New Beginnings, Part 1 (Alanya again, new digs, and a fresco or two)
Hello again from Trabzon!
I’ll start with a little health update, which is that I’m over the tonsillitis! The healing saga wasn’t totally linear, because while the antibiotics got rid of the infection, they also gave me head-to-toe hives for three days. But you know, this experience is all about growth and gaining self-knowledge, and now I’ve gained the knowledge that I’m allergic to amoxicillin!
My week in Alanya was really nice, both for sleeping off some jet lag and seeing all my friends there. I stayed with my friends Ali and Pauline, a couple of university students from France. I also spent some time with the Fulbright grantee who’s placed there this year, Savanna, and showed her around a bit. I enjoyed being in a place that felt familiar, and it was kind of reassuring to be able to look back on it as a site of success, where I not only survived living in Turkey but enjoyed it and formed a lot of great relationships. At the same time, it was a good reminder of the things that made Alanya not-so-great: the heat (I was a puddle of sweat after five minutes outside every day) and the crowds of tourists everywhere, which included a number of old Russian women who would mistake me for a compatriot and approach me speaking Russian. My days in Alanya mostly consisted of sleeping in until late morning, then venturing out into the heat to meet a friend at a cafe or something. Ali, Pauline, and I spent a nice bit of time camping out in the air conditioning indoors and playing board games or watching TV.
The view of the Taurus mountains flying into Antalya:
Cable car up to the Alanya Castle with Savanna, the new Fulbrighter in Alanya. You can see crowded Cleopatra Beach on the left:
Back in Trabzon, I had a day before Summer, my site-mate, arrived, which I mostly spent transitioning from being tonsillitis-sick to being allergic-to-antibiotics-sick. We spent two nights in the university hotel while looking for an apartment for the two of us. We checked out a couple of pretty nice places (Fulbright’s housing stipend, times two, is about three times the average rent here), accompanied by our colleague and new friend Tuğba, and finally found a furnished two-bedroom apartment in a new building near campus and the airport. It has a full kitchen, including an oven, which is not a given in a lot of places, so even though there is currently no wifi and doesn’t seem to be any climate control, it’s a good find! (For the money-minded among you: total rent is 2050TL/month, currently roughly $235.) The place came furnished with beds, dressers, and white goods, but we had a few big adventures buying kitchen supplies and other necessities. Tuğba and her friend Aynur, another teacher, were super helpful in helping us sign the lease and taking us to the mall for a big shopping trip.
After a second trip to the mall to buy a table and chairs for our balcony (which involved a lot of back-and-forth in Turklish with some Turkish Home Depot employees and a lucky taxi ride) and our lovely balcony setup:
Our first week in the apartment consisted mostly of getting settled in the neighborhood and doing our two-day Fulbright orientation over Zoom (and for me, those full-body hives!), but we also had a nice breakfast with Zafer. Breakfast (kahvaltı) is a big thing in Turkey, and almost always consists of tomatoes, cucumbers, cheeses, olives, and bread with toppings. Fried eggs and french fries are also common, and of course, lots of tea:
Summer’s much better at visually documenting our days, and she took this short video of breakfast at a roof-level cafe a few blocks from our apartment. Unbelievably, the dishes on the table are not, in fact, everything that was served. Because the airport is right at the bottom of the neighborhood, you can always see planes landing and taking off.
Summer is a recent WashU graduate from Texas who doesn’t have any previous Turkey/Turkish experience, so I’ve been pushed to use my Turkish skills a lot more, and it’s been gratifying to be able to mostly get around with them. It’s nice to not have to start over alone, and I’m glad to have a buddy to figure things out with—it makes it much less intimidating to explore the city and meet new people. She’s much more adventurous than I am, so our first weekend here, she pushed us to do a tourist day-trip to Sümela Monastery, a monastery about an hour outside of the city that’s built into a cliffside. The tour also took us to a restaurant near a pond, a glass terrace overlooking a valley, an interesting cave, and the village of Hamsiköy, famous for its rice pudding called sütlaç.
The monastery at a distance and up closer, with some of the extensive metal netting to prevent falling rocks:
The main chapel is covered with frescoes and vandalism and has been under ongoing restoration for many years. I found the vandalism kind of fascinating—the monastery was founded around 386 AD and reached its current form in the 13th century, but a lot of the vandalism has to be less than a century old, since it’s mostly written in the modern Turkish alphabet.
The tour we took was aimed at Turkish citizens—you needed a national ID number to register, and it was cool to be able to join the in-group. The group played some classic Turkish songs and danced along, and I think they got a kick out of having some foreigners clapping to the music too. I speak just enough Turkish to not get into any trouble on a tour all in Turkish—do I know what the guide was saying about the history of the sites? Not really. Did I catch the meeting place and time? Yes I did! On my own, I never would have signed up for a day trip on my first full weekend here—I’m used to being an anxious homebody—but Summer is excited about exploring and traveling, and I’m glad that she’s been encouraging/forcing me to get out and do things that I enjoy but would allow anxiety to postpone for months.
Summer and I on the glass terrace in Gümüşhane. She’s squatting because she’s nine inches taller than me:
Rice pudding (sütlaç) in Hamsiköy, topped with hazelnuts. A lot of villages in Turkey are famous for one thing, and this is the one’s. I thought it was good, but not mind-blowing. It’s served a lot colder than I would prefer.
So Trabzon thus far has been great! The Black Sea is sometimes very dark (hence the name) and sometimes it completely blends into the sky. I’m enjoying living in a more interesting neighborhood than where I was in Alanya, and the university campus is a lot bigger, nicer, and more lively than ALKÜ. I feel kind of embarrassed for all my misgivings and stresses about coming to Trabzon—I’m finding it a wonderful placement, and I’m even coming around to maybe prefer it to Alanya 😬. It makes a huge difference to have a site-mate as well—I think a lot of the grantees last year would have had a much better experience if we were partnered up, rather than having to deal with new places and COVID isolation alone. And of course, it helps to already have some language skills and experience with the country. Lots of things are still challenging (we spent over a week trying to figure out how to get water delivered to our apartment) but it’s been going really well, and I continue to be very happy to be here.
All my best,
Netta