My “Love” Letter to Swiss Housing Agencies

When I think back on my bad memories in Switzerland, I can associate majority of them with three places: EPFL, government offices, and housing agencies.

EPFL is normal since I did my PhD there. PhD is a bitter-sweet journey for everyone. No matter how resourceful the journey is, it is painful at the same time. Therefore, I do not mind my bad or stressful experiences at EPFL. These were among the bad experiences that enriched my life.

So let’s move on to the government offices. These institutions are a pain in the ass wherever you go. So there is no escape from them. You just need to find ways to relax yourself after dealing with the people at a government office. To wash away the memory of the annoying interactions you had to go through in these offices, either swearing by yourself in your native language or listening to your favorite punk band after you leave the office works.

This leaves us with the Swiss housing agencies. The “wonderful” “lovely” agencies…

I was living in a college dorm before I started my PhD so Switzerland was the first place that I had to deal with a housing agency. Even though I had been told that it would be hard to find an apartment in Switzerland, I didn’t expect things to be this hard. Every time I went to an agency, it felt like talking to a wall. Of course, this was partly because of the language issue. My French was terrible in those days (and it still is). I also remember many agency visits where I asked my questions in English and got my answers in French. However, even if there were some people at the agency who didn’t resist talking to English, it still felt like talking to a wall when talking to them.

After struggling some time being rejected from all the places we applied for. Six months into my PhD, I finally moved to a studio apartment, which I didn’t dare to leave till the end of my PhD. I was lucky with this one because the building was a newly built one, it was specifically built for EPFL students based on an agreement between EPFL and Foncia agency, and  not many people knew about it at the time unlike my friend Cansu (who urged us (my other friend Duygu and I) to apply for it).

The feeling of talking to walls never disappeared though whenever I had to contact a person from Foncia even though I was now their customer.

The latest set of encounters I have been going through with Foncia is related to my deposit. I ended my contract with them on November, 2014. It has been almost 3.5 months now. And I still haven’t received my payment. The first time I contacted them regarding this issue was the beginning of February, 2015. Since I moved to the Bay Area in early January, I was sending emails to them in my evenings and calling them the first thing when I wake up at 6am in my mornings if my emails weren’t answered. The contact guy for my ex-building was a different one now and he seemed more responsive than the previous one.

As a side note, the previous one drove me crazy while I was moving out. He didn’t answer any of my emails and he barely answered my phone calls. All I wanted was a letter that says I was going to move out at the end of November so that I could schedule a time with my concierge to leave my keys. In the end, I physically went to the agency to ensure he handles my request. That was useless as well. He told me the letter should be in my mailbox in a week, but it wasn’t. In the end, I kindly asked my lab’s secretary to contact him and only then I got my letter. (Bless you Erika, and all the secretaries at EPFL that helped me. If I ever wrote an actual love letter to someone in Switzerland, it would be to the secretaries I interacted with at EPFL. They are the best.)

Anyways, this new guy, he actually answered emails and phones. So I was a little hopeful and decided to be polite with him while handling my deposit situation. I have never been a person that believed aggressiveness can solve my problems. (I blame my dad in this attitude; constantly making me listen to his favorite hippie singers/bands when I was a kid and basically brainwashing me to be a peaceful human being).

However, a couple of weeks later I started feeling like I had no progress in my issue with this guy. He kept telling me I should be receiving my deposit at the end of the week and he wrote this at the beginning of every week. Then he told me that they don’t have my account number (which I gave them while I was giving away my keys to the concierge, I have two people that witnessed me searching for my account number for 5-10mins in my wallet and then writing it down for another 5mins). I said anyways I gave him my account number over email and kept my polite attitude still. He again said I should be receiving things by the end of the week. The other week, when I re-emailed him saying I still haven’t received my money, he said that there are some documents that I should sign. I signed them, scanned them back to him in a still-polite email.

