Almost 10 years have passed. To be exact, it will be precisely 10 years in the summer of 2019.

It all started when I discovered the TV show Friends during my university years (very late, I know) and fell head over heels in love with this sitcom. I still remember it so clearly: when the screen went black on the final scene of the final episode of the final season, a single tear rolled down my cheek, and I asked myself, “Bro, what am I supposed to do with my life now?”

Naturally, I had to go to New York, where Friends took place. But how?

We’re students, we have no money, and when you type “America” into Google, “Work & Travel” pops right up anyway 🙂.

Immediately, the agency research began, along with those classic conversations with friends: “Bro, I’m going this year, you coming or what?” At the end of these talks, my friend Burak decided to join me on this American adventure. After extensive research, we registered with a Work & Travel agency that suited us. Since we were incredibly excited, the moment we stepped out of the agency, we immediately took a photo holding our registration documents, of course 🙂. We were so ready for this whole thing that we signed up back in October 2008—like, 9 months in advance. Most people register in the last 3 months or something.

Between choosing a job, interviewing with the employer, the visa interview, and looking up flight tickets, the days just refused to pass. Also, during this period, a friend from Burak’s school—Yalçın—decided to join us, and then we were three.

Right at the beginning, I got a bit demoralized when we found out that the agency’s jobs in New York—which was the whole point of going to America—had been canceled. In fact, the jobs they kept offering us were completely out of the city, basically camp-life options, which bummed me out even more. The people at the agency wouldn’t stop praising these jobs, though. They kept talking about high hourly wages. If my American adventure was going to be spent at an amusement park 60 miles away from any city, what was the point of going to America? Just go to a camp in Turkey and hang out there, right? After my intense insistence, the agency finally found me a job inside a small resort town, at a small amusement park, with a wage that was lower than the others. To me, it was the best option they had, and I accepted. Our destination was Panama City Beach, Florida. And the name of that small amusement park was Emerald Falls.

Once the job selection was made, the only thing left to do was wait patiently. Days that felt like years, constant daydreaming, endless internet research, etc. Just so we’d have an environment full of beautiful girls when we arrived, I was constantly messaging girls on vkontakte.ru (the Russian Facebook) who were going to Panama City Beach for Work & Travel 🙂. I even created the “2009 Work & Travel” group on Vkontakte and gathered all the Russians and Ukrainians heading there into that group 🙂. The group is still up; you can access it here.

And finally, the long-awaited day arrived. We had set our round-trip ticket dates according to the maximum number of days we could legally stay there. Because of this, I literally walked out of my final university exam and went straight to the airport 🙂. We couldn’t afford to wait even a single day.

We were so excited… Even now, as I write these lines, I can feel that excitement all over again. My family and I normally live in İzmir. But even so, my family came all the way to İstanbul just to see us off. Boarding time came, we said our goodbyes to everyone, and went through passport control.

Our British Airways flight had a layover in London, and this was only the second time in my life stepping onto a plane. My first flight experience was literally the İzmir–İstanbul flight just to catch this London plane anyway 🙂.

Even though we were going to work in Florida, our first target was New York. That city had to be visited, my friend! We had declared a 3-day vacation for ourselves before starting work, which would also help us shake off the stress of the exams. However, New York was a very expensive city, and we only had $500 per person on us; this money had to get us to the place we’d work and survive on until we got our first paycheck. Therefore, we needed to do this 3-day vacation the cheapest way possible. The first problem we had to solve was: “Where are we going to stay on the cheap?”

Since I foresaw this issue, months before going to America, I tried to find a host who would welcome us into their home through couchsurfing.com. I must have written to hundreds of people who owned apartments in New York. I got rejections from almost all of them. Some didn’t even reply. But one day, I received a reply in Turkish from someone named Eric saying, “Okay, you can stay at my place.” I was shocked. Turns out Eric’s father was Turkish. His parents had separated years ago. When Eric was 2 years old, his mother took him to America. He found his father years later when he was 25. After finding his father, he started learning Turkish.

Since I am someone who prepares very well in advance, I had mastered everything before going. I knew exactly which subway to take after landing at JFK, which station to transfer at, which stop to get off at, and how to walk to Eric’s apartment. I had practically memorized New York step-by-step on Google Maps. But there was just one problem. Sometimes, preparing this much makes you forget small but crucial details 🙂. When I arrived in London, I realized that I hadn’t written down Eric’s phone number or his apartment number anywhere :O . Sure, I could find the building, but without knowing his apartment number, how were we going to reach him? It’s not like we could wait for hours outside Eric’s building with our suitcases.

