Waking up to a 4 AM call from Midway about CPL Turkey being cancelled, just ten hours before my flight was scheduled to leave, was one of the worst experiences in my life. After five hours of extreme frustration, when it was finally announced that CPL would host a $20k qualifier instead of the actual $50k World Tour stop, I was bitter but happy; after all, I was still paying a visit to my motherland! I called wombat after all was said and done, (as I didn't want to upset him like Midway did to me in the middle of the night!) who was staying over at Torbull's with destrukt. Not only were they upset about the goings-on with regards to Turkey, they were also worried that our flight to Istanbul might be delayed many hours.

A couple of hours later, after checking in at the airport and going through the security checks, I met Jared "cha0ticz" cugno, Sean |daler| Price, Brian "destrukt" Flander, Mark "wombat" Larsen and Craig "Torbull" Levine at our gate. They all looked pretty disappointed and were questioning the decisions of the CPL, which was quite understandable, but they settled down a bit after I assured them that we would have a great time in Turkey with my out of this world tour guiding abilities, with or without a tournament. Boarding started without any major delays, and the plane wasn't full at all. We had three rows of four seats for six people and arranged it so everyone was able to push their seats back for a comfortable sleep. After a relatively excellent in-flight dinner, I was quite full and ready to sleep. Daler was deep into one of the five poker books he brought with him to read, cha0ticz was looking quite sick and was doing some coding on his laptop, wombat had absolutely nothing to do and was occupied by being bored as always and destrukt was already one the way to sleep. And Torbull? Well, he was examining people around us with the huge grin that he always has no matter what – well, maybe the grin did disappear for a while when he learned what he had eaten at a traditional Turkish restaurant. A couple of anti-histamine pills later (courtesy of destrukt), and I was deep asleep until our initial landing.

I thought that weather had to be cold for it to snow, yet it was snowing when we landed in Istanbul, and it wasn't cold at all. After a rather straightforward visa process for the others, which took about two minutes, and a lucky baggage claim sequence, we were set to hunt for our hotel shuttle inside the airport. Craig and Jared strongly requested to me that they wanted to declare their laptops at customs, just to make sure they would be able to take them outside of the country when they leave, and it took me about five minutes to calm them down and assure them that nothing bad will happen. It's crazy how much of a stereotype Turkey gets from North Americans about her jails and customs.

After exiting customs, luckily Cagdas, one of the Turkish CPL Partners, was waiting for us there. We took two cabs to our hotel, as there was no sign of the previously announced shuttle, only to be welcomed by some shocking news: apparently, a third party travel agency had been contacted to make the initial reservations from the hotel, and they would only accept cash. Not only would they only accept cash, but they also wanted all of the money upfront. For example, I was booked for a single room for five days and had to pay $75 for each night, a total of $375 in cash, upfront, when we entered from the revolving doors of the hotel. Other people, such as sakh from EYE and Ztrider from eStar, were having cash issues also. I didn't have that much in cash myself either. Luckily, Scott Valencia was there to help us out and after hours of negotiations, they allowed us to use credit cards. This consisted of them taking our credit cards for the night, and taking them to their agency to swipe them, and bringing them back the next morning. During the whole check-in process, Scott was really helpful and friendly to all the gamers and didn't let any issues get out of hand from that point on.

We met at the lobby after settling into our rooms, just to chill out and surf the Internet to see what was going on with the event, since Scott wasn't around anymore. 24 hours of whopping speed wireless Internet cost Craig and myself fifteen Euros each. And when I mean whopping speed, I mean about two minutes to load GotFrag and timeout during the loading process eighty percent of the time. So all we could do was hop on AIM, message people that we landed safely, and that was it. I went outside for a couple of minutes just to see what was around before taking people for a tour. Our hotel is basically on a highway with nothing nearby, with the exception of the airport. All that is outside is a gas station, with a supermarket open 24 hours, which was good news. Did I tell you the drinking age is 18 in Turkey? When I took Mark and Craig there to get some stuff to fill our backpacks with, it was obvious that someone told Craig we had cyanide in our water, because all he got was more than 20 bottles of water, in different sizes.

It was around 2 PM, and we had nothing to do. We found Vo0, gellehsak, gopher, and sakh strolling in the lobby, since apparently they were the only ones that had landed so far, with the exception of the Fatal1ty crew (but Jonathan doesn't really like to come out of his room that much). Since we had nothing to do, I went downstairs to the gym area with Vo0 to play some table tennis. I found out that he played tennis for 12 years, same as me, so we were in for a good match. After five long sets of table tennis, I knew how this guy won two CPLs and an ESWC. It's all luck. All he did was hit the side edges of the table or the net with the ball landing on abrupt parts of the table. Anyway, even with his luck he wasn't a match for my skills, and I beat him 3-2 in sets.

After a quick shower and a nap for an hour so, I met Craig downstairs, and he said that we were going out to eat with a large group of people. Stuff like that is quite high pressure for me since I'm the only Turkish speaking person around, and have to communicate for everyone, not to mention I have to order food for everyone also. Our dinner group consisted of Sheryl from NVIDIA, Scott Valencia, The CPL UK Partners, a couple of people from Intel, our flight group, and myself. We took three taxis to a Turkish meat restaurant that was about ten minutes away. It was still snowing, but the snow never sticks to the highway and it just ends up piling up on the sidewalks, which doesn’t matter anyways since in Turkey people walk on the road, not the sidewalks. Two hours of non stop food service later, everyone was really happy with the food they ate and thanked me for my good choice, so I just had to remind Craig about my tour guiding abilities.

During the dinner, Scott talked about the traffic accident he got into when he was on the truck taking the computers to the event venue, which ended up bruising his ribs and destroying six tourney computers. From what it looked like, things were going to take place at our hotel ballroom and not the actual reserved event venue. The five-megabit Internet connection would be connected on Thursday along with tournament computers arriving and getting set up. Apparently, the CPL had a problem with customs, and they didn't allow the shuttles or graphics cards into the country, forcing the Turkish partners to find new machines and Sheryl to find new GPUs.

When we got back to the hotel, we met up with all the Painkiller players who had arrived, around twenty-five of them. Twenty-five might sound a little low, but every top player in the world is here, with the exception of a couple SK guys such as zyz. Most of the players wanted to get some practice in before the event started, and they asked me to get them to a LAN center for Thursday since it didn't look likely that the tournament computers would be set up on time tomorrow. The North American people headed up to their rooms around 10 PM, having trouble staying awake due to the jet lag, with plans to meet up at noon the next day.

It was a rather slow start to CPL Turkey for the arriving people, and nobody had much to do all day.