After this last email, he answered me writing they finally approved the release of the deposit and I shouldn’t contact him anymore and instead contact the cooperative of my building instead. When I asked him for their contact information, he told me that he doesn’t have such information and I should look at the contract that I made with “them”. 

(Here is where I leave my dad’s peaceful rock music and switch to my mom’s more angry music that is very specific to her so I won’t give it a genre name.)

Them, THEM. THEM = Foncia, you work at Foncia. How the hell you don’t have their number? You think I am an idiot. I am really bored of being treated like shit or an idiot every time I had to deal with a Swiss housing agency. I don’t know whether this is because of my student status when I was there or my nationality. But I don’t care. I don’t deserve this. Neither any of my friends who were/are at EPFL.

To give a comparison, it took me one day to find an apartment in USA. Whenever I have a question, request, or maintenance issue, it is handled at most in two days (as opposed to waiting weeks or a month in Switzerland or making your secretary call them again to fasten the process). Whenever I meet one of the maintenance guys in my complex or visit my leasing office, everyone greets each other. They always ask me if everything is OK with the apartment. They treat me like a human being.

I know writing this won’t have any effect other than switching me back to my peaceful mode. There is a housing issue in Switzerland. Supply just doesn’t properly meet the demand. And the housing agencies will keep exploiting the lower class European citizens like me. What happens if I badmouth Foncia’s name? Nothing. A student or a non-student non-EU citizen newly moved to Switzerland, has to say YES to the first suitable apartment that she/he got accepted into by the agencies. Because the alternative is either being on the street or paying really high prices to extended-stay-like options.

It feels like superman died!

It has been almost a week now. I still get sad at random moments during the day.

After seeing the deaths of many young or middle-aged people when I was a kid, I remember telling myself that I won’t get upset if a person lived a life full of bitter/sweet memories and died at a reasonably old age (like at least 70) because she/he lived a good life, there are people dying at much younger ages, and we are all going to die anyways.

But I am still upset even though he was 71. Because I feel like superman died. He was a very nontraditional superman but he was my superman. I thought maybe I can feel better if I write as I always do.

Even though I had heard his name before, what really introduced me to Lou Reed was reading Trainspotting in high school. Trainspotting gave me a good list of musicians to be discovered; Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, etc., and shaped some branches of my music taste. From that list, Lou Reed was the one who left the biggest impression on me, because he not only became one of my favorite musicians, but also one of my favorite poets and storytellers. His love for literature was all over his work and he offered me a goldmine for underground literature in addition to his music and poetry.

He was one of the most important figures in my life who made me love and respect people as they are, especially the ones marginalized by the society, because he often wrote about drug addicts, transvestites, prostitutes, etc. But more importantly, many times he made me accept who I am whenever I felt like an outcast and hated myself for it.

He was one of the main reasons that during my bachelor’s my first academic paper’s topic was prostitutes or I visited a penitentiary regularly to voluntarily work with female prisoners.

He was sometimes a substitute for my mom and dad at nights I had hard time to go to sleep. When I was lying in bed alone in my 19m² studio in Lausanne last September with a high fever on a Saturday night, his voice put me to sleep making me dream about a beautiful Sunday Morning.

To a girl like me who gets extremely bored while listening to famous love songs like Unchained Melody or I Will Always Love You, he gave her favorite love song, I’m Sticking With You.

He gave me some of my favorite movie scenes; like when Perfect Day plays in Trainspotting or when Venus in Furs plays in Last Days.

I often felt drunk or high by just listening to some of his songs.

He was always there to say everything is going to be alright in various ways when I was broken.

And he will always be there with his songs whenever and wherever I need him. But it still feels like superman died.

Zero Dark Thirty – Good Cinema, Bad Politics

First of all, I have to say that I am a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow as a director since I watched Strange Days in college. So I might be biased in the below comments.

