De-Foreign-ifying in Santa Fe

Spring break is amazing, isn't it? A little break away from school, get to see family and friends, and maybe even get a chance to travel, which we can easily confirm, is almost always a rewarding experience. I spent my break road tripping to the Southwest (Arizona & New Mexico), where the city life is painted by the warm colors of sun and embellished by the tropical greenery, and where I argue the best Mexican tamale is made in the entire nation.

Hint: The green bean smoked tamale in Los Olivos Mexican Restaurant in Scottsdale, AZ



Not to mention local artwork inspired by Native American and Hispanic cultures, sometimes reinterpreted with a postmodernist approach, and architecture that aligned with them, and the street artists (^^^^^), the food vendors, and jewelry bazaars.

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign" once said Scottish traveler writer and poet Robert Louis Stevenson. True story. As an Istanbul Turk who has only known the big northern cityscapes both in the US and Europe, the South felt new and different, sometimes a little scary because I felt even farther away from home, which definitely made me feel extremely foreign in the first few days. An entry from my journal was:

"I knew we finally entered Arizona, when all I could see was hilly pine forests to my right side and large valleys to the left, resting under blue-gray rainy clouds. A moment later, it was raining under the bright sun, which created a beautiful rainbow we were about to pass by. The moment after rain was gone, and I was searching for the side button to scroll down the window because it was getting damn hot inside of the car even though it was only 10am.

In a couple hours, I was going to find out Arizonian geography was more than pine forests and location specific rain outbreaks. Cacti, many large desert cacti, I was going to pass by to eventually hit Arizona's Urban Heart Phoenix, where wide concrete city roads were embellished by bright pink bougainvilleas and tall palm trees. The clock hit almost 1pm, when we finally found the neighborhood I was going to live in for that weekend. My first couchsurfing home ever of a recently graduated young adult, living in one-story Arizonian house with a small, nostalgic pool in the backyard, and lemon and pecan trees filling the air with some rich and kind of sour smell. 

The next 9 days of my Spring Break were going to be me the foreign Turk, already foreign to the American lands, adding another layer to my foreignness when encountering the Southwest, eating super delicious Mexican-American dishes, shopping from Native American gift stores, browsing exceptionally unique Arizonian art galleries, meeting spiritual art healers in Santa Fe, tasting tapas in Albuquerque cafes... It all was different but yet felt so alive and welcoming that soon enough it started feeling like I was an insider already."

The moral of this story is that I have personally found traveling and pushing off my personal boundaries an important aspect of grounding myself more in my identity.

This perfectly ties back with the struggle I've heard a lot of my peers have gone through who studied abroad, that going away to a different country and spend months away from your loved ones, but once come back to struggle even more this time not knowing how to readjust...

And one cure for that I found works perfectly is to insistently continue going away to places and constantly challenge yourself with meeting new people and new food and new cultures, the farther and "foreigner" the better.  

In other words, in my quasi-wise words, the more you are contrasted with the unknown, the more familiar you become with yourself.

Happy post-Spring breaks!