We got a bonus day in February thanks to this leap year, and I spent that extra day frolicking in an ancient amphitheater in the rain and eating oranges my friends nicked from roadside groves. That’s the spirit I would like to carry onward from this February.
Best Of The Month
I finally signed up to swim laps at the local municipality pool, and it’s been a terrific addition to my weekly schedule. You reserve your spot every month, and mine is at 7am, which I actually LOVE— it gets me up and active early in the morning, and then I have the entire day left and I feel great.
My dear friend Natalie showed up in Istanbul for the weekend with only two days’ notice, which felt like such a gift. We drank the French wine she brought from Chamonix and caught up on our lives… and the next morning, woke up to Istanbul snow. It felt auspicious.
A friend invited me on a very spontaneous 48-hour trip to Budapest, and I jumped at it. We spent our time eating goose liver and soaking in thermal baths and seeing half an opera… it was a perfect little break.
And the greatest news of all: a very dear friend of mine got his asylum case accepted in Germany. There is so much upsetting and heartbreaking news around migration these days, I’m grateful for this small bit of glorious news.
Worst Of The Month
I was stressed all month about a 10k I was to run in March, especially because my knee has been so achy. Finally I realized that I’d probably worn out my shoes. I got new shoes, which help a lot, but didn’t solve the problem— though that’s a story for my March recap.
What I’m Loving
Reads: I finished the novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, a gorgeous and intense book about people trying to live their lives in Chechnya during the second war there in 2004. The characters are so vividly drawn, I really enjoyed it.
Music: I adored the song Aaj Shanibar by Rupa, which is a terrific jam with and interesting backstory. Rupa travels from Calcutta to Canada to visit some relatives and ended up recording an album called Disco Jazz (which is not particularly disco-like or jazzy). It went nowhere and she mostly forgot about it. Decades later, her son stumbled upon a recording online and realized this song had become hugely popular with underground DJs and the rare records were being sold for high prices online. The album was reissued, and you can listen to it now on Spotify. And it’s great.
I also LOVED the song Water Me Down by Vagabon. Song Exploder did a whole episode about the song.
Movies/TV: My friend set up a screening of Parasite (as its only showing in theaters with Turkish subtitles) and I’m so glad, what a fantastic movie! I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days after. It won Best Picture so you don’t need me to tell you that it’s fantastic, but, it is!
Podcasts: I have been absolutely obsessed with the podcast Hit Parade, swimming through its three-year archive. The show uses pop chart hits as a jumping-off point to tell all kinds of stories, and analyze why songs become popular. I started with the episode “Without the Beatles”, about the only three Lennon/McCartney songs that were NOT recorded by the Beatles that went to #1 (they are all weird). I also recommend the two-parter about REM and the B-52’s… I recommend every episode, the show is so good.
The Film Files
I bought a lot of weird film in California and I finished a roll of Kolor Revolog on February. Every picture has a multicolored wash, which is pretty cool! I probably should have overexposed, in retrospect (the images are all a bit underexposed) but it’s still interesting.
Ephemera
I wrote a blog post for my friend Kate’s blog about solo female travel in Turkey. It was interesting, it’s been so long since I was a tourist here, sometimes it’s hard to remember how people perceive Turkey when they’ve never been here.
Upcoming
Well, I was supposed to visit Zagreb in March, but it seems like the coronavirus might be messing with my plans. Let’s see what happens…
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