Getting around

“I’m going home now. I want to do some sports tonight”, I told my colleague the other day. “Oh, are you walking home?”, he asked. I told him not to be ridiculous: my house is a 10 minute drive away from the embassy, but walking, it takes about 45 minutes.

Inspired by this, I actually did walk home the other day. It was a very long walk along a very uninspiring boulevard. Towards the end of the boulevard is some governmental building, which means the road is lined with high fences, warning signs displaying soldiers with weapons (probably saying something like “don’t take pictures here, or this guy will shoot you”), and, behind the fences, real-life soldiers behind concrete walls, eyeing into the world suspiciously from underneath an iron helmet. Then, I took a right, where there is a military compound. Again, the signs with the ready-to-shoot soldiers are there. And some flat buildings which look like they have been imported from the Soviet Union.

Towards the end, it gets better: the walk is now leading along embassies, and views of the bare mountains surrounding Ankara are very pretty, especially towards sunset.

So yes, it is doable, this walk. If you have time and the sun is shining (which it has been consistently doing the past three weeks), it is actually nice. I’m not so sure about the walk from my house to work though. Because that one is up hill. And walking up hill actually means walking at a very steep angle up hill. The hills are so steep here, that cars often don’t make it to the top - so no wonder my legs had a hard time carrying ME to the top at first. But: if you train hard and persistently (and involuntarily, in this case), it will pay off: I can now walk from the supermarket back home without being out of breath at the end.

I have been making quite some long, hilly walks the past few weeks, which was mainly caused by the fact that I had to choose between either walking or taking a taxi. Now, taxis are not very expensive, and taxi drivers are ridiculously reliable here. They always take the shortest way possible, and make lengthy apologies whenever they take a wrong turn, and readily lower the metered price because of that. I have often had to bargain with taxi drivers in other countries, but never because I insisted on paying the price on the meter, and they on me paying less than that.

But even though they are perfectly reliable, I grew tired of taking taxis all the time. But today, I finally, for the first time, managed to take a bus home from the city centre. Yes, it took me a while to figure out the bus system, but it’s not my fault: there are probably hundreds of buses, and nowhere is any information on which one to take. There is no clear website for this, and the only information available about a bus is its destination - and maybe, if you’re lucky, the neighbourhoods it crosses. A neighbourhood here, however, can take hours and hours to cross on foot, so you don’t want to risk ending up at the wrong side of it. Nevertheless, I found a bus from the centre to my home today, and took it. I got out in front of my supermarket, feeling like I had beaten the Turkish bus system; despite trying so hard to discourage me from using it, I had managed to use it in my advantage. And so I walked home, smiling and humming, walking up that hill like I was Julie Andrews in an Alpine setting. Ankara’s roads - they won’t get any prettier, but at least I know how to find my way along them.