One of the places I insisted on going to for our European trip was Groningen, Netherlands. If you’ve never heard of it you’re excused because it’s not well known to those of us in the States. But I had a reason to go there. To visit my friend, Deniz, whom I hadn’t seen since we met in 2002, when I was one of her subjects for Med El cochlear implant research that she conducted for her doctorate. Deniz’s and my backgrounds couldn’t be more different; she grew up in Ankara, Turkey in a somewhat traditional though nonpracticing Muslim family with one sister, still in Turkey, and several close cousins living in the States. I’m a product of the Midwest with a Protestant upbringing and quite a few years older than Deniz. Yet we hit it off during my five days at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles, realizing we were simpatico in our views on women’s rights, our hesitance to marry, and our drive as professional women.
We kept in touch over the years, mostly through Facebook. In 2005 I emailed her when Dave and I were in Istanbul to ask about a dessert made of chicken breast that we’d had to see if she’d heard of such a thing. (It’s a real thing, called tavuk gogsu.) She got married a few years after we met and moved with her husband to Groningen soon after Continue reading “Catching Up In Groningen”