Eight Years Abroad

Every year I reflect back not on December 31, but on January 29, the anniversary of the day I arrived in Istanbul. In 2013, that felt like the real new year, the first day of my new life. A calendar date has always felt more arbitrary than that auspicious anniversary.

In retrospect, though, my eighth year abroad didn’t start on January 29, when I published last year’s reflection, but on March 14, when it began to become abundantly clear that my world was going to drastically change. Everyone has a different moment when the weight of the pandemic really hit them; for me, it was a phone call I received from my friend Philipp on that Saturday afternoon, telling me I needed to stop going to tangos, and start taking the virus seriously. Three days later, Istanbul shut down. And the real shape of my eighth year abroad began.

And yet! For everything hard and weird and sad about this year, it wasn’t a bad year at all. (I’ve definitely had worse.) I found so much joy in so many unexpected places, and burrowed deeply into my neighborhood and this beautiful country I’ve called home for so long. Someone told me at some point during this pandemic year that “it’s okay to be okay,” and I’ve carried that with me. I’m very fortunate, and I am more than okay. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Best Of The Year

Swimming

Early in this year, I finally did something I’ve been missing for ages: I found a pool and started regularly swimming laps. I chose the earliest time slot at 7am, which meant I woke up in darkness, walked to the pool in darkness, and early on would often finish swimming in darkness… and it was perfect, and so addictive. It quickly became the best new thing in my life, and I looked forward to summer morning swims, when the sun would be up by 7am. Alas, Covid paused the pool, but I did have a chance to swim laps again in December when I was in California, which just emphasized how much I love it, and how much I’m looking forward to beginning, someday, again.

Morning at Gellert Baths

My one international pleasure trip was a spontaneous 48-hours in Budapest with my friend Jenna, mere weeks before the pandemic touched down on our lives. We crammed as much as we could into our short time in Hungary: we ate goose liver and drank local white wine and hung out in a palace library and even saw (half) an opera. But the highlight was the last morning, when we woke up at dawn to go to the Gellert Baths as soon as they opened. The baths are gorgeous, covered in turquoise tiles and smelling faintly of medicinal sulfur and steam, and at 8:30am most of the visitors are elderly Hungarians enjoying their morning soak. And we enjoyed right along with them. A perfect, magical late winter morning, letting our stresses and worries seep away in the thermal waters.

Bubble of normal with Demetri

I reported this Daily Beast tango piece with my friend Demetri, a Greek photographer who was spending a couple of months in Istanbul. When the pandemic hit and the tangos stopped, we decided very early on not to distance from each other, so Demetri became my lifeline to normalcy during the first month of the pandemic. Because we were really still getting to know each other, we were able to have conversations about a million things that WEREN’T Covid, and it was just such a relief. His friendship made that first month easier, and I am so thankful for it.

The first trip in June

After months of lockdowns, including restrictions on intercity travel, Turkey opened up on June 1 and I set about planning some sort of escape. Four of us rented a car and drove to the Aegean coast, renting an Airbnb in a tiny town called Dalyan. Our terrace faced the wild windy sea and the island of Bozcaada, and even though we barely left the Airbnb, just escaping Istanbul and being together felt like the ultimate relief. Hugs! They are amazing! We drank wine and talked about life and went swimming and feasted and it was such a divine reset for my soul. Our long weekend was the first time during the pandemic that my brain got a break.

Summer road trip

The June trip was just a warm up for a much more epic trip in July. When I left İstanbul in mid-July, I had no idea when I’d be back, and that untethered freedom in itself made me giddy. There were four main legs of the trip in the end: a stop in Cesme, a glorious few days in Ekincik Koyu, a villa with a pool in Kalkan, and a journey up and down the Datca peninsula. I wrote about this trip in this blog post, and it captured the spirit of the experience— exuberant and wild and mad, with so much sea. I want to do a trip like this every year.

Bioluminescence

The most magical moment of the year is one I’ve brought up more than once on the blog, but it was so wonderful that I’ll write about it again and again. On our first night in Ekincik Koyu, we went for a midnight dip under a new moon, and the intense darkness meant that the Milky Way glittered in a riot of stars, which already would have been amazing. But then we realized the bay was full of bioluminescence. The sparkling sky, the sparkling sea… it was so enchanting that I still get chills thinking about it. A perfect pearl of a moment in the middle of a strange hard year.

My Kadikoy family and the wine trip

Because I spent so much time in my neighborhood this year, I became so much closer to my friends who live nearby. For a while in the beginning of the pandemic, it felt like anyone who lived beyond walking distance might as well be on the other side of the world, and so our little Kadikoy crew came together to look out for each other. The culmination was the Kadikoy Family Wine Trip, a tradition Helene and I have had for the last three years. Helene had to drop out last minute, but the four boys and I set out in our rented child-abductor van down towards Canakkale to visit vineyards and drink wine and laugh ourselves silly. Honestly I don’t know how I would have made it through this year without my neighbors.