We are talking about the year 2009 here; devices connecting to mobile internet weren’t widespread like they are now. At Heathrow Airport in London, we went up to anyone holding a laptop, asking, “Can we connect to the internet for just a second? We just need to grab an address from our email.” People were looking at our faces like we were crazy 🙂. Thankfully, one family let us access the internet from their daughter’s laptop. We got the address and thanked the family profusely. As a thank-you, we even gave their daughter a small piece of jewelry with an evil eye bead (nazar boncuğu) that we brought along to gift to random people.

Now everything was complete, and we could board the New York flight. After a flight of about 6 hours, we would be in New York. While on the plane, realizing that the drinks were free was a wonderful bonus, of course 🙂. I remember drinking until I passed out 🙂. Even when the plane hit severe turbulence, it felt like a lullaby to me 🙂.

By the time we landed at New York’s JFK Airport, I had sobered up. After passport control and waiting for our luggage, we first threw ourselves onto the AirTrain, which loops between the terminals and the Subway station inside JFK, and from there, into the New York subway network 🙂.

Welcome to the Jungle: Manhattan When we reached Manhattan, we had to make one more transfer, get off at the Port Authority Subway Station, and walk 3 blocks. As I wrote before, I had memorized everything step-by-step from Google Maps. In fact, I had virtually walked to Eric’s building dozens of times using street view images, which were quite new even in America back then. But I still remember the exact moment I stepped out of the subway station into the city… I was literally like a fish out of water—the crowds of people, the traffic, the height of the buildings. But still, without too much trouble, I led the group right to the front of the building. I walked inside holding a piece of paper. There was an old lady waiting at the door—like a reception desk or something. With a small piece of paper in my hand and my heavily accented English, I said:

– “I am looking for Eric.”

At that exact moment, I truly felt like the classic “clueless villager arriving in the big city.” You know that Turkish cinema cliché—the villager looking for his relative in İstanbul with a tiny scrap of paper in his hand—yep, you know the one. The woman looked at me with a sour face and took the paper from my hand. I think she called Eric. Then she hung up the phone:

– “He is not answering his phone,” she said.

Right then, I literally started breaking out in cold sweats. Because we had no Plan B. We hadn’t even entertained the thought of Eric not being home, so I hadn’t looked up any other places to stay. Therefore, with one final spark of hope, I asked:

– “Maybe he is sleeping, can you please try again?”

The woman nodded, opened the phone line again, and started talking 5 seconds later. When she hung up:

– “You can go upstairs, he is waiting for you,” she said.

I was incredibly happy. We finally had a roof over our heads for 3 days, and the best part was, we were going to stay in a city like New York for free!!!

The apartment building where Eric’s flat was located was very old. The apartment itself was a 1+1 and also very old, but it was ridiculously close to Times Square. Only a 4-minute walk. Literally the heart of Manhattan.

[Photo: Eric opening his pişmaniye]

Eric settled us into the house, and we gave him his gifts. He had specifically asked us for rakı and pişmaniye (Turkish fairy floss) 🙂. He immediately opened the pişmaniye and started eating it 🙂. Once we settled in, he said, “Come on, let’s all go out and explore,” and took us straight to Times Square.

[Photo: Me in Times Square]

We immediately took our photo on the red stairs sitting right there in Times Square, of course 🙂. I cannot describe my happiness at that moment. I was literally walking on air.

Times Square is an incredibly crowded place; everyone is there. There are some very bizarre characters. People wearing different costumes trying to collect tips. Dozens of people putting on street performances. It feels like a never-ending, unstoppable carnival atmosphere. And, of course, very cool-looking New York Police Officers every 50 meters.

After hanging out in Times Square for a while and taking our photos, Eric mentioned that he forgot his wallet at his girlfriend’s place and that we needed to go grab it. Together, we started walking from Times Square down toward Lower Manhattan. As we began to leave Times Square behind, the crowds started to thin out. After about a 30-minute walk (by the way, there’s a motto that goes “New Yorkers Walk”), we arrived at the venue where Eric’s girlfriend and her friends were hanging out. Here, his friends invited us to their table and bought us each a beer (in America, you have to be 21 to drink alcohol). At that date, I hadn’t turned 21 yet. We had heard that these rules were very strict in America, but they didn’t ask for our IDs, and that’s how we committed our first law violation in America 🙂.

