Turkiye

It took some work, but we agreed on a destination for the honeymoon: Turkey. D originally wanted Croatia or Santorini (there were some other places mentioned, but I can't remember them now) and I wanted India, Japan, or central Asia. The deciding moment was when I went out to Brandeis to get a letter of recommendation from a former professor. He's Turkish, and while we were chatting, I mentioned that D and I were getting married. I brought D into his office and we all chatted about the honeymoon. I think at that point we were leaning toward Santorini (I wasn't thrilled about that, hoping to go somewhere a little bit more adventurous. In retrospect, as half of Greece is on fire and it's economy is exploding, Greece would have been pretty exciting after all). So my professor starts to pitch us Turkey and it turns out it has everything we wanted in a honeymoon. The more we looked into it, the more we loved the idea. So, I think the tourism board of Turkey owes Professor Erbil a finder's fee at the very least. I was in a mentoring program at Fidelity and my mentor was Greek. She also gave me honeymoon advice when we thought we were going to Santorini, but she just showed me the website of a hotel she liked (which was also way out of our price range). Professor Erbil recommended an itinerary and really got us excited. He talked about renting a boat with his college buddies for like $40 each (per day) and the boat had a captain and a cook who prepared all of their meals. They sailed around the coast and went fishing, drank, swam, and generally had an awesome time. I know it's just an anecdote, but Greece is currently bankrupt and destroying itself, while Turkey has set its sights on building a trillion dollar economy. I mean, thanks for democracy, Greece, but you sound like China. What awesome thing have you done lately?


We bought our tickets last week. We'll leave immediately after the wedding (when I was still at Fidelity and had less vacation time, we thought we'd have to wait until 2012 to honeymoon) and stay for 12 days. D knows the itinerary better than I do, but we're going to the coast, Cappadocia, and Istanbul for a few days. We'll rent a car at some point and drive across Turkey, north to south. We just got our applications in the mail for international permits. I'm really excited about that part of the trip. It'll be practice for when we dominate the Amazing Race. We just have to get our acts together and finally submit an application.