The pieces I wrote

I will likely never be someone who produces articles quickly, but I am always proud of the work I do. The pandemic ended up being professionally inspirational to me, with almost every piece I published in 2020 touching upon Covid. There are two in particular I am proud of: in the weeks leading up to the world shutting down, I spent a lot of time at tangos, intended to write an article about Istanbul’s tango scene. Instead, I wrote about the end of it. Though this piece isn’t at all about me, it captures exactly what those last weeks felt like as my carefree days reporting at tangos shuddered to a halt.

As Coronavirus Fell, a Last Tango in Istanbul (The Daily Beast)

Then, the piece that took up the most time this year: a deep dive into the history and current use of contact tracing in Turkey, for National Geographic. This is one of those topics I just became utterly obsessed with, and writing about it for such a prestigious outlet was a true highlight of the year.

Turkey has been contact tracing for a century. That offers lessons and perils. (National Geographic)

Family time

When I went home at the end of 2020, I was nervous about everything around the trip— the long flight, the long quarantine, the long time away from Istanbul, the fact that everyone would be home all the time. But it was the best, actually. I love spending time with my family, I loved having them all around all the time, and I wish we could do that every time I go to California. I’m lucky that my family gets along so well, and we spent so much time laughing hysterically and talking about what we would cook for dinner. It was really hard to leave again, but such a gift to have that time at all.

The cat

I kept the pushy cat who hangs out in my building out of my apartment for a year. And it was an effort, he really wanted to come in. But when the pandemic hit and I thought I wouldn’t hug anyone indefinitely, I gave in, and let the kitty in to hang out with me. He is not my cat— I never feed him, he’s rarely unsupervised in my home— but he’s been a real comfort throughout the year. He’s a cuddle bug, most content to sit on top of me and purr. I am totally okay with that.

Worst Of The Year

The pandemic

Is it even a question what the worst part of this year was? I had plans, trips booked, goals within reach, and then the world collapsed. I had multiple breakdowns the first week, full-on sobbing at everything we were losing, so quickly. The pandemic dominated almost everything both good and bad about this year. And we’re still in it. It’s exhausting.

Cancelled trips

The first trip that was cancelled was my weekend in Zagreb with Claire in March. She was going for a conference and I was going to join up with her at the end of it; when her conference was called off, I begrudgingly cancelled my plane tickets. (Thank goodness— had I gone, I might have been stuck outside of Turkey.)

Then, my parents cancelled their trip to Turkey, and my sister cancelled hers, and my plans to go to Berlin and Prague in April went out the window, along with my Boston-NYC-DC trip in June… I was looking forward to all of these things, and I felt them pass by like ghost as the calendar flipped past each day I would have left and each flight I would have taken.

Getting Covid

The only time I left Turkey during this entire pandemic was to go to the US, finally, and see my family. We planned it all out, budgeting in time for a proper quarantine and scheduling Covid tests. And thank goodness, because after seven days in quarantine, my Covid test came back positive. I wrote about the whole debacle here, and even though I was very lucky and my brush with Covid was nowhere as bad as it could have been, it certainly was a blow. Honestly I almost fainted when I saw the results. And the irony: after spending all year in Turkey, my positive Covid test counts towards the US.

A friend’s death

In a year of grief, it feels unfair people are still dying too young of other diseases. I found out a friend and former boss and mentor had passed away at only 49, and it hit me so incredibly hard. He always cheered on my move to Istanbul, even though it really made no logical sense back in 2013. He knew it was a good decision. I always hoped I would have the chance to see him in Istanbul on his many work travels, and I still can’t believe we won’t have the chance to meet up here. Because of the pandemic, his memorial service was online, so I could join in and then call my best friend Kelly (who attended from the US) and reminisce with her. He knew and loved the two of us when we were young and raw and weird, and we adored him. Truly a tragedy.

Shin splints in the race

My last trip before the pandemic was a weekend in Antalya to run a 10k on March 1st, and even though this was my third 10k race, I was inexplicably nervous about it. I bought new shoes and trained and still couldn’t shake my worry. The day of the race was sunny and perfect, but the race was not. After only a kilometer or so, I developed horrific shin splints. After alternating walking and running for a bit, I started running again around kilometer 4 and pushed through the shooting shin splint pain. Don’t do this! That is a stupid thing to do! Stubborn me finished the race and immediately burst into tears from the pain when I finished. I couldn’t walk properly for days. Let me say it again: guys, don’t do this.

