"Sweet Home Adana" Revisited

So I've been thinking about the title of my blog: Sweet Home Adana. And I've been thinking about when I first came up with said name and how I came up with it. When I created this blog, I was still in the U.S. It was about a week before I left that I decided to go ahead and create the blog, and I was throwing around names with my family, trying to find a somewhat creative yet not too cheesy title. Though this may not have worked (I mean, it is undoubtedly pretty cheesy), it planted an idea in my head that needed time to come to fruition: the idea that Adana would in fact become my home.

Let me pause here to look back upon what I knew of the city of Adana then, in the time before coming here. What I knew came primarily from the Wikipedia page and my guidebook, whose one brief page highlighting its limited tourist attractions is a lot better than the description from my friend Charlotte's guidebook, which labeled Adana a "brash, commercial city" through which one should only pass for transportation if absolutely necessary. How could I sit there back in August and create a blog that called this city, which I had only seen through words and websites, my home?

Now nearly six months (half a year!) into living in Adana, it's time to reevaluate how I feel in relation to the word "home", which I so casually donned upon the title of this blog. Now I have become so comfortable in this city, or at least in the parts in which I live and through which pass, that it is difficult to reconcile the two different ideas I have of the city. One is the vision I created out of sentence fragments and online photos last April, ten months ago, when I first received my acceptance letter from NSLI-Y, and it gave me the name: Adana. Adana. Adana? Adana? How even to pronounce it?! I had never heard of it before. An idea swirled around in my mind. An exotic city, dusty and hot, with a middle eastern vibe. It was an Adana that I more felt than really understood and put words to. It was something in the name, as I let it roll over my tongue, tracing the options of the three simple syllables. The different ways to pronounce the word led me to believe that there were different ways the city could be, as if it were not truly determined until I got there, until I arrived there and called it home.

My second idea of the city, how I see it now? I regret to say that after this buildup, after explaining my previous idea of the city, I won't be able to truly explain until I leave this city. For now, though, it's my home, because my home is where I am.