What do you call that peculiar sense of euphoria you feel at an airport? Airport rush? Airport buzz? Airport high? If you know, you know. I always arrive absurdly early for my flights. Airports exist in a state of permanent, contained chaos: there is always somewhere to be, a gate to find and a departure being announced. Someone may be boarding a plane for the first time, while someone else may be travelling under difficult circumstances. Some people are thrilled simply to be

Living in Istanbul is, without a doubt, a love-hate relationship. Some days (or, if I’m honest, most days) you hate it so intensely that every cell in your body seems to scream, “Get me out of here!” These are the mornings when you wake at six and have to be on the road within half an hour, simply to stop a twenty-minute drive from becoming a seventy-minute commute. Some days, I can’t bear the relentless chorus of car horns. And then, a few times a month, you find yourself at

If you were a child in the 90s, you must have heard of The Nutcracker. I loved it. I don’t know whether it was more famous back then or whether it simply feels that way because I watched it as a child, but it is one of the clearest memories I have from my single-digit years. 😊 We went to see a modernized version of it in Istanbul last weekend, and it was amazing. Somehow, our seats were changed, and we ended up sitting in one of the very front rows. The ballet dancers were s

Hi there! Or should I say hi, future me? 😊 Because I know I will be reading this at least a hundred times to celebrate finally ending a decade of procrastination. I’ve always wanted to write and bought cute notebooks to motivate myself. But every time I tried, I either fell into the deep hole of perfectionism or just cared too much about how it would turn out. But recently, life reminded me in a sad way that we should not postpone the things we want to do. Years pass a bit t