1. Doing two red eyes back to back is never a good idea. It means you won't get sleep for 48 hrs, your brain will be fried, and you might overreact to the normal stresses of travelling.
2. It seems European airports don't post the gate of your flight until a short while before you board. Which means you cannot settle in and snooze at the gate, you have to stay in the busy shopping areas, and there is limited seating. It also means there is a mad rush to the gate when it is posted. In Glasgow, the gate was posted 8 mins before boarding started. No exaggeration.
3. It also seems in Europe that everyone lines up at the gate. There is no organization as to who boards first (ie: the back of the plane) so everyone is chaotically pushing passed each other to get to their seats. It also means boarding takes longer, thus none of our flights left on time.
4. Our red eye flight to Turkey left London at 1am and arrived in Istanbul at 6:35am. Pegasus Air does not offer any included beverages or snacks on this flight. A coke was 6 euro, which is roughly $9 Canadian. Luckily, I had filled a water bottle, but with the flight being so hot, me being a claustrophobe, and having no sleep meant my body was stressed and overheating. I drank through that bottle quickly.
5. In addition, they walked through the cabin at least 5 times to sell stuff and never turned out the lights. On an overnight flight, that is ridiculous. I couldn't sleep at all. And when I tried, my gracious neighbour decided to have a loud catch up session with his friends. No sleep was had, but a panic attack was.
6. Once we landed, JM and I booted it to customs. We were some of the first people off our plane to get in line. There was a flight ahead of us, and two more behind ours that arrived while we were in the queue. We bought our visas online before arriving - DO THIS if you ever go to Turkey. No one was telling the other passengers they had to buy a visa before they got in line, so they would wait the whole queue just to be turned away. And that queue wasn't short. We waited 1h25 mins to get through. There were only 2 agents open for all of us. And things got very tense. Some people started jumping the queue because they had transfer flights to catch, others just thought the meeting they had to get to made them more important than everyone else. It was an interesting way to observe culture clashing (ie: who skipped the line, who spoke out, who ignored the protests of fellow travellers, who thought they were so important they pushed children out of the way, etc.). There was no Turkish security or staff directing people and it got pre-riot-esk.
7. Free wifi is not universal in airports. Enough said.
8. Once we arrived in Izmir we tried to connect to the internet to call our airbnb host. Not possible. So we went to buy a SIM card for my phone, but it would not activate. I have an unlocked iPhone that is fairly new (< a year) and it would not connect to the Turkish network. In fact, it said it could not "activate my sim". I hate Apple. My old Samsung from Korea never had a problem in any country we visited.
9. Be sure you have good directions to your airbnb. Otherwise you will spend an hour walking up and down stairs with your packs in the hills of Konak.
But we made it. And it's lovely. Now to sleep...
PS. My apple of the last 24 hrs was the cutest Scottish kid who screamed with delight when the airplane took off. He then proceeded to chat with me in his adorable accent all the way to London. He made my day.
