If there’s a polar opposite of a homebody, it’s Crystal Chilcott. The 2011 Butler High School graduate used her time studying abroad at Queen Mary University of London to travel to 18 countries across Europe and Asia including a four-day jaunt to Istanbul and Cappadocia in Turkey in May.

“I took them mostly on my own. They were pretty spontaneous,” said Chilcott, an English major with a creative writing minor, who will finish her senior year at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs in December.

“I took classes three days a week (in London),” she said. “You have classes three days a week, and there’s not a lot of contact with your professors. There’s a lot of reading and writing.”

“I did a lot of my school work on the road,” she said.

One of her last trips before she returned home was to Turkey at the end of May.

Along with her friend and fellow American student Lily Zerihun, Chilcott said she planned the trip so she could see as much of the country as possible in four days.

She said she spent $200 for airfare, bus fare and accommodations. Her bare-bones budget meant sleeping on all-night buses and washing up in a Starbucks restroom occasionally.

“We flew to Prague in the Czech Republic,” Chilcott said. “Then we took a night bus to Vienna. We got ready for the day in Starbucks’ bathroom. Then it was a four-hour bus trip to Budapest.”

“We stayed in Budapest for two days and flew to Istanbul. We stayed in Istanbul for two days and took a 10-hour bus trip to Cappadocia in central Turkey,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in visiting there.”

“We wanted to see the 3,000-year-old underground city,” said Chilcott.

Called Yeralti Sehri, the underground city was just one of the historical and geological attractions in the interior of Turkey.

“There are 2,000-year -old churches there and cave dwellings. There are Roman ruins as well,” she said.

Chilcott said there was one surreal moment on the bus ride to Cappadocia.

“It was a bit weird. We had been sitting with a German and a French environmentalist,” she said. “About 5:30 a.m., the French environmentalist woke me up to see the flamingo nesting beds around the Great Salt Lake of Turkey.

“I’m thinking this is a weird moment. A Frenchman is waking me up to look at flamingo nests in Turkey,” said Chilcott.

Chilcott said she got a visa beforehand online for 20 euros.

“We had no problem getting over the border. It was a lot simpler than I expected,” she said.

Chilcott said, “Istanbul was more crowded than London. I was a little surprised at all the people.”

Chilcott said she and her friend stayed in a $10-a-night hostel near the Galata Tower, a medieval stone tower that offers a panoramic view of the city.

The two Americans took in many of the tourist spots of Istanbul: the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern and the Grand Bazaar.

“One thing interesting, in Turkey most women don’t cover their heads unless they go into a mosque,” she said. “Some women would cover their heads all the time.”

“Turkey is a secular state. There’s a separation of church and state like in the United States,” she said.

Another interesting thing she discovered is the Turks are big tea drinkers.

“Turkish tea is steamed,” she said, and immensely popular. “Turkey consumes more tea than England. They are the world’s top tea drinkers. That’s something I learned.”

She said teapots are hung up on a pole and tea is served in small vessels that look like espresso cups made of glass.

“Parts of Istanbul are more Third World than others,” she said. “There are places where they burn their trash. One night we got back late and our part of the city was dark.”

“They shut off the electricity to conserve energy. We were totally disconnected. No light, no Wi-Fi.”

Chilcott said she and her friend just sat in the garden of the hostel and waited for the lights to come back on.

She said Turkey was the only country where she didn’t blend in with the rest of the population.

The Turkish people were friendly and wanted to talk about her life in the United States.

She said she was surprised both by the number of Americans she encountered in Istanbul and the sheer number of foreign tourists from Europe and the Middle East in the city.

She met a German man and a Polish girl who were staying in the same hostel.

Traveling in Turkey was “much safer than I thought it would be,” said Chilcott.

Since returning from London earlier this summer, Chilcott has kept her travels slightly less exotic. She traveled to Washington, D.C., by bus to visit a friend and made a trip to Disneyworld.

“The budget buses (in Europe) are really efficient. The ones here are always running late,” she said.

After she graduates from the University of Colorado in December, she hopes to get two of the novels she’s written published, she said, and perhaps embark on a career as a freelance travel writer.

“I like seeing people, meeting people from all over the world and learning about the history of the country,” she said.

In the meantime, she may apply to become a tour guide in Europe until her writing career gets established. She certainly has the experience.

FACTS & FIGURES

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• Slightly larger than Texas, Turkey is located in southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia (that portion of Turkey west of the Bosphorus Strait is geographically part of Europe), bordering the Black Sea. Its climate is temperate with hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. The weather is harsher in the interior.

• The population of 79.4 million is made up of: Turks 70-75 percent, Kurds 18 percent and other minorities 7-12 percent. The country is 99.8 percent (mostly Sunni) Muslim and 0.2 percent Christians and Jews.

• Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 from the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire by national hero Mustafa Kemal, who was later honored with the title Ataturk or “Father of the Turks.”

Under his leadership, the country adopted wide-ranging social, legal and political reforms. After a period of one-party rule, an experiment with multiparty politics led to the 1950 election victory of the opposition Democratic Party and the peaceful transfer of power. Since then, Turkish political parties have multiplied, but democracy has been fractured by periods of instability and intermittent military coups (1960, 1971, 1980), which in each case eventually resulted in a return of political power to civilians.

In 1997, the military again helped engineer the ouster — popularly dubbed a “post-modern coup” — of the then Islamic-oriented government.

• The chief of state is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, elected Aug. 28, 2014.

The head of government is Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Turkey's president is elected directly for a five-year term. The prime minister is appointed by the president from among members of Parliament.

• Turkey's largely free-market economy is increasingly driven by its industry and service sectors, although its traditional agriculture sector still accounts for about 25 percent of employment.

An aggressive privatization program has reduced state involvement in basic industry, banking, transport and communication and an emerging sector of middle-class entrepreneurs is expanding production beyond the traditional textiles and clothing sectors. The automotive, construction and electronics industries are rising in importance and have surpassed textiles within Turkey's export mix.

• Oil began to flow through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in 2006, marking a major milestone that has brought up to 1 million barrels per day from the Caspian region to market. Several gas pipeline projects also are moving forward that over the long term will help address Turkey's dependence on imported oil and gas, which currently meets 97 percent of its energy needs.

SOURCE: CIA Factbook