Digital Home of Kristoffer Strom

Wednesday 08th of September 2010

Round 11 - Ankara, Turkey (2004-03-01 -> 2004-03-11)

Turkey! Warm, nice beaches with plenty of kebab to go around! Atleast that's what I thought!! Unfortunately for us we were going to Ankara, not Istanbul and that's so not the same!!
The problems started early with our flight from Austria to Ankara got cancelled! So instead we had to take Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul and change to a domestic flight to Ankara. I don't care about landing all the way but I did see the problem of our luggage not getting through. On every stop along the way we asked twice "is the luggage _really_ with is" and "yes, ofcourse it is".... NOT!! After not getting our luggage and filling in missing luggage report we got in the embassies car they had there for us and got a long ride into town. I didn't really know where Ankara was but it turns out it's right there among the mountais, everything is either uphill or downhill, very few flat spots. And I didn't learn my lesson from Argentinia so I got there totally unprepared for how very cold it was! We got the hotel that was a brand new hotel. Really good room and everything, but they were doing some work on the kitchen so they didn't serve much food there, just the breakfast.

We got to the embassy and was right away greated by a german dude that was married to one of the women working there and he was also working at the embassy. He was a really funny guy and usually my biggest concern on day 1 is to lift and move everything in place, especially if the embassy has more floors than 1 and this one had 3 and ofc the serverroom was in the basement so I had to get everything down there. This guy wouldