Mark's Blog

Jetlag  —  The disorientation your body feels when the plane you are flying crosses multiple time zones, leaving your appetite and your sleeping pattern at home!  Generally speaking, jetlag just feels like you stayed up all night and have to work the next day–so it is survivable!  I’ve read that it takes one day to recover from jetlag for every hour adjustment that you need to make. 

So, for instance, Sherrylee and I left Thursday afternoon and flew about nine hours to Frankfurt, Germany.  Our bodies thought it was midnight when we landed, but the clocks all said 6am–so what should we do?

In the years we were taking groups to Europe every summer, we only had one answer:  you wake, eat, and sleep by the local clock from the minute you arrive.  We would land in Frankfurt at 6am, rent a car,  drive four hours to Hannover, spend the afternoon getting the team settled with their hosts, then we might even have the big information meeting that evening when we would meet the people we would be reading the Gospel of Luke with all summer.  In other words, no time for jetlag!

Now that we are traveling more independently, I have discovered a few alternative remedies for jetlag:

• Caffeine and coffee will keep you awake at the right times–that’s easy–but what will help you sleep when it is dark? You could read old blogs that you have printed out and taken with you–but I use Melatonin myself. One gram for every hour that you need to recover–up to six.  Melatonin does not put you to sleep; it just helps reset your body clock a little faster.
• Stay outdoors as much as possible!  Sunlight helps reset your body clock as well.
• Plan for jetlag and compensate for it.  That’s what we always do now, if our schedule will allow it.  Yesterday in Germany, we went straight to a hotel, got a dayroom, and slept for six hours.  Then we got up and flew on to Turkey.  It made all the difference yesterday because our Turkey flight was delayed two hours and we did not arrive in Antalya until 3am–but because we had slept, it only felt like 9pm body time.  We slept then until 10 this morning and now I feel like we are almost turned around!!

Sometimes you just have to ignore jetlag–especially on short trips where you don’t have time to get turned around.  But that is just part of the adventure!!

This Turkish keyboard is driving me crazy! They use a dıfferent letter i and they put it in the same place as the i on an American keyboard.  If some letters look lıke symbols ınstead of letters, that is the reason.

Our hosts A & K  are here to visit, but I will tell you about them later.