I want to comment on the movie in two different perspectives:

1. Just ignore this story being on the quest of the USA for catching Osama bin Laden, but rather some country X is searching for some evil guy Y.
2. Focus on the story of USA trying to catch Osama bin Laden.

(1)

This is a great example of high-quality cinema and tells the story at hand very successfully.

I usually don’t like to see people in uniforms, neither in real life nor in movies. I find most of the movies involving modern day soldiers, battles, and CIA agents very boring. I would even ban the money dedicated to them if I had the power. However, in this 2.5 hour film, which is full of CIA and well-uniformed people, I didn’t even realize how the time passed. The story flows very densely from the start; it keeps you tense and awake. This tenseness goes to an extreme level toward the end of the film when the dedicated team is looking for the enemy Y in his possible fortress, even though you know very well how this search would end. The details are well-placed in many scenes, especially the just mentioned search scene. Also, the protagonist’s face is priceless throughout the film; ever-tired and determined convincing us that she is definitely a one-woman-army and she adds herself to the smart, strong, cool, and skilled Kathryn Bigelow female characters list.

(2)

Some parts of the story might seem pointless to you, especially if you are not from the USA and do not have a big national pride.

The long journey to hunt down a single man, all the resources spent on it, and all the people died on the way might look really meaningless knowing that it is not going to solve actual problem of terrorism at all. Nobody in the film aims to look at what lies underneath it all. It’s just a quest looking for a single man, an important man but a very tiny and unimportant piece in the whole picture. Therefore, in the scene where the search team is being shouted at on the fact that they are failing miserably on the quest, you just want to tell them to go get real jobs. When the protagonist says she wants to find and kill Osama bin Laden, you again think “well isn’t it better to keep him alive to get information in order to tear down the whole terrorist organization if he’s the absolute important leader?”. However, this is not a problem related to the film, it’s related to the story and the story itself comes from real life USA pride and glory gibberish. So the film shows us that gibberish wrapped-up in very good cinema that can be used as a lecture on many aspects for directing, if you manage to ignore reality.

Finally, just my take on the torture scenes: I found the discussion around this highly overrated after seeing the film. Torture is used in many parts of the world, when especially political prisoners are involved. The film shows what happens in reality by taking no sides in it. It’s true that the tortured people in the film eventually give some useful information. However, under any circumstances no matter what the outcome is, I personally, do not find it OK when seeing a guy being chained to the ceiling from his arms or kept in a tiny box for hours or almost choked to death. It just disgusts me. The confessions do not even seem all reliable seeing the state of the tortured ones in the end. So I do not think the film praises torture, it just leaves you with your own perception of torture thinking about the possible outcomes. There might always be other ways to get those outcomes.

One of the best scenes of the film is when you see some of the main characters looking with their WTF-faces at Obama on TV saying that they do not use torture because it is wrong. The film just states that torture does happen as a part of this process whether you like it or not or whether it is good or bad. Even how the protagonist evolves on the matter of torture shows that. In the initial torture scenes, she looks very uneasy while later on in the film she’s the one giving orders to punch one of the detainee accepting this as a part of her job in her clan and not questioning it further. It is just the ugly facts.

Tepenin Ardi (Beyond the Hill)

We watch the story of a very male dominant family living in an almost deserted large land that mainly belongs to the grandfather character.

The main question in the film is; who is the enemy that we have to fight with?

“The enemy lives beyond that hill”; keeps saying the grandfather. But he doesn’t really know who the enemy is. He is just very prepared to create the illusion of the enemy in his head and fight it with all the rifles he owns. He is completely unaware, or maybe ignorant, of all the misgoings in his family. His focus is on the enemy beyond the hill that we never see.

The enemy suspected by the very sane grandfather character is actually no different than the enemy delusion his not very sane grandson has, who is going through a severe depression due to the things happened during his mandatory military duty.

The film depicts a great example of a society that creates scapegoats rather than dealing with their own internal problems. It also shows how such a society, in turn, makes their people fight with things that they have no clue what and why they are fighting for and the price paid for this meaningless fight is usually their own blood.

