In my 4x2 room with triple bunk beds...for a 14 hour journey...
The train from Sofia to Istanbul departs at 7:10pm and arrives the next day at 9am. In the midst of such a comfortable journey, you get awakened by police banging on your door at 1am to check your passport as you exit Bulgaria. The process involves bright lights, lots of noise, and about 45 minutes. All of this would be tolerable (as it happened on the way to Belgrade too) and you get to stay in bed...except that about 30 minutes later...it all happens again, only this time you get forced out into the freezing cold of a Turkish train station. First, I had to make my way down to an isolated end of a platform, beyond the duty free shop, to purchase a visa for $20 - paid for with American money only, please. Then I had to retrace my steps to wait in a queue for the passport control guy to stamp my passport. This process took about an hour since the guy was obviously still home sleeping when the call came in that our train had arrived...he didn't arrive for another 3o minutes. All in all, we spent over 2 hours at the Turkish border before we could finally crawl back into our bunks and sleep the remaining 5 hours.
It was all worthwhile though to arrive at Sirkeci station in Istanbul and see this as my intro to the city!
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