Plantar fasciitis

Apparently foot injuries are becoming more common in the pandemic era, which partially explains why my left foot became utterly messed up this year. I have bad feet and knees anyway and I insist on running on them, which doesn’t help anything. And I spent all summer wearing very cute and very flat leather sandals. So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when I suddenly developed shooting pains in my heel and my arch. A little Googling determined that I probably had plantar fasciitis, which is quite common but oh GOSH it is painful and inconvenient. Since it came on with a vengeance, I’ve spent a lot of money on good supportive shoes and no longer walk around my house barefoot, which has helped. I still haven’t started running again yet, though.

The Best Book I Read

1493 by Charles Mann

I read it just before the pandemic, and my friends teased me for carrying such a brick of a book to Budapest and Antalya. But I can’t think of another book I read this year that gave me the same thrill as this one, where every page taught me something new and fascinating. I dog-eared page upon page, I took pictures of interesting passages to send to friends, I wanted to talk about how amazing potatoes and rubber are thanks to this book. I read 1491 and liked it, though I found it slow reading… not so with 1493, a superior sequel. 1493 is a delightful deep-dive into the disruptions throughout the world after Columbus and the exchanges (of germs, of produce, of resources) that his journey instigated. The effects rippled out, through Europe and Asia and Africa and boomeranged back to the Americas. Educational without seeming ponderous, curious and critically clear-eyed, this book was the one I read this year that I still want to talk to everyone about.

Special runner-up shout out to The Plague by Albert Camus, which I’d read multiple times before, but never during a pandemic! It’s still wonderful, and hits differently during an actual plague.

My Year of Podcasts

With so much time at home this year, I listened to a lot of podcasts— binging a podcast series was a great way to get through long lockdown weekends. There are many individual podcast episodes I loved throughout the year, but here are the shows (or show’s seasons) that really stuck out this year.

My favorite show of the year was Hit Parade, a deep dive Slate podcast about some hit song-related topic that somehow ends up being about so much more, and constantly makes me laugh out loud. The first episode that hooked me was “Without the Beatles”, about the only three Beatles-penned songs performed by other people that went to number 1 on the charts— and all three are weird. When the show briefly went behind Slate’s paywall this summer, it became the only podcast I have ever paid for. And I have no regrets— it’s definitely worth it.

The New York Times’ podcast about algorithms and conspiracies, Rabbit Hole, became my weekend lockdown addiction. New episodes came out every Friday evening, right when I was settling in for our weekends inside, and it gave me something to look forward to every weekend. Each episode ended on such a cliffhanger, and I had the sneaking suspicion that we were being tugged down a different sort of rabbit hole. And the content continues to be very relevant.

Maybe everyone’s podcast addiction this year was Wind Of Change and I was no exception; I listened to the show on Spotify just so I wouldn’t have to wait for the new episodes. Did the CIA write a rock song to take down the Soviet Union? That hook is enough to make the podcast interesting, and then there is so much more.

The miniseries called “Madness” from Endless Thread stuck with me long after I finished listening. It horrifying and hypnotizing, an exploration of mind control and forced madness that would seem wild except that it is so heartbreakingly real.

Jill Lepore’s podcast The Last Archive asks a simple, or perhaps not so simple, question: who killed truth? Through strange stories from history, she highlights different facets of that question, and I absolutely loved it.

I am a Boston girl at heart, so I am a sucker for a good baseball story, and the podcast The Edge: Houston Astros delivered. The Houston Astros were the best team in baseball — until it came out that they were stealing signs. The show delves into the ethics, the fallout, and the casualties of the scandal, and shows how things have changed, and how they haven’t at all. I think it’s enjoyable even if you don’t care about baseball.

You Must Remember This is the GOAT of podcasts as well as he show that got me hooked on podcasts in the first place, and the Polly Platt season this year was YMRT at its best, highlighting an amazing woman who touched so many aspects of cinema and never got her due. This series is an attempt to rectify that, and it’s thrilling.

My Year of Earworms

Being home also meant that I listened to an immense amount of music this year— with more time inside, there was more time to discover new ear worms. Like last year, my favorite BBC 6 radio show was a major contributor to my music diet, feeding me a constant flow of eclectic, quirky, delightful tunes. I’ve compiled a playlist of my favorite jams from January to December, so you can take an aural journey of my eighth year.

What will this new year bring? Last year killed our ability to make plans, but I can’t help but feel optimistic. As I begin my ninth year abroad, vaccines are rolling out, there’s a new president in the US, and soon things will change. I am still dreaming and loving and living. And that’s enough for me.

For a review of years past: A Year Abroad, Two Years Abroad, Three Years Abroad, Four Years Abroad, Five Years Abroad, Six Years Abroad, Seven Years Abroad.