Rhythmic banging on my door from wombat woke me up around 11 AM. Even though our departure for the LAN center was scheduled for noon, he was babbling on, "Geez wake up Tim, I wanna practice," and he wouldn't stop. I just told him I was awake already and to wait for me downstairs while I get dressed. That five-minute interval was enough for me to shower and get dressed and I headed down to the lobby to meet up with wombat, gellehsak, gopher, Vo0 and sakh. As a couple people heard that we were going to head to a LAN center to practice, a chain of messengers were sent to the almost everyone’s room to ask if they wanted to come or not. I did, of course, want everyone to get in some practice before the tourney started, but going to a random LAN center with twenty people wasn't exactly the thing on my mind.

It took about an hour to organize all the people coming, including twenty minutes spent searching for dkt only to find out he had converted to the dark side and was practicing with fatal1ty and zen at their room. As all of this was going on, tempus from checksix was constantly on the phone with LeXeR who apparently had some trouble at the airport and couldn't get through passport check. At one point, tempus shouted out "Turkish cocaine!?!?!?" but I have no idea what LeXeR said to get such a response from him. Finally tempus found out that the Russian people don't need visa when entering Turkey, but apparently the visa officer's "Russnglish" wasn't good enough to explain that to LeXeR.

The LAN center we were going to was notified by the tournament organizers that we'd be arriving at around 1 PM, and Cagdas assured me that we wouldn't have any problems there and had given me the address of the place the night before. With a total of seventeen people, we managed to fit in four taxis, and I have absolutely no idea how the last five people fit in because the back seats are really small. Wombat, daler and Vo0 were riding with me and I told the other cab drivers to follow our cab. It was quite funny how Sander jumped on my cab once he learned the other cabs will be following my cab for the whole forty minute ride and totally sold out gellehsak, gopher and his manager.

Thank god we arrived there without any troubles and found the place easily. Daler was absolutely person of the day. A Turkish Quake III player happened to be at the cafe when we got there and he instantly recognized Sean. Fifteen minutes and a few phone calls later, the place was full of all the best Quake III players in Turkey, trying to see him and get a picture with him. One of the guys even admitted that he left his girlfriend while they were having some "romantic" moments just to come down there. When I told them wombat was here and cha0ticz along with LeXeR were at the hotel, they were absolutely amazed and decided to enter the Painkiller event just to meet up with them.

Some of the players were having problems with their machines, which didn't get them the desired FPS. After talking to the owner of the place, I found out there are two cutting edge technology machines down stairs, which were reserved for the CS teams practicing, including m19 from Russia and TiTaNs from Singapore. I told the guy that Sander was the world champion for PK at the last events earning over "$50K" in the last two months. After I told them he beat fatal1ty twice, they agreed to kick one of the Turkish CS teams out from downstairs and make five computers available for the PK players. I had to take the original people who came up with the LAN center idea to the good machines, which happened to be Vo0, gellehsak, gopher, sakh, and daler/wombat rotated for the last machine.

A couple of hours later, when Mark and Sean said that they had enough practice and were hungry, we were about to leave the place. When we went upstairs to close our bills, the rest of the people with the exception of the fnatic wanted to return with us just to make sure they didn’t get lost in the process. After a rather quick dinnerish meal at the 7/11 that happened to be right by the LAN center, I got three taxis, and we were on our way back to the hotel through some heavy snow, which was finally starting to stay on the ground for more than five minutes before it melted away. With the combination of excessive heat in the cab, and my continuous Turkish conversation with the driver, Mark, Sean and Lioukin from TsN passed out in the back seat.

When we arrived at the hotel, I went downstairs to check out the ballroom that was being set up as the tournament area. I was quite worried that there wasn’t enough time for them to set it all up before the matches began, but they had almost twenty people working with good coordination and I was relieved. Going back up to the lobby, I witnessed Vo0 stumbling through the revolving doors, dragging himself to the lobby and diving to one of the sofas. His whole body was shaking continuously and there was vomit on his shirt. Hotel people appeared out of nowhere to help him out but he said he was alright and just needed some water and a little bit of rest. Five minutes later when he was feeling better, we found out that he actually got food poisoning from the hotdog he had at the 7/11.

The lobby was almost clear by now, since players were told to check in to the tournament area at 11 AM to learn their seedings and match times. The only people remaining were the alcohol-proof Four Kings players, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes as always. After thirty minutes of chatting and gossiping, everyone headed back to their rooms to get a good night’s sleep before the first tournament play day.