Friends and Family visits.. all summer long:)

I’m back. Back from my visit to home in France and to Barcelona with my sister and her best friend from LA. Back into the late August summer heat. And back at my writers desk.

Summer 2012 so far has been one of many lovely and not so lovely turns and surprises, spontaneous decisions, beautiful road trips and the inevitable hello’s and goodbyes. A lot of those.

To start with, I was finally going to pick up Tamila from the brand new Alanya airport this June. It’s been exactly two years since her last (and first!) visit to Alanya and so much has changed since then. We spent deliciously lazy days together, celebrating quality time and long conversations. At the end of the week I felt like we finally caught up again, we updated each other about everything and everyone and shared all the important stuff that we had and have on our minds for months. Quality time this way with friends is like wellness for the soul.

This same week another visit came up; David and Leda decided to come down to Alanya since they were on a trip to Istanbul already. Brother and sister Ozmen, friends of my sister from LA. We spent a few days all of us together, hanging out at Dimcayi and the restaurant and soon enough ‘the Americans’ as they were called, felt like home. I guess not even LA can beat my friend’s charms and our sunny Alanya lifestyle lol. They had a road trip planned to Bodrum three days later.
Just when my family from Rome called me to ask if I can come visit them in Göcek, a beautiful little place close to Fethiye where they spend their summer on the boat every year. Tante Tina, our oldest Lundgreen family member and my father’s aunt insisted on seeing me.

My auntie is 94 years old. She still travels. And she has more will power than an average teenage girl. So I guessed I had to do her the favor and come see her, since we were already in the same country for once and one should not keep an old lady waiting.

So I joined David and Leda for a few days on their road trip, until we would pass Göcek on their way to Bodrum. I’m so glad I did. We saw some breathtaking sites and places, ate delicious fish at night and I got the perfect chance to get to know those two sweethearts a little better.

When I got to Göcek I was not prepared for the little piece of paradise that was awaiting me there. Nor for my time with Tante Tina. I stayed at her place while the rest of the family was on the boat. And for the first time in my life, I had a chance to really sit down with her and talk. To talk and to listen to her while holding her hand. Three nights in a row we sat at the wooden table on her terrace.. eating cherries in the light of one lamp above our heads, with the shiny black see in front of us, and lined up boats and yachts softly rocking on the little waves along the piers.

She told me about the years in Istanbul, going to the German school (Alman Lisesi) at the end of the Istiklal Caddesi. How she first felt butterflies at the tender age of 15 for a boy named Bülent too from her class. How she experienced love at first sight when she saw her Italian husband for the first time on a ferry boat from Istanbul to Büyük Ada and then much later met him again on the Pera Bulvari. How her father Cesar, a great engineer in his time, was a very strict and respectable man who built great things for the city of Istanbul. He was  from Hamburg, married to his Greek wife ‘die schöne Heleni”.  She told me that she too was a beautiful girl when she was young (which is still visible to this day) with long blond braids. Which is why her father was extremely protective and once slapped her in the face when he caught her leaving the house with lipstick on. She told me how our Greek Orthodox family grave in the city got destroyed by the Turks in 1955 and
later restored again by the government. She told me so many stories, about my family, about herself and about Istanbul. And she asked me a million things about my new, my own life in Turkey and with Bülent. We compared and discussed details about food and habits, about words and expressions, memories and new experiences.

And the more we talked the more I realized that between us there runs a circle. Her standing at one end.. me at the other.. and a perfect bow connecting the two of us. Connected by Turkey, where we meet again.. the country my old auntie left as a young woman many decades ago and the same country I came to in my early adult years, starting a new life. Could it be that Turkey plays a much bigger role of importance in my life than I could have assumed until this point?

Was I brought here by my own choice or was it my destiny?

As my dear auntie talked about passed times, I felt like slowly but surely I was tapping into a field that I had not been at before.. a field with roots.. family roots from my father’s side. Roots that have been planted here more than a century ago. And that connect me to this soil in a way that I hadn’t been so consciously aware of up until this point.

And there is something else I realized. We spoke in German. And French sometimes, mostly when Tante Tina’s daughter was around. And Turkish with our neighbors. Then she looked for her help Lisa, always on a calling distance, and discussed what’s for dinner in Italian. Later she asked me to call my dad so she could talk to him, telling him in Greek how happy she is happy to see me. And on the first day, when Leda and David were still with me she had no problem switching to English, a language she hardly uses, saying to them with a smile: “come visit me in Rome one day. All roads lead to Rome.”

Now, I know this language thing is part of our family, both sides. We are so used to it that we forget sometimes how unusual it may seem to others.. only to be reminded about it by their reaction. Of course there have been times where I wish that we would be ‘normal’, and that I would have a simple answer to the question: so where are you from? Why did we have to be so different all the time? But over the years I came to understand that that’s just us, mixed and matched for many reasons. And sometimes I had my fun with it, confusing people to the point of light despair. Still, terms like identification, belonging, home and nationality are always a struggle to define. And now here was the living proof right in front of me, that this has always been the case. That my grandparents and even great grand parents had always been part of a ethnical minority. Have always lived in a cross cultural environment. They were Armenians and Greek in Istanbul, Germans from Sweden in Istanbul, Italians from Istanbul.. This is who we are. United in differences. You couldn't separate the strings if you wanted to. Just like you cannot un-bake the cake. We have lived this ex-pat/mix-pat life of ours since we remember. Naturally. And for some reason, I had to meet our dear old Tante Tina in Turkey, in the beautiful place of Göcek, to point that out to me. And suddenly I felt at peace with it more than I even could before. Without explaining. Without analysing. And no questioning. Just understanding that everything was the way it was supposed to be. As it has always been. Thinking I would do her a big favor by visiting her she returned me an even bigger one. On my 8 hour bus ride back to Alanya I looked at the beautiful country side passing outside my window with different eyes this time. I had so much to think about that I didn’t even opened my book once.