The Further Adventures of Lauren - Sweden and Turkey

Lauren’s summer travels got off to a fairly slow start, all things considered, mostly because her graduate program got off to a surprisingly quick one. She had about a week and a half between her last class as an undergraduate and her first class as a graduate student, and while that class was only a few weeks long it was enough to keep her from accompanying us to Florence and Porto.

Sweden, however, was within range.

She figured out a flight from Chicago to Stockholm that would arrive on June 18, at more or less the same time as our flight from Porto, on the theory that we could meet up in the airport and then take the train together from there to Huddinge where our friends live. They’d pick us all up at the station, and then we would spend the week hanging out in the Stockholm area together.

Unfortunately nobody told the airline about this, and they were determined to keep Lauren away. It took five separate rebookings and a short layover in Amsterdam that didn’t appear on her original itinerary to get it all to work out but in the end she got there a few hours ahead of us and we met her in Huddinge. Kim and I were not really in a position to be of much help during most of this as we were traveling ourselves, so it all fell on Lauren to get that straightened out. The fact that she did so was a pretty good sign, I thought. If she could handle that right off the bat on her own, she’d probably be good to handle the rest of her trip.

I’m not going to go into our time in Sweden since I’ve already covered that pretty extensively in this space. We had a lovely time together, though given that the rest of her plans took her into Asia we were somewhat concerned by the reckless actions of the US government concerning Iran during that time and what that might mean for American travelers – or any travelers, really – who had to pass through that region of the world on their way to somewhere else. In the end things calmed down, but it was an unnecessary complication and just one more bit of infuriating nonsense to be laid at the feet of the current regime here in the US. There are a lot of those.

Also, sometimes it takes a few tries to get the eSims to work properly, because they’re technology.

Our flights out of Sweden were close enough together that Mats was able to drive us to the airport in one trip early on June 25. Our flight left a couple of hours before Lauren’s, so we said our goodbyes in the airport and wished each other well.

It’s something like 4:30 in the morning in that photo, but we managed to look pretty cheerful for all that.

Kim and I flew back to Wisconsin, an uneventful flight that seemed to last for days, and we were soon walking back into our own home to resume our regularly scheduled lives already in progress.

Lauren, on the other hand, was headed to Riga (Latvia), where she would catch a connecting flight to Istanbul, and – perhaps surprisingly enough, given the kaleidoscope of moving pieces that was her flight to Sweden – that worked out pretty well. The plan was that in Istanbul she would meet up with Arden, who was flying in from Madrid where she’d been teaching English for a year or so, and they would explore the city for a few days before flying down to Antalya on the southern coast of Turkey where the Turks go to the beach, as opposed to the western coast of the country where most of the tourists go to the beach. In early June when Kim and I were in Frankfurt waiting for our third and final connecting flight to Florence I ended up chatting with a Turkish man at the gate and he was immensely pleased that Lauren would get outside of Istanbul to visit Antalya. He was very proud of his country and wished her well there, and it was a very nice conversation to have.

Lauren and Arden spent a few days knocking about Istanbul and generally having a good time, from what I could tell. It’s a lovely place according to the pictures they posted.

It is also, as any proper city should be, full of cats.

Lauren and Arden didn’t keep us posted on everything they did because that would have been absurd, but we did get to hear some of the highlights. At one point they went to a traditional hammam for a spa day and enjoyed that very much.

And they visited the Blue Mosque.

They met some nice people in the hostel where they stayed and enjoyed a fair amount of good food, though this was the only place in their travels this summer where they ended up with food poisoning – a situation that Lauren blamed squarely on a lapse of judgement that led her to eat shawarma from a street vendor at 4am after a long night out. “That meat had probably been sitting there for ten hours,” she told me later, and in retrospect it probably wasn’t much of a surprise that it turned out the way it did. But lesson learned, and with a couple days of hamburgers and taking it easy she was back in traveler mode, ready to take on the city.

For the most part, though, Istanbul treated them well.

They spent about five days in Istanbul before flying down to Antalya. One of the things that really surprised me about all of this was just how inexpensive airfares are once you get outside of the United States. I don’t know how much this particular flight cost, but I do know that all of the flights that were on the original plan – five countries and ten regions – came to about same as the cost of Lauren’s flight back to the US at the end of it. Some of them were as little as $30. You can get a long way in this world if you are willing to look around a bit.

Antalya is another lovely city, to go by the photos I saw. 

The beaches there are lovely. Lauren reported that the water there was very salty even for seawater, and while that made it hard on the skin after a while it also made it pretty easy to float so there’s that as well.

And, like Istanbul, it is a city of cats, most of them three-dimensional but not all. Either this is something that is generally true of Turkey or Lauren is just generally drawn to cats, though honestly it could be both. Kitties!

There was also a rafting trip that they enjoyed.

At one point they decided to get out of Antalya and visit the thermal pools at Pamukkale, about a three-hour drive away. I know nothing about this place other than what I looked up online, but it is just astonishingly gorgeous in a brightly austere sort of way.

Not everything was glorious in Antalya. Staying in hostels was generally a good experience for Lauren on several different continents. There is a real sense of community there and often people find each other in different hostels across a trip. You can sometimes get good food there. And they’re phenomenally inexpensive – as little as $6/night in some places. On the other hand, one of the hostels that Lauren and Arden stayed at in Antalya had bedbugs, which they discovered the night that Arden was scheduled to leave. They did a thorough cleaning of their stuff and the hostel took steps to fix the problem – “We got moved to a room that just got gas chambered,” Lauren reported to us later – but Lauren did switch to a different hostel after that.

There was an odd consequence of that, though. While the room was being fumigated Lauren did some laundry so her stuff wouldn’t carry the bedbugs to the next place. She then set it all out on the roof to dry and left for as long as she could, hanging out in various sociable establishments until about 6am to avoid the bedbugs and the gases. But when she got back she discovered that most of her underwear was missing. She moved to a different hostel a few hours later and then left the next day so she didn’t really have time to replace it before she got to her next country and it took a while to do that even then, so there were a lot of very small loads of laundry during that part of the trip. There are some hazards of travel that the guidebooks don’t mention but which, on reflection, perhaps they should.

So there were a few bumps, but Turkey mostly treated them well.

Lauren was originally scheduled to fly back to Istanbul for a day or two after Antalya but here is where the first of the schedule changes happened – a minor one compared to the ones that came later, but good practice. It’s very easy to rebook hostels – apparently you don’t really need a reservation at all for most of them – and moving flights around outside of the US is much less complicated (and since they’re also much less expensive, the penalty for skipping a flight and booking an entirely new one is that much less as well). So rather than spend time in Istanbul again she simply extended her time in Antalya and departed from there.

Of course her flight went through Istanbul, so there you go.

Arden’s plan was to go back to Madrid, where she’d been living and working for a year, pack up her apartment and then return to the US. We will see her again on these travels, though.

Lauren’s plan was to head east.