The Midnight Express

December 31, 2014 to January 2, 2015

Bored with usual Klimowicz - Eberhardt New Years Eve scene of watching Ryan Seacrest blabber in Times Square on the telly, we decided to ring in 2015 by taking the Midnight Express aboard Turkish Airline Flight 6 from Chicago to Istanbul. After a short layover, we planned to test Christopher Columbus' theory that the world is round by traveling on to New Delhi. 

Our 26 hour journey began with a flight from Madison to O'Hare. Upon boarding the tiny plane, I wondered out loud what the in-flight movie would be. Since our final destination was India, I was hoping for Gandhi. Unfortunately, United Airlines was unable to condense the 191 minute movie into the 25 minute flight to O'Hare. 

As the sun set on Madison for the final time in 2014, Becky was excited about spending 17 of the next 26 hours inside several cramped flying buses.

Upon arrival in Chicago, we had approximately three hours to kill. After finding the International terminal and going through security again, we spent our last meal of 2014 on the usual uninspired and outrageously expensive airport food. I started a theme that would serve me well on this trip and went vegetarian with the falafel dinner - which was actually not bad.

Palatable Airport Food - Perhaps There Is Hope for Humanity

I also got mint lemonade - a drink I had never seen before. Lemonade blended up with fresh mint leaves. It was so good that I tried to order it every time I saw it again - including on board the flights to Istanbul and Delhi. The menus aboard both Turkish Airlines flights advertised the delicious drink. But when we requested a tall cool mint lemonade, the flight attendants mumbled something about making the drink later. Although the flight attendants had 18 hours between the two flights to mixed up a tall cool one for us, the drinks were never forthcoming.

After dinner, we walked the length of the terminal, gazing at the beautiful giant photos of all 50 states. Wisconsin's photo choose a rural setting in the Driftless area in the southwest corner of the state. It was so fantastically beautiful that we could hardly believe it was Wisconsin.

Unlike most other countries, one doesn't go through passport control before leaving the United States. However, I have noticed in the past few years, that people must walk the line of beefy TSA agents right before boarding an international flight. I'm assuming they will stop and do further checks on you if you look suspicious.

Not looking suspicious - or perhaps because it was New Years Eve and the TSA agents wanted to hurry home to catch Ryan Seacrest in Times Square, we boarded the plane without incident. However, as soon as we were aboard, we became slightly alarmed when the captain introduced himself as Captain Oveur and asked "Jason, have you ever been in a . . . in a Turkish prison?"

To our immense delight, the flight attendants began handing out lokum - or better known in the West as Turkish Delight. A confection made from gel of starch and sugar, I have been curious about the dessert ever since reading the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in elementary school. The White Witch seduces poor Edmund by giving him Turkish Delight. I always wondered how a candy could be so good that a person would betray his siblings over it. I didn't have my first taste of the dessert until traveling to Istanbul in 2011 (oddly, I didn't try it when I was Istanbul in 1991). It's pretty good - in fact, it always delights me when I have some.

One side-note. According to Wikipedia, Turkish Delight was alternatively known in English as Lumps of Delight. I don't think the name ever caught on though, because in my mind, that would conjure up eating something like a cancerous tumor.

Becky Doing Her Best Imitation of the White Witch

Our 10 hour flight to Istanbul was uneventful. Flying Turkish Airlines was a nice experience. The food was pretty good - they even had actual menus - something that I had not seen on a transatlantic flight since the 1990s. To Becky's delight, there were personal screens on the backs of every seat with a wide variety of movies. And the flight attendants were friendly and helpful. Oddly, the midnight hour was not marked by any pomp or ceremony. Perhaps because the New Year had already begun in Turkey hours earlier. In any event, I looked at the clock on my phone at Midnight and expressly gave Becky a New Year's kiss. And that is how 2015 began for us.

An Actual Menu, a Throwback to Another Era of Flying

We landed in Istanbul shortly before 4 pm local time. Our flight to Delhi didn't leave until 8 pm. Just enough time to see one of my favorite squares in the all the world - the center of Sultanahmet - the beautiful space between two of the world's great buildings, the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia.

Having limited time, we had to move fast and we were a little nervous about squeezing the quick trip downtown in - for if something went wrong, we could miss our flight to New Delhi. But hey, as Robin Williams once said, carpe diem.

Once we cleared customs, we immediately got some cash out of an ATM at the airport. Having spent much time waiting in line at the local American Express office to change travelers cheques into local currency while traveling in the 80s and 90s, it always amazes me that you can walk off an airplane in a foreign land, head to the nearest ATM, and have money taken out of your bank account and given to you in foreign currency in less than the time it take to say "Istanbul, not Constantinople."

Armed with our Turkish Lira, we jumped in a taxi and told our driver to take us to the Hagia Sophia.

Dusk was arriving fast and a light mist was falling on the city founded as Byzantium more than 2,500 years ago. Later made the capital of the eastern part of the Holy Roman Empire, it was renamed Constantinople after the Roman Emperor, Constantine. In 1453, the city famously fell to the Turks and became the center of the Ottoman Empire (which incidentally reinvented the footstool as a talking piece of furniture among Colonial Americans, allowing Thomas Jefferson to famously use the term Ottoman in the English language for the first time in 1789).

Today, the city sprawls between two continents with the Bosporus waterway separating the European and Asian sides. Originally, it was to be the setting of the 1981 movie Continental Divide starring John Belushi. However, the movie was filmed in Colorado when Belushi was denied a Turkish entry visa after he appeared in a Saturday Night Live Skit as Elizabeth Taylor eating a turkey leg.