After hanging out there for an hour or two, the girls invited us to a party they were going to that night, but Eric didn’t let us go to that party—making the excuse that we were very tired, saying, “They need to rest.” To this day, I still don’t know why he didn’t want us to go to that party 🙁. We left the venue with Eric, hopped into one of those famous NY yellow cabs, and headed home. Even the cab was a completely different world for us. We were sitting in the back seat, and the back seat had a metal cage, presumably to ensure the driver’s safety, and there was a screen playing New York-related videos right in the middle of the back seat. Back then, this whole setup felt incredibly high-tech to us. And as we were getting out of the car, Eric paid through that screen using a credit card 😯. Even now, you can’t pay with a credit card in our taxis back home.

After dropping us off at the apartment, he said he would stay at his girlfriend’s place tonight and come back tomorrow morning, and then he headed off to that party the girls had invited us to.

To be honest, we were also exhausted. Think about it: we boarded a plane in İstanbul in the morning and arrived in New York in the late afternoon. We hung out until 12:00 AM local time, but at that moment, it was actually 7:00 AM for us back home. Meaning, we hadn’t slept for 24 hours, and following a long flight, we were walking around and trying to hit up parties. Ahh, youth… if it were now, we’d barely manage to throw ourselves onto a hotel bed 😐.

We hit the sheets around midnight that night. And with that, our first day in America came to a close.

Day 2: High Society Brunch and the “Delivery” Girl We woke up early in the morning. We were starving, but we couldn’t leave the house because Eric hadn’t left us a key 🙂. We called Eric; he said, “I’m coming in a bit,” and showed up an hour later holding 4 coffees from Starbucks.

Since it was getting close to noon, even though we wanted to skip breakfast and go to a fast-food restaurant making fried chicken—an American classic—Eric had other ideas in mind. Since we didn’t want to carry all our money with us when leaving the house, everyone took $20 with them. $20 was big money 🙂… well, according to us 🙂.

Eric took us to the Bryant Park Café, located in a large garden right behind the New York Public Library, where slightly upper-class people do brunch. This is a park/garden where you suddenly isolate yourself from the skyscrapers. In the café inside this park, they serve brunch. Or, you can order single portions like we did. Nowadays we have them in our restaurants too, but back then, Eric ordered dishes whose names we were hearing for the first time, like Quesadilla and Philly Cheese Steak. He also ordered Mimosa Cocktails (a drink made of orange juice and champagne), which is a tradition to drink at brunches there. The ones in the photo below are exactly those 🙂.

[Photo: Our first brunch in America and the Mimosa Cocktail 🙂]

The real shocker came when we were paying the bill 🙂. While we were hoping to hang out at KFC for 5 bucks, we ended up paying $20 per person for this brunch, and at that exact moment, the money we had allocated for that entire day was completely gone 🙂. But the taste of that philly cheese steak is still on my tongue.

After leaving here, Eric took us straight to Rockefeller Center, the skyscraper with the best view of Manhattan. Going up to the top floor of this place was also $20, and we had no money left on us. Bless him, Eric bought all of our tickets and took us all the way to the top.

[Photo: With the Empire State behind us, us and Eric (From left to right – Yalçın, Eric, Burak, Alican) watching over Manhattan 🙂]

After coming down from Rockefeller, we walked around the streets of New York a bit more and headed back home to rest. Eric bought some things from outside to throw a little party in the evening. We started drinking rakı along with our New York-style snacks. Just as we were about to finish a full 70cl bottle, Eric’s girlfriend arrived. She had also brought us another 70cl bottle of rakı 🙂 (Yes, rakı is sold in New York).

As the night progressed and our heads turned from tipsy to drunk, a chick walked straight into the house without even knocking and sat right in the middle of the room. While we were looking on in our drunken innocence, thinking, “What’s going on updates?” and “She must be a friend of Eric’s,” the girl pulled a massive bag of weed out of her purse 😯. We were, of course, completely SHOCKED. Turns out the girl was a dealer doing home deliveries 😯. She made a small baggie containing the amount Eric wanted, took her money, handed the bag to Eric, and walked out.

We were utterly speechless from shock. While we were talking among ourselves in Turkish, saying, “Bro, what the hell is happening?”, Eric’s girlfriend took the weed, rolled it, and lit it up. And Yalçın managed to capture that exact moment she lit the joint 🙂.

[Photo: Weed and Rakı Party – All the crime evidence packed into one picture 🙂]

Even though weed was illegal in America during those years, it was so widespread that everyone was smoking it. I could practically say I didn’t meet a single person in America who didn’t smoke weed 🙂.

