I didn’t expect food to become one of the biggest parts of my Amsterdam trip but it did. Let me just say, I ate fries almost every day, tried a different sauce nearly every time, and somewhere along the way, found a genuinely good döner, thanks to Amsterdam’s sizable Turkish community. As a Muslim traveler,…
Here’s the thing most week-long Amsterdam itineraries won’t tell you: seven days in the city itself is too many. You’ll run out of museums by day four and start padding the rest with things you wouldn’t have bothered with on a shorter trip. The better use of a week is to keep Amsterdam as your…
Three days sounds tight for a capital city, but Amsterdam is one of the few places where it’s genuinely enough. You can walk across the middle of it in under an hour, which is exactly why so many people get it wrong. They look at a map, decide everything is close together, and then try…
My first trip to Amsterdam wasn’t originally supposed to be a proper visit at all. I was already in Europe for work, and I extended the trip by a few days specifically to add Amsterdam on rather than heading straight home. Once I made that call, I ended up staying five nights total, enough time…
A lot of people assume that adding a Greek island to a Turkey trip means flying through Athens. It doesn’t, not if you’re anywhere along Turkey’s western or southwestern coast. Several Greek islands sit remarkably close to the Turkish shore, close enough that a proper ferry crossing takes less time than your morning coffee. Kuşadası…
Paragliders drifting down toward Ölüdeniz beach are already a normal part of the beach, most days between April and November you’ll see them without trying. During the Air Games, that changes completely. Acro pilots, wingsuit flyers, paramotors, base jumpers, hang gliders, and more all fill the sky at once, and for a few days the…
The first time someone told me Istanbul was split between two continents, I pictured a clean line, Europe on one side, Asia on the other, pick a team and go. It’s not really like that. Each side is really a handful of neighbourhoods with their own personality, and the decision that actually matters isn’t “Europe…
Every time regional tensions in the Middle East flare up, I get some version of the same message from friends and family: “Wait, isn’t Turkey right next to all that? Is it actually safe to go?” It’s a fair question, and it deserves a better answer than a flat yes or no. Turkey is a…
Most “biblical Turkey” guides hand you a map dotted with seven ancient names and call it a plan. What they don’t tell you is that those seven cities are scattered across hundreds of kilometres of western Turkey, and figuring out which ones fit into your trip, and which don’t, is the real problem. Here’s how…
Ask most people what there is to do in Kuşadası and they’ll say Ephesus, and honestly, they’re not wrong. But Ephesus is technically over in Selçuk, and I’ve already written about it in detail, so I’ll link that here rather than repeat myself. What I want to get into is everything else, the stuff that…