<spoiler

The grandfather has two sons; Nusret and Mehmet. While the enemy we don’t know keeps living hidden beyond the hill; Nusret’s young son shoots the dog of Mehmet’s son, Nusret rapes Mehmet’s wife, and someone shoots Nusret from his leg. However, nobody has a clear idea of what is actually going on. Except for Nusret’s young son and Mehmet’s son, nobody knows who shoots the dog. Actually, even we as an audience don’t see who shoots the dog, we only guess that it’s Nusret’s son. Nobody knows Nusret raping his brother’s wife except for Nusret, the wife, and us. And nobody knows who shoots Nusret, it’s only suspected by us that Mehmet’s son might have realized the rape and might be the one who shoots his uncle.

The grandfather, though, suspects the enemy beyond the hill of all the shootings. So he goes and shoots some of enemy’s goats. In turn, there happens another shooting that we don’t know from where and by whom again. And as a result, a member of the family is lost.

spoiler/>

While going home right after the film with my very beloved college roommate, she asked me to summarize the film in one sentence, which is like a little game between us that we play after each film we saw together. And below is what I told her for this film.

We keep fighting with things, but we do not really know what they are.

You don’t always need to have bombs and cranes to run down someone’s home.

When I look back to my childhood, in all my greatest memories there is Istanbul. 

We lived in Zonguldak but both my mom and dad had studied in Istanbul and my mom’s close family members were living there. Thus, we very often visit Istanbul during various holidays.

For me a typical wonderful Istanbul day usually started early in the morning because of my dad waking up so early. Then we had a nice breakfast and went out to catch the bus 55T. 55T was my favorite bus when I was a kid because it connected my grandma’s house to Istiklal Street.

The first thing to do in Istiklal Street was to go for a movie for one of the matinees with my dad. Usually mom joined us after the first film since she couldn’t stand seeing two films a day. Therefore, my dad and I picked the morning movie among one of the cool horror films or weird independent films.

The theater choice was also important. Our first choice was to see a film in Emek Theater. I was in love with Emek. Coming from a small city like Zonguldak, it was the most beautiful theater I had ever seen in my life. With its carvings on the walls and ceilings, the smell of history inside, its big white dog on the floor at the entrance, its irreplaceable staff that I have witnessed getting older and older; it was just glamorous to me.

If we didn’t really like the film screened in Emek, we checked the old small theaters, like Beyoglu Theater that had amazing paintings on the walls and insisted on showing films that weren’t screened in most of the big cinemas.

After the first film, the next stop was Mercan in Cicek Pasaji. This was the place where my dad slowly taught me how to properly drink and eat stuffed and fried mussels. To be honest, I initially hated both the mussels and beer when I was a kid. It’s amazing to see that years later Mercan’s mussels became the thing I craved for the most while doing my PhD in Lausanne.

After the mussels and before the next film, we stopped by Inci, which is a small and cozy pastry where the most famous profiteroles in Istanbul are prepared and for me the place that I ate the best profiteroles ever.

After Inci, we saw a second film; this time a romantic one or a drama since my mom was also with us. Then we took 55T back to my snow white grandma.

Later when I had to pick a college for my bachelor’s, of course, I had no other choices than colleges in Istanbul.

Whenever my parents came for a visit, we kept our routine with slight differences like one move instead of two or skipping either Mercan or Inci. We added more people to our routine from friends and family and enjoyed this routine more and more.

I kept finding myself in small theaters like Beyoglu whenever I felt depressed or had a problem; most of the time being the only one in the theater. They were the perfect hiding places for me; made me felt like I was at a safe place, I had peace, I was with family, I was home.

Among all the festival films I watched during college, the ones shown in Emek gave me a more distinct joy and happiness.

Often times I preferred eating a profiterole at Inci instead of eating a proper meal when I was in Istiklal Street.

