Saying Görüşürüz (and lots of photos)
Hello dear friends and family!
With my departure in just a few days, I’ve been throwing a low-grade pity party 24/7 about leaving such beautiful people and places. I leave and go back to Minnesota on Friday, and I will deeply, sincerely, from-the-bottom-of-my-heart miss the time I’ve been able to spend here. I’ve been so lucky and so happy. I had applied to renew my grant for another year, but the powers that be at the Fulbright Commission decided that I couldn’t return to Alanya, and instead placed me at a different university in a major Black Sea city, Trabzon. I was so upset to not be able to come back here for another year and seriously considered not accepting the renewal and just staying in the US. After a long and fraught decision-making process (which plenty of you heard me moaning about), I decided that I should take the position and return to Turkey, to a new and different experience on the other side of the country. I still put off finalizing that decision until Fırat took me to a beautiful cafe terrace on the river above the school, where I felt such peace and awe that I signed my contract forms then and there.
I’ve been trying to make the most of my remaining time here, as well as the lightened COVID restrictions, so there’s been lots of seeing friends and the sites I hadn’t previously made it to. I know I’ve said it a million times, but Alanya is like, so beautiful.
The day that the lockdown ended, I went on a hike with the group I’d been with before. One of the women who I’d met previously was there, and she and her other auntie friends took me under their wing. It was a wonderful time and they were so kind and hospitable — talking to me and sharing their food and tea and taking photos. There were lots and lots of wildflowers, and somehow the snow hadn’t entirely melted yet. (Some people gathered some snow to take and make desserts with, à la maple syrup on snow, which I personally thought was gross because it was end of season snow that had been sitting there for months!) There were also lots of herds and animals — cows, sheep, goats, horses. Somebody went right up and picked up a lamb for a photo, and I was somehow the only one freaking out about it. I stuck to feeding the sheepdog parts of my bagel (not a very attentive sheepdog, clearly).
Me and Zeliha, my hiking fairy godmother:
I also finally got around to visiting the castle here, with a friend who I’d met on the first hiking trip I went on here. We went up by cable car, and the view of the city was amazing—it looked so big, and yet I know that it only takes about 20 minutes to walk across the main part of it. Looking down at the coastline from up on the castle, I thought it could easily be mistaken for San Diego if it weren’t for the scattered mosques and minarets. The castle area itself is beautiful, full of old walls (it was built in the 13th century by the Seljuk Empire) and with amazing views of the city and the sea.
Here’s a view of the castle from below, on Cleopatra Beach:
I’ve also gotten to spent a lot of time with the French couple I met through a meetup of foreign students here. I was shocked to meet French people here (they’re the only ones in the city, I’m sure) and they were shocked to meet an American who spoke French, and we immediately became friends. Ali’s parents are Turkish and he’s been here for a few years, while Pauline came last fall to join him at university. When the lockdown finished, we got together with one of their friends, Sinan, and I cooked “Mexican food” (there was rice and beans and guac and an attempt at fajitas) and they tried to teach me how to play Okey 101, which I think is basically like Turkish mahjong. It is incredibly complicated, and I have to admit that trying to learn the rules, in a combination of English/French/Turkish, absolutely broke my brain.
I also went with them to a restaurant on the river, which was, you guessed it, incredibly beautiful. The tables are on platforms just above the water—there are no chairs, you sit on cushions on the floor. We had a long lunch (here’s a picture of my food; GRANDMA DO NOT CLICK, IT IS FISH) and I tried the classic Turkish beverage of şalgam suyu, or turnip juice, which comes in two varieties: spicy and not spicy. The not spicy was okay; the spicy was awful. We played Uno and another French card game (somehow all of their games involve some amount of numbers and math) and put our feet in the very cold water, and my face hurt from smiling.
The next day we all went to a nice restaurant on the beach in Alanya, where there was more delicious food and beautiful views and I think you’re getting the idea of what my life has been like recently and why I’m so heartbroken to leave!
Fırat took me to visit Dim Cave up in the mountains, which is one of two well-known caves in the area. The other one is Damlataş Cave, which is right next to Cleopatra Beach and is a big tourist destination, even though Dim Cave is much, much more impressive — about 1,000 feet long. I just kept saying, “Oh my god!” as we walked through it—photos in caves obviously don’t capture that much, but it felt like an underground cathedral that just kept going and going.
And on Saturday, Fırat and another English instructor, Mustafa, took me out on a boat tour of the peninsula, complete with some fishing (unsuccessful) and some rakı (potent). It was beautiful, I’m so grateful to them, yadda yadda yadda, you must be getting tired of hearing this over and over.
So I think I’ve been making good use of my last couple weeks! There’s been more that I haven’t included here: having dinner and playing ukulele with the family of one of the professors, visiting Antalya with Mehmet, having a potluck with the foreign languages faculty and getting worst sunburn of my life, attending a very propaganda-y event by the Turkish department. I’ll miss the people here so much, but I’m already making plans to come back and visit next year while I’m up in Trabzon. I’ve had to do my share of reflective reporting on this experience (I’ve got to go now and write a report on how I, as a Fulbrighter, may have impacted the way that the people and society of the United States are perceived abroad) and words can’t really capture it, but it has been an wonderful, life-changing, growth- and joy-filled experience that I’m so thankful to have had the opportunity to do. This’ll be the last from me while I’m here, but I’ll hopefully pick up again in several months with a whole new set of Turkish adventures.
All the best,
Netta
To cap off, a little anecdote I jotted down a few weeks ago:
With the weather so nice, I’ve taken to going to a nearby park to sit in the shade and work. On one afternoon, with all the other picnic tables filled, a family came up to ask if they could sit to eat at mine, so I vacated it and went to sit on a bench. When I was leaving the park, I walked past them again and waved; they insisted on me sitting down with them and gave me sunflower seeds and Coca-Cola (I did not want the coke, but I’ve yet to figure out the way to decline an offer in Turkish that isn’t interpreted as just politely accepting the offer). This was a rare case where I seemed to speak more Turkish than they did English, but there was an 11-year-old girl who was very excited to use the English she had learned at school. They were very friendly and kept giving me more sunflower seeds, which I ended up hiding in my pockets because I did not want to eat them and they kept handing them to me. After 20 minutes, who should walk past but Firat, and I was intensely embarrassed to be seen, like, cheating on the Turkish people I already know with what was clearly a group of strangers in the park, and Fırat was clearly amused to see me sitting with this random Turkish family.