memories, so it'll definitely be good to go back at a time when I can visually document my experiences as opposed to having to rely solely on my memory. I'd go into more detail about what we're doing there, but I pretty much have no idea what we plan on doing. I think we get to go on a safari and visit an elephant orphanage (which I'm really excited for, although I'm not really sure what that'll entail), but beyond that (and visiting family), I'm clueless. I'll do my best to blog about anything interesting that happens.

As for now, I should probably pack (but I probably won't for another 17 hours or so).

Au revoir tout le monde! (wrong language, but I don't speak Sinhala so you'll have to deal)