With the excitement brought by all this freedom, I overdid it that night. I ended up doing and saying things I normally never would. In fact, even though I don’t remember what I said right now, I apparently broke my friends’ hearts. Even though I apologized to them the moment I sobered up, I want to take this opportunity to apologize to them here once again 🙄 😳.

After the drinking phase ended, the best thing we did that night was to whip up the tripe soup (işkembe çorbası) that we brought with us from Turkey 🙂. Forgetting we were in New York, we were savagely downing tripe soup, can you believe it? 😆 Eric turned out to be a massive fan of tripe soup.

[Photo: Eric drinking tripe soup – Eyes completely wasted]

That night ended with us dropping Eric off at his girlfriend’s house. I have no idea where we got the confidence to say, “Bro, you drank too much, we’ll take you home,” in a city where we didn’t even know the customs or the layout 🙂. But it was a good thing we did, because on the way, Eric started picking fights with some Black guys, and we had to pull him away 🙂. Also, because of this, Eric grew to love us a lot. We still chat on the internet every now and then. That day was the last time we saw Eric.

Day 3: Central Park and Running for Our Lives at JFK Naturally, Day 3 started with a bit of a headache. That day, I was going to meet up and travel around New York with a Russian girl I found on Vkontakte. Her name was Irina, very fitting for a Russian 🙂. We met at the entrance of Central Park, walked around inside, and had a great time.

[Photo: Alican (Me), Irina, Burak – 2 Turks and 1 Russian in Central Park]

Irina was also going to work in the exact same city as us—Panama City Beach. And she had been there the year before. Since she was an experienced Work & Traveler, we gathered a ton of information from her about the place where we would be working and living for the next 3.5 months.

After going a few more places with her, we said our goodbyes, promising to meet up in Panama City Beach (she became a great network for us in PCB later on).

After she left, we, the Turkish squad, turned New York completely upside down that day—Little Italy, Chinatown, the Brooklyn Bridge. We walked until our feet practically gave out that day. After all, it’s the cheapest way to travel 🙂.

[Photo: Alican, Burak – Little Italy | Alican – On top of the Brooklyn Bridge]

That night was our last night in New York, but since Eric had other plans out of town, he didn’t come home that night.

When we woke up in the morning, we thought Eric might return from out of town, but he couldn’t make it. We wrote him a beautiful letter, left him the Turkish soups we brought with us, and headed toward JFK Airport to catch our flight.

[Photo: On the way to JFK – NY Subway]

Just to be safe, we arrived at JFK Airport 2 hours early. But the job doesn’t end with arriving early 🙂. You have to check in, get to the flight gate on time, etc. Saying, “Well, we arrived early anyway, let me look at this for a second, let’s sit here for a bit,” we let a massive amount of time slip away 🙄.

[Photo: Yalçın, Burak, Alican (Me) – Waiting for our flight at JFK]

When we went to check in during the last 20 minutes, the guy at the counter said, “Check-in is closed, you can’t drop off your luggage.” We were just about to get defensive and say, “What do you mean, bro?” when we snapped back to reality with his warning: “If you don’t run to the flight gate right now, you will miss the plane.” Look at our casualness, as if we’re boarding an intercity bus 🙂.

JFK’s terminals are seriously massive. I cannot explain how we sprinted with those huge suitcases in our hands. When we reached the gate we were assigned, learning that the plane’s gate had changed and been moved to the complete opposite end of the terminal made missing our flight almost a certainty 🙂. Still, with a shred of hope, we sprinted to the other gate and caught the staff just as they were closing the door. They even told us, “You can’t board anymore, you’re too late.” In that panic and with my English at the time, I started arguing with the gate agent right there, saying, “You change the gate and don’t even make an announcement, it’s your fault, I am getting on that plane!” When the agent turned out to be a tough nut to crack, our efforts to pass through the gate successfully concluded with a shift to pure emotional manipulation: “Bro, we are students, we have no money, we’ll be stranded here otherwise, please bro, just let us get on the plane, bro.” 😆

Thank goodness they let us on, but I still can’t forget the panic I experienced and how I was completely out of breath from running 🙂. The next time I ran like they were going to kill me was probably in the military 🙂.

We were finally inside the plane—the vehicle that would carry us to our next adventures. Our next stop was Fort Lauderdale, where we would catch our connecting flight. Of course, after getting on the plane, we didn’t forget to take a victory photo since we made it at the absolute last second.

[Photo: We made it on the plane, mudafaka – The flight to Fort Lauderdale]

And with that, our New York adventure came to an end. In my second post, I will be telling the adventures we lived through while traveling to the place we’d work. Don’t miss it!