Anatolia and the Levant 2013

As we got closer to our trip, we began to seriously think about where we would travel in addition to Istanbul. I discovered the great airfare website skyscanner.com which let me explore where we could go. After plugging in Istanbul into the search engine, Skyscanner showed me how much it would cost to fly to various countries nearby. Interestingly, the cheapest place to fly to outside of Turkey and Northern Cyprus was Beirut.

Now this immediately perked my interest since I grew up in the 1980s when Beirut seemed to be Hell on Earth. I remember reading about the place in my early teens and thinking how could such devastation and fighting go on in such a little place? And how could people continue to live there? In late November or early December, I began to read up on Lebanon. The mix of cultures (Christian, Sunnis, Shiites, Armenian, etc.), the food (both Becky and I love Middle Eastern food), the recent history of war (a travel agent we met in Beirut latter - coined this as "Dark Tourism"), and the ancient history - Byblos was where the modern alphabet was invented, all made the place fascinating to me. And then of course there was the fact that Beirut had historically been called the "Paris of the Middle East," something I had relentlessly told my wife over the years.

I mentioned to my mother that we were thinking about traveling to Beirut. She was not very happy about this, thinking that Beirut was dangerous to Americans. Later on, after I booked the plane tickets to Beirut, she sent me the State Department Travel Warnings as an effort to get me to change my plans. I would counter that by sending her any story of violence of places she had travelled to or would travel to (such as Tucson, Brookfield, Eagle Heights - a student housing project in Madison that we lived at when I was young) and asked her if she had checked the travel warnings on the place.

In December, Becky and I went to Chicago for a weekend trip. We ended up stumbling into a Middle Eastern restaurant called Old Jerusalem. When we talked to the owners - after having a very delicious and reasonably priced meal - we found out that they were from Lebanon. We took that as a sign that we must travel there.

Anatolia and the Levant 2013

Origins of the Trip

Always on the lookout for cheap airplane tickets and needing a trip to look forward to after having just come back from a family vacation to New York City in September 2012, I found round-trip tickets from Chicago to Istanbul on United for $515. (I strongly urge people to check airfarewatchdog.com regularly - over the years I've found some amazing deals on that website including flying to England in the summer of 2006 for $300 roundtrip). On many occasions, you can't even fly from the midwest to Arizona or Florida for that cheap. 

So I consulted with the Boss, Becky. Because we loved Istanbul so much when we went there in March 2011, we couldn't pass this Golden Horn opportunity up and went ahead and purchased the tickets for travel in March 2013.

Our plan was to spend four or five days in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and then travel either to other parts of Turkey or perhaps Cyprus - having been fascinated by that divided island after reading about in The World Without Us. However, as with most of our trips, those plans would change as we got closer to travel time (more about that later).

Since there was so much time between the ticket purchase and travel dates, I thought I'd learn Turkish. Although the Babbel application on my Iphone was great, I cannot say that I was very rigorous in my studies and so I learned very little Turkish before traveling.

(As I write this entry, Becky is making fun of me - "I love how you wear your Turkish soccer jersey while writing about Turkey").