chapter 5: academic nomads

Ardiana opens by reflecting on a viral video: a surprise visit home, a mom's very unfiltered reaction, and suddenly a million people watching a moment she never meant to be public. And this all, just because she really missed watermelons and booked a flight home. Therefore, Ardiana, Burcu, and Mirna dig into what it costs to build a life outside the country you grew up in, starting with the question that trips them all up in different ways: "where are you from?" Depending on the day, the audience, or how much energy they have left, the honest answer changes.

From there they trace how each of them ended up abroad in the first place, Burcu's path arriving more by chance and a supervisor's nudge, Mirna's move from Slovenia to Belgium turning from "a few years" into an actual life without anyone officially deciding that. They get into the unglamorous machinery nobody warns you about: visas, admin, proving you exist to three different bureaucracies at once, and the specific loneliness of missing ordinary things back home, not the milestones. They compare notes on how you actually build a safety net from scratch in a new country, who ends up being family when your real family is a flight away, and the culture shocks that still catch them off guard: nude beaches, the unspoken rules of splitting a bill, someone showing up at your door unannounced like that's a normal thing to do.

The conversation circles back to what moving around does to a research career and to a sense of self, the strange math where you're too foreign for one place and too changed for the other, and why going "home" can end up feeling more disorienting than leaving did. It's the viral video that gets people to click play, but it's the quiet, familiar ache of building a life in translation that makes them stay.