My sister-in-law was just in Turkey. Her experience was that 99.9% of the country is fine. Yes, there can be mass demonstrations in that square, but 2 blocks over, its life as normal. As always, travel smart and you'll travel better.
I've done more than the average amount of travelling and my experience has been that purposefully avoiding the touristy things isn't all its cracked up to be. Sometimes, things are touristy because they're pretty awesome. You learn to live with the vendors selling cheap crap and the people begging for money, but some of those things are amazing.
For instance, the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul can be pretty touristy but you should definitely go. Same with the Western Wall in Jerusalem: tonnes of vendors. Sections of the Berlin Wall are filled with people but there's a good reason for that.
Im just saying there's a good balance to be struck between the touristy stuff and experiencing the culture.
My advice:
- sew a Canadian flag on your backpack. It seems tacky, but we met lots of great people who just came up and asked if we were from Canada. Plus, getting mistaken for an American in the middle east... not fun.
- after 9 weeks backpacking in Europe, we found we didn't stay at that many HI hostels (where you get the discount with the membership). We preferred to stay at one-off smaller, more casual hostels. For us, the HI membership wouldn't have been worth it. YMMV.
- Eurorail is great... but make sure you do your research on which one to buy. We would show up to the train station a day or two before travelling and book our tickets and sometimes that wasn't enough to get the train we wanted. That was in low season.
- Venice is fun but extremely expensive. Locals dont usually live in Venice, they live on the islands surrounding the lagoon and commute in.
- Leave room in your backpack for the things you pick up along the way. We ended up with a mini-pantry in my backpack because we cooked most of our dinners at the hostel to save money. We had olive oil, salt, pepper, ketchup (its hard to find heinz in Europe), etc. That way you dont have to find new food staples in every city.
- You can get away with less than half the clothes you're thinking of bringing. Doing laundry somewhere is a great excuse to chill nearby in a park for a couple hours and relax.
- You don't need a laptop or tablet. A smartphone is great for checking email or loading google maps from a stolen hotspot and most of the hostels have computers you can use.
- Work extra hard at obeying the laws while you're in another country. Trust me. The threat of being thrown into a Portuguese jail kind of ruins the afternoon.
- You're only going for a month right? Pick a weekend somewhere in the middle and book a nice hotel for two nights. Dont do anything. Your muscles and sanity will thank you. Over 9 weeks, we did that twice and it really helped. First time, it was for my girlfriend's birthday and we were in southern Portugal. We got a massage and just lay by the pool for a couple days. Second time we stayed with family friend in Milan and he just cooked us lots of great food and drove us around.
Above all... remember to relax. Try to think of it as a vacation and not stuff too much into the trip.
