Around the world in 28 days

I’m starting today a trip around the world which will take about 28 days to complete. I’m going to make stops in 5 cities (not including my departing airport of San Francisco) on 3 continents. All but one city I’ve never visited before and all but one city is capitol of it’s country. All of them are the most populous city in it’s country.

This trip will be the first time I’ll be in Asia. For me this is unusual, since I grew up really close to Asia minor, but I never visited that part of the world. In fact, I’m probably as far from Asian continent right now as I ever was - it’s going to be long 11 hours flight.

As I already said, I start my trip in San Francisco. For the past few years I’ve been living in this area and the City (which is only proper nickname according to San Franciscans) has a special place in my heart. However, airport does not. Partially it’s because it’s airport I was at most often in the past few years and I find airports horrible experience in general. The other thing that bugs me is lack of good coffee on Sunday morning, and SFO airport has no good coffee options on international terminal.

During my trip I’ll constantly be going west. I find much easier to deal with jetlag going west than going east so this was only feasible option to circumvent the Earth. I’ve chosen my stops based on several criteria that mostly have to do with feasibility. First off, direct flights. More connections means more airports and I do not like spending time in the airports. Also, higher chance of loosing luggage (which can be more than enough to ruin my stay in a city). Second, I do not want to get visa for any country I’m visiting. Visa usually means a lot of paperwork and that’s hassle I do not need. This already limited places I could (and wished) to visit, so making a destination list was easy from there.