Eleven years ago, I moved to Istanbul.
That’s about a decade longer than I intended to stay. My original plan, as much as you could call it a plan, was to have a self-imposed year abroad in Turkey, traveling around the country and the region and generally having a grand adventure, before returning to Boston and figuring out my life.
What I figured out, slowly but surely, is that Istanbul is my life. Eleven years after that plane touched down on a cold night in January 2013, I have such a life here, full of friends and routines and adventures and heartbeats I could never have imagined.
The strangest thing about my eleventh year in Turkey is how blurry so much of the beginning of it is. I am excellent with dates, and I always seem to remember birthdays and when things happened– something about the way my brain is wired. But this year had a real trajectory, from the lowest of lows into the beginning to such glorious highs. I’ve said I spent a lot of time last year crawling out of the hole, and that’s really what it felt like.
But that means that the dark times, “in the hole,” are a little lost to me. And yet, it’s just one more year in the rollercoaster of years I’ve spent in this country. It’s wild how, over eleven years in Istanbul, so much of that time has been EVENTFUL. I like to say that Istanbul is never boring, though sometimes we wish it was.
My secret? I don’t want it to ever get boring. I hope the coming year (or eleven) is filled with joyful highs and not the lowest lows. But I’ve been through so much with Istanbul, and I’m prepared to go through so much more.
Best Of The Year
A week on a boat
Perhaps the biggest highlight of this year was the week I spent on a boat in the south of Turkey with seven of my dearest friends. The irony of that is that at first I didn’t want to go; when Jenna invited me along, my knee-jerk reaction was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY. And then I asked her who was coming, and changed my mind. One of my intentions for this year was to prioritize the friends who are always there for me, and I realized going on this boat trip was a way to do that, even if I was nervous about a weeklong trip confined on a boat.
I shouldn’t have been worried, though. It was a true pleasure from beginning to end, spending all day swimming in the clear turquoise sea and soaking up sunshine, drinking and laughing with friends, relaxing and reading and napping and living our best lives. I think all of us had our own personal hesitations before the trip, and now we can’t wait to do it again.
The summer of pleasure boating
That wasn’t the end of boats, though. I started referring to the warm months as My Summer of Pleasure Boating, because it seemed like I managed to get on a boat nearly every week. For day-long boozed fests on the Bosphorus to sunset cruises, so much of this sweaty summer was spent blissfully boating.
Two weddings in Czechia
I studied abroad in Prague and have always considered it one of the most important cities in the constellation of my personal history, but I hadn’t actually visited since 2016. So when my friend Kate invited me to her wedding in May, I enthusiastically RSVP’d and started letting my Czech friends know that I was finally coming back for a visit.
And then a month and half before Kate’s wedding, my friend Bara invited me to HER wedding, the weekend before… and this one was going to be in eastern Moravia, practically on the border with Slovakia. Of course I said yes, and set out to spend a week and a half (and two weddings) in the Czech Republic.
I knew I’d have a good time, but I don’t think I was prepared for what a deep, meaningful, and soul-feeding experience it would be. Almost immediately upon landing in Prague, I was driven four hours east by a couple I did not know (but who quickly became friends) and spent the next few days sharing a cabin and sharing meals in a Moravian village. I made wonderful new friends and experienced my first proper Czech wedding, and then the day after hiked hours through the woods into Slovakia to walk off our hangovers, Czech-style.
Upon returning to Prague, I felt almost like slipping into an old life, except that it was layered with years of nostalgia– a strange combination of familiar and unfamiliar. I stayed in a studio in Karlin and lived like I really lived in the city– working in cafes in the morning, meeting up with Lada and her baby in the afternoons, taking myself out to movies, meeting new friends, walking up to Letna and drinking beer near the Metronome. I had been so blue in the months leading up to this trip, and the comfort and sunshine and joy of Prague did so much to dispel that, and give me time to truly reflect on some important things. And then there was Kate’s wedding, which was an exuberant way to close out an exuberant trip.
Arriving in Naples
Hillary and I spent a week and a half in Italy and there were so many things that were wonderful about that trip, but one moment that sticks out the strongest is our arrival in Naples. We got a taxi from the train station to our hotel, and in that short ride, I fell in love. I just couldn’t stop gaping out the window, swooning over the city. Because of the pandemic, it had been a long time since I was so struck by a city so quickly, and I’d almost forgotten what that could feel like.
The luscious Azores
Traveling to Portugal was as close to a spontaneous trip as you can get when one participant is coming from Istanbul and the other from New York, and adding the Azores to our itinerary was more practical than anything, since Alison’s flight would pass through there anyway. But the Azores ended up being the more magical half of that trip, with its abundant lushness. We went to hot springs every day (and sometimes at night), we drove all over Sao Miguel soaking up the verdant views, we hiked to volcanic lakes and spent a lot of time ooh-ing and aaah-ing all over the place. At one hot spring, we befriended a Brazilian guy who took us on a hike. And one night, we discovered that the most hopping place in Furnas, the town we stayed in, was the local cheese shop. Which also sold beer. Everyone was there, so we joined in too, drinking local craft beer and sampling a cheese plate. What a special, special place.