With a population of almost 15 million people, the city proper is the sixth largest in the world. When Becky and I flew out of Sabiha Gokcen, the airport on Istanbul's Asian side, to Beirut in 2013, we couldn't believe how far out the city went with row after row of high rise apartments going on for miles and miles.

As the mist continued to the fall, we approached the old city with the Sea of Marmara on our right. Dozens and dozens of freighters and other large ships were floating a little ways off the shore. Passing the ancient land walls of Constantinople, built in the 5th Century AD, I was reminded of the first time I saw them in 1991 as my friend Joe and I drove through them in a little Renault 5 that we had bought in Paris. Upon spotting the walls back then, I knew that I had a arrived at a city that was older and more exotic than anything I had seen before. Even today, I got excited at seeing the land walls.

Shortly after we were beyond the walls, our taxi driver deposited Becky and I at the bottom of the hill from the Blue Mosque. And like a caricature of Istanbul, a Turkish carpet dealer greeted us immediately as we stepped out of the cab. He asked us where we from and invited us to have a look in his carpet shop. The first of many touts that we would experience on our trip.

As we walked by the Blue Mosque and took in its beauty, the evening call to prayer resonated out from the towering minarets.

On the other end of the square, we spotted the Hagia Sophia and continued a debate that began between us in 2011 about whether the Blue Mosque or Hagia Sophia was the better building. Becky prefers the Blue Mosque, believing it to be more perfect and pleasing to the eye. I prefer the Hagia Sophia as it is a thousand years older and is one of the wonders of the ancient world. Whatever one's preference, they both are fantastic monuments.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque - As Blue as the Moon

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, popularly known as the Blue Mosque, was built between 1609 and 1616. This immense mosque immediately stirred controversy with its six minarets because they equaled the number of minarets at the mosque of the Ka'aba in the Muslim holy city of Mecca. Being the sultan, he solved that crisis by adding a seventh minaret to the mosque in Mecca.

Opposite the Blue Mosque, stands the Hagia Sophia (Greek for Holy Wisdom), perhaps the greatest wonder of the Medieval and Byzantine world. Constructed in the 6th Century AD, it was a Greek Orthodox basilica for its first 800 years, then a Mosque for almost five hundred more years, and now a museum. The building has weathered earthquakes, fires, and maurading Christian crusaders and Muslim Turks. Interestingly, both Orthodox Greeks and conservative Turks have started campaigns to restore the building to become a functioning church or mosque. Whatever its future use, the Hagia Sophia is one of the most glorious structures I have ever seen.

Incomprehensible Byzantine Wisdom

With our time in Istanbul running short, we ambled down the hill in the direction of the Golden Horn, knowing that the Viva Hotel had a cafe we had visited before that had good Turkish Delight and more importantly, a strong wifi signal. During our 15 minute stroll down the street, we passed many things that make Istanbul, Istanbul, such as roasting chestnuts and beautiful vegetable carts.

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

Her Favorite Earring Kiosk in All of Constantinople

Get Your Fresh Fruits and Veggies 

Preparing Fresh Flatbread at Restaurant 

What a Delight!

Arriving at the cafe, the waiter told us he would have a taxi waiting to take us back to the airport at 5:30 pm. With the waiter's reassurance, we sipped our tea, ate our delight, and sent texts back and forth to my mother and Becky's sister. At 5:30, the waiter took us to the office next door where two men sat at a desk in what appeared to be a travel agency. Apparently, the waiter had misunderstood us because he had brought us to a service that takes people to the airport in a minibus at set times during the day for a flat fee. When I told the man we needed a ride to the airport immediately, he was taken aback and everyone laughed, including the two men at the desk, Becky and I, and the waiter. He then told us that he didn't have anything right now.

The Viva Hotel - not Just in Las Vegas Anymore

All was well though because the Sirkeci train station was right around the corner and we could hail a taxi there. Besides, Sirkeci was the terminus for the famous 80 hour Orient Express from Paris.  The train was a setting for everything from Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express to the James Bond film From Russia with Love and perhaps we would catch a glimpse of Hercule Poirot or a Spectre secret agent coming out of the station.

Instead, upon reaching the station, the only Murder on the Orient Express we experienced was the exorbitant taxi fare quoted to us. The non-James Bond looking taxi driver offered to take us to the airport for 70 Lira. It was the usual tourist scam in which a taxi driver charges a highly inflated flat fee instead of using the meter. Since the ride from the airport had only cost 50 Lira, we insisted the driver use his meter. And of course the ride back to the airport was only 46 Lira. 

A Taxi Ride to Ataturk Airport is Almost as Romantic

Arriving back at the airport, we went through Passport Control for the second time in two hours. The immigration agent didn't seem overly concerned with making sure my papers were in order as he was busy following a soccer match on his phone, while photos of scantily clad women regularly popped up on his phone screen. The nonchalant passport control experience reminded me of the first time I crossed into Turkey in 1991. 

Back then, Joe and I entered Turkey at Kipi–İpsala, a city on the Greece - Turkish border. After the immigration agent gave me my Visa and stamped my passport, he proceeded to open a drawer and pull out a rack of ties, and wondered whether I wished to buy some. 

Once we were through immigration, Becky and I had just enough time to spend our remaining liras at the souvenir shops before we headed to our gate. Upon boarding Turkish Airlines Flight 716 to New Delhi, we were delighted to find that our seats were next to the emergency exit. The extra leg room was a huge bonus for our eight hour flight. 

With the Extra Leg Room, it was Almost Like First Class

As we lifted off the ground and headed towards the Indian Subcontinent, I looked down at Istanbul fading away from us and saw a giant neon Payless Shoes sign. Perhaps, the integration of modern commerce throughout the world isn't such a good thing.

NEXT UP: Christopher Columbus ain't got nothing on us.