My husband, Adam, and I have a quartet of major home-improvement projects slated for 2023, but we don’t know exactly when any of them will happen, which makes planning travel rather difficult. So when a window opened in mid-November, we looked into a trip to Paris—I’ve been dropping hints for years about revisiting the city. In the weird world of airfare pricing, however, flights to Istanbul via Paris were much cheaper, and flights to Istanbul via London were cheaper still. While my desire for Paris remains strong, I have to admit that telling people you’re headed to Istanbul is much more fun.
Our first and largest mistake was only going for five full days. We’re still in the East Coast mindset, I guess, that you can pop over to Europe for a few days. But from the West Coast, and particularly to the eastern edge of Europe, the travel is a bear and the jet lag is brutal. (The time difference between here and Istanbul is 11 hours.) We only got acclimated right as we were due to return home—so we were basically jet-lagged for 10 straight days. Plus, as much as I loved Istanbul, I don’t know that we’ll return anytime soon (i.e., ever, given our ages), which means we’ll probably never see Cappadocia, Bodrum, Ephesus, and wherever else people go in Turkey.
Istanbul is huge, with over 15 million residents, as you will notice when you fly in over all the sprawl. It’s also very much a modern city, as you can tell from the airport. We are big…