Aimee and Lana in Newport
Trying to arrange my visit to the East Coast is always a little tricky– I need to juggle so many things, including the friends I need to see, my family’s schedule, the amount of time I want to spend in each place, and which weekends go where. It’s always a bit of a puzzle. This year was feeling overly complicated, with an orphaned weekend floating around that needed to be filled. I asked my cousin if she’d be in DC, but she said no, it was too hot; she’d be in Rhode Island. What she didn’t say, but what my sister figured out, is that she’d be at the Newport Folk Festival, which she goes to every year. After a little rearranging, we decided to go too, staying with our cousin and her friends in Narragansett for the last two days of the festival.
It was the chillest, sweetest festival I think I’d ever been to, and we saw so much good music, but the two that ended up being my personal highlights were only half predictable. We saw Aimee Mann perform, and she’s been a personal favorite of mine since I was in high school, so that was a deeply meaningful and moving experience. And then we saw Lana Del Rey, who I wasn’t honestly all that familiar with and didn’t really care too much about seeing… and immediately fell under the Lana spell. So of all the artists I discovered at Newport, the one I’ve been listening to the most since is Lana Del Rey! Who could have guessed THAT!
Summer at the Fenerbahce pool
One of the highlights of Istanbul life was the summer spent swimming at the Fenerbahce Club Pool. I did this last year too, but I feel like I really got it to be part of my routine this year, and I was at the pool three or four mornings a week to swim laps and lie out in the sunshine before starting my day. It makes the hottest season here so, so much better.
Tarot and the Likya
I spent a long weekend hiking the beginning of the Lycian Way with my friend Lauren and letting her read my tarot constantly over those days; something about the very rooted act of walking and the more mystical act of reading cards was a really wonderful way to reorient my brain and emotions at a time that I really needed that.
Dinner parties during disaster
Good things can come out of bad, and in the darkness that was February 2023, I started throwing regular dinner parties for all of us stuck in Istanbul. They were a coping mechanism for everyone, but each dinner was an interesting crowd and the hunger for laughter and distraction made every gathering special.
Worst Of The Year
The earthquake
There was truly nothing worse that happened in my eleventh year in Istanbul than the earthquakes in the southeast of Turkey on February 6th. A city I visited and loved, Antakya, ceased to exist. The devastation was so vast and visceral that I fell into a dark depression, along with everyone else in Turkey. I don’t think I’ve ever gone through that kind of mass grief event, where everyone was personally affected, everyone was traumatized. It continues to color so much about our experiences here, and it was one of the defining things about last year for me.
Reorganizing friendships
I spent a lot of time this year re-evaluating many of the friendships in my life, which inevitably led to the unhappy realization that I had to let some of them go. I know this is a good thing in the long term, but it was immensely painful, and still is sometimes.
Weekend of weeping in Boston
The last weekend of my east coast trip was the one I was looking forward to the most. I was going to spend time with three of my dearest friends, including my best friend Kelly, and it was going to be so invigorating. And instead, everyone went through their own personal breakdowns and many of us spent a lot of that weekend crying with each other. Actually it was a beautiful thing, because I don’t usually get to be present physically for my friends when they need me, and vice-versa. But it was still an intense weekend of emotions that we could laugh about even at the time, but still had to go through.
Madness at the Datca wedding
Two of my wonderful friends got married in Datca this year and my entire Istanbul family descended on the skinny peninsula in the south of Turkey to celebrate. The week was mostly wonderful in all ways… except the night before the wedding, when everyone seemed to lose their minds. It was a full moon, I swear there was something cosmic going on.
Danielle leaving
One of my closest Istanbul friends, the one who made me a journalist, left the city for good. It never gets easier.
The Best Book I Read This Year
Life after Life by Kate Atkinson
Normally I like to alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction, but this year all I wanted was escapism, and found myself more and more drawn to fiction. I picked up Life After Life at The Last Bookstore in LA during my December 2022 visit, because I’d loved Kate Atkinson’s detective series and figured her other books must be pretty good too.
Life After Life is better than all of them; a puzzle box of a book with vibrant characters that somehow never lets up, never stops being clever but never lets its cleverness get in the way of a good story. Plus it’s somehow a “what if someone killed Hitler” book that isn’t cliche at all. I read the sequel, A God In Ruins, as well, and it is also excellent (with a gut-punch of an ending), but Life After Life is the best and I hope you find a copy and read it.
Best Podcast This Year
I listened to a lot of excellent podcasts this year, but there was only one that my friends and I discussed every week over beers and listened to as soon as it published– and that’s season 2 of I’m Not A Monster. The first season was good, but the second and more recent was much better, digging into the story of Shamima Begum and including interviews with her. The story of Begum and her two friends who joined ISIS has been a point of fascination ever since the girls went missing in 2015, and the UK government’s choice to take away Begum’s citizenship and make her effectively stateless makes this story complicated and relevant. I can’t recommend it enough.
My Year Of Earworms
It’s a bit harder to keep track of the songs I loved each month when I haven’t been writing monthly blog posts, but skimming through the playlists I’ve made along the way shows a real range of music, including stuff I shazam’d in public places, songs recommended by friends, music gleaned from the BBC 6 radio show I love, and more.
And now I’ve been living in Istanbul for eleven years, which is about a decade longer than I intended to be here when I got on that plan in January 2013. And I have no plans to leave; for all the madness and hardship that comes from living in a place like this, I can’t help but love it with all my heart. Istanbul is my addiction. I think we’re stuck with each other.
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, Eight Years Abroad, Nine Years Abroad, Ten Years Abroad.
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