Turkey 2026 - Day 1 Cupertino to Istanbul

Welcome to my blog on our 2026 vacation (do retired people have vacations?). This year, we are headed to Turkey for 16 days. Our flight to Europe follows the usual route - a brief circle around San Francisco (and a beautiful sunset) to gain altitude followed by heading rapidly to

the NNE so that we exit the United States somewhere between western Washington state and Billings, MT. From there we fly over Calgary and then into the great white north. The jet stream must be fairly far north because we pass over the northern end of Hudson Bay and northern Greenland. From there, our great circle route starts to head south. We go over Iceland, then over the North Sea between Britain and Norway (but much closer to Norway). We go over Denmark and then onto Germany (close to Berlin) and Poland. From there, we deviate slightly to the south of our southwestern route. The map on my seat monitor shows why. On my right are the cities of Budapest, Belgrade and Cluj (which I think is in Romania). On my left are Lviv and Vinnytsia which are in Ukraine. I'm comforted that we are keeping a respectful distance from the Ukrainian border, the clouds hiding the pointless conflict going on there. After that, we are on to Bulgaria (passing to the east of Sofia and west of Varna). As we reach the coast of the Black Sea, we can finally see the ground (it has been almost entirely cloudy up until this point). We see that nearly every hill is covered with huge windmills. It is good to see that at least this part of the world is ignoring our current President's obsession against windmills! We approach Istanbul over the Black Sea, so we don't see much of the city. It is incredible that you can hop on a plane in San Francisco and in 12 or so hours, be in a completely different part of the world. Tailwinds must have been favorable because we arrive in Istanbul about 1 hr ahead of schedule. Istanbul airport is huge! It seems like we taxi for weeks and then when we get to the gate, we have an almost equally long walk to passport control and baggage claim. Our co-travelers and friends Chris and Mark from Toronto arrived about 2 hours earlier and have already had a cup of coffee, enjoyed a little sunshine and most importantly, found our driver for our ride into the city by the time that we arrive.

Some thoughts from our flight. We made a rule some years ago that we will fly business class on flights longer than 10 hr because my legs can't stay wedged behind the person in front of me for that long. But a side benefit is that you get fancier meals. We noticed that Turkish Airlines has minaret shaped salt and pepper shakers; gold top for pepper, white top for salt.  It is the first trip we've been on that has carts that come down the aisle to provide choices for appetizers and later for dessert!

 

While Turkey is a secular country, they are also majority Muslim. When our seat entertainment screen was set to Map View (as mine almost always is), every few minutes, a screen came up which indicates when the next of the five Muslem prayer periods (Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha) as well as sunrise starts and the approximate direction of Mecca relative to the orientation of the airplane. For practicing Muslims, this is important information because the time when each prayer period starts changes with both latitude and longitude. While Mecca is more or less oriented in the same direction that our plane is going, we were thinking that it would have been much more difficult if we were going in the opposite direction because you would have had to turn completely around in your seat in order to pray in the correct direction. Fortunately, we think that there is an accommodation for practicing Muslims if they find themselves in a place that makes it hard to pray toward Mecca.

We find the Turkish language difficult to parse. Türkiye converted from Arabic lettering to English characters, but with diacritical marks (like umlauts and cedillas) added to account for differences in pronunciation, in the early 1900's. This makes it look quite similar to English. However, while you can often somewhat understand other European languages by looking for similarities to English words, there are no words in Turkish that look anything like English. They could literally be random characters, and it would not be any less intelligible. The spoken language is just as difficult to understand. The language seems quite soft. There are not a lot of hard consonants which makes it hard to identify distinct words. It reminds me a little of Korean.

I have pancakes for breakfast on the plane - Turkish pancakes are smaller and a little thicker than we're used to and they are sitting on top of cream (like the filling of an eclair) and warm strawberry jam. Good, but more than a few calories!

It takes about an hour to get from the airport to our boutique-style hotel in the new city which is quite close to the old city where most of the UNESCO sites are located. There are a lot of roads which seem to wander back and forth - perhaps Istanbul, like Boston had their street system designed by cows or goats!

The hotel is in the bougie section of Istanbul. First clue - there is a Prada next door. With this in mind, we ask the hotel clerk where we can get a light meal with authentic Turkish food and specify that we are not looking for high-end dining. Fortunately, he recommends a place only a couple hundred meters down the street. In our jet-lagged state, we walk right past it but managed to Google map our way back to the correct location.

The waiter speaks just enough English that we are able to place an order for three meze (sort of like tapas in the US) - an eggplant/yogurt mix, a red pepper, walnut and spice and hummus along with some bread. We also ordered an order of eggplant stuffed with ground meat of some sort and a kabab made out of another sort of ground meat mix. It was all great. The price was around 4,000 Turkish lira that works out to about US $80 - a little pricy, but we are staying in the high rent district! Our short walk back to the hotel is enough to convince us that it is time for bed so that we are ready for a walking tour of most of Istanbul's UNESCO World Heritage sites and a 3 hr cruise on the Bosporus (the water way connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and on to the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas). Stay tuned!