Now I am in grad school in Lausanne and this routine is always the most important thing in my TODO list when I visit home, which is completely Istanbul now since my parents also live there.

During my first year I managed to perform this routine completely.

During my second year, Emek Theater was closed.

During my third year, Beyoglu Theater was decided to be closed.

Now I am in my fourth year and Inci Pastry is closing down.

You don’t always destroy one’s home by using dangerous weapons or big machinery in one shot. You can destroy it very slowly and painfully over the years; by cutting the ropes that give the real idea of attachment, belonging, and hence home one by one.

I didn’t decide to do my PhD abroad to leave home. I came here to eventually come back home as a more resourceful individual. However, people who are somehow chosen to represent me by people other than me are crashing down not just my home but also other homes, passion of many, and soul and history of Istanbul by destroying various landmarks.

And I cannot do anything against it.

We cannot do anything against it.

Please tell me to which home I am going to be back to in a couple of years or later?

Back in Lausanne!

I had never thought that I would be this upset because of coming to Europe from US. But I know the reason; it is all the people I had to say “goodbye” in the end.

If I write in the order that I had to say “goodbye”;

- greek brother; who taught me that it is ok to do mistakes in my work as long as I learn from them.

- good old friends from undergrad (Yasemin, Yigit, Kivanc, Ezgi); who made me remember once again that even if you don’t contact with good old friends for a long time, once you do, you can always start from where you left off as if you have never separated.

- aunt and cousins; who took me back to the years before I left Zonguldak and come to Istanbul for my university and made me realize that the everyday family routine is not actually something boring like I always thought it would be and it can give back to you the peace you often lose while working. I cannot really realize this when I visit my parents because it is usually not for more than a week and we try to do bazillion fun things during that week which doesn’t quite allow any routine but which gives me peace in some other way.


I came back to Lausanne,

weirded out when I heard the French speaking people on the streets due to hearing only Americanish for the last two weeks,

got into my apartment,

felt like a stranger to the place

till I called two good new friends (one greek, one turkish) for tea and then watched a movie with them. :)

Life is nice to me as long as I know how to feel not alone! :)

"This is the end of an era!"[1]

Last week, I finished another series; Six Feet Under.

And it kicked OZ from its top spot at my favorite series list. :)

If I'd like to summarize the whole experience in one sentence it would be

“We're all fucked up and people who really really love us are the ones who love us even though they know we're so fucked up.”


This is what I saw in the far from wonderful relationships of Dave and Keith, Brenda and Nate, Brenda and Billy, Brenda-Billy and their parents, Claire and Ruth, Ruth and George, Federico and Venessa, Claire and Ted, …


And as Claire drove away from home to New York for building the life she wants to lead for herself, I just cried my brains out. There were three reasons for this.

One, I remember the day I left home for university. The excitement I had for being independent and on my own for the first time in my life, coming from a little city like Zonguldak to a big city like Istanbul. Even though I visited Istanbul many many times, it was always with my parents. Now it was only me to discover what that beautiful and chaotic city has to offer to me and I sucked it as much as I can. But also the fact that the safe walls you had before, being cracked after leaving home and becoming more and more cracked as years go by, bit me whenever I was watching a film alone (by being the only audience) in a little wrecked independent theater.

Two, as they showed how each character dies in the future while Claire is driving away, I remembered the people I've lost, how death became a simple part of life for me when I was a kid due to facing the death of many people who were really close and special to me, how I couldn't get upset when I hear a relatively old person dying. Yes, a series that takes place in a funeral home was perfect for me.

And three, listening to “Breath Me” from Sia during this whole ending scene.

This series marked the end of an era for me. I felt like I grew a bit more. There are many more striking issues from the series that I'd love to write about but I don't know how I can really mix all of them here and write about it but I might write about them one by one later, or just keep them for myself, I don't know. This post is just for showing the effect of the last 10 mins of a TV series that was so special to me.


[1] “Friends”