Alanya at last
Friends and family,
Settle in; this is a long one.
Antalya province is beautiful. Everything I’m going to say next is going to sound trite and commercial, and yet I can’t find any other way to say it. The Mediterranean is intensely blue. The weather is perfect in the shade or with a breeze. The airport is small, nestled in foothills that remind me of Napa, but instead of grapevines, they’re covered in banana trees. The road curves along the sea, and the landscape is green and rocky—San Diego, I think, is the best comparison I can make. On the plane ride, I had been missing my snow and frozen lakes and winter stillness, but it was hard to hold onto that feeling as soon as I exited the plane to green and warm breeze. After spending the last 36 hours in different kinds of metal and concrete containers, it was almost jarring to see so much land and sky at once.
My host university contact/buddy teacher, Fırat, picked me up at the airport and suggested we make a stop at the ruined city of Aytap/Iotape. I was relieved to be able to walk around and breathe fresh air, but mostly I was speechless. I’m still speechless. I’m a shoddy photographer, but I think you’ll understand:
I had whiplash from going from the stress and tedium of transit to hiking around ancient ruins, smelling the trees and touching the cool rock of a city built two thousand years ago, next to some of the most important water in human history. It was all of the ‘magic of Fulbright’ in a single gut-punch of culture and history and beauty. Fırat gestured to the water and said that this water was too dirty, he’d never swim in it, and I looked at the clear teal sea, and I thought of the murky lakes I grew up in, and I laughed.
The city of Alanya itself is dense and full of hotels and retail which sometimes resemble casinos and sometimes resemble bodegas. Our first stop was to get a SIM card, a transaction which Fırat handled entirely, for which I am immensely grateful. (This will be a theme. Just assume that all I am ever doing is standing around staring while he graciously talks to people on my behalf and explains things to me because I am both clueless and don’t speak Turkish.) He says that the most common businesses here are real estate brokers (apparently, Russians and Syrians will buy real estate and citizenship with it, and indeed, many of those signs were in Russian and Arabic) and tattoo shops (no explanation).
After dropping my bags at the hotel, we went to the university. It’s a young university, founded in 2015, and Fırat suggested that it didn’t really look like much, and I laughed again, because courtyards and modern Seljuk architecture and a single snow-capped mountain in the distance. I usually resist taking photos because they never seem to turn out, but I’m realizing I’ve got to start taking more pics. After a brief break for instant coffee and dried black locust seed pods (texture like jerky but sweet like dried dates? I had never ever heard of a locust plant; they are apparently a common sweetener here despite being native to North America. I was unprepared to be eating a food I’d never heard of before and was again speechless). I then met several administrators and faculty members in rapid succession and filled out some forms (read: Fırat filled out the forms for me when everyone realized that I couldn’t read them and didn’t even understand what information they were after) and was given a lot of information which I have no hope of retaining due to combination jet-lag/over-stimulus. The upshot: I have an office (shared) and the textbooks for my classes and am enrolled in a beginning Turkish class and will soon get my email and other credentials. They asked me what office supplies I would like, and I was like, I cannot convey to you on how many levels I am unprepared to answer that question. I was given several branded notebooks and a pile of other basics I couldn’t even attempt to translate from raw visual input of “pile.”
Fırat returned me to the hotel with a plan to look at apartments in a neighborhood called Kestel on Monday after the weekend curfew is lifted. (Please, take a wild guess who handled the hotel check-in.) This hotel is of course much cheaper and dirtier than the one in the airport, but it has a living room area and a kitchenette and a balcony with a view, although now that I am here I would guess that every accommodation in the area has a balcony with a view.
I’ve spent the day since trying to recover from jet lag in my little cocoon of the hotel apartment, but I did go grocery shopping and walk along the beach at sunset. I’m more tired than anything else, although I did have a spike of anxiety after a nap yesterday. I’m still a bit puzzled by how non-anxious I’ve been, but I suppose that when your world has already become apocalyptically unrecognizable in the last 10 months, more unrecognizability is not such a shock. Also the years of therapy and the SSRIs probably help. I didn’t study abroad in college in large part because I thought that my mental health would not withstand it, and I’m feeling more and more certain in that decision. I think it’s probably true that I would have been unbearably anxious on a semester abroad a few years ago, and now I’m simply able to handle it. I’m trying to frame all the little interactions that did not go as flawlessly as they would in America—asking hotel staff not to clean my room, checking out at the grocery store—as successes because I accomplished what I set out to do, not agonizing events because they involved some communication trouble. And really, what fun would it be for the Turks if I blended in seamlessly? The whole point of this endeavor is my foreignness, and that means making simple mistakes and having stilted Turkish-English conversations.
What I continue to struggle with are the power dynamics of Fulbright and how starkly lucky I am. I’m lucky to be able to do this, to come live in a beautiful place, to have received the education and had time for the extracurriculars that made me a good candidate. I’m lucky to have the financial resources I have; I don’t fear being trapped anywhere or not getting something I need for lack of being able to pay my way out of the situation. And I’m paid well; not an impressive salary by American standards, but several times the median Turkish income, and to me, everything here is cheap, from housing to food. I have done nothing to deserve this pay rate other than be American. It’s at best awkward and at worst abominable to be literally valued more than all the people around you by virtue of nationality, especially when I rely on all those people to help me do basic things. Like a Kardashian, I am rich for no good reason, and like a toddler, I am completely clueless. I am Chicago West.
And I’m lucky to be able to choose whether or not to live in America. Fırat mentioned he’d like to move to the US, but green cards are hard to come by. And this is someone who has competently and kindly managed my whole existence here; if I am Chicago West, he is whatever nanny Kim is underpaying. America would be lucky to have him. I told him he should go for North Carolina, based on his desire for temperate weather and friendliness and ocean fishing, but he didn’t seem inclined to entertain my speculation. There is no way to justify the disparity between how simple it is for me to get here, and how hard it would be for him do the reverse. Lucky, I think, is not actually the right word for me: it is unfair that I am able to do this. I did not get this opportunity through a stroke of random fortune—centuries of global exploitation and injustices conspired to place me here. All I can hope is that I will be useful, and I will do my best to learn and to teach.
On a lighter note, I found some Turkish cheetos at the grocery store! They are exactly the same shape and texture, but taste less artificial, with more herb flavor than cheese. I’m a big fan.
With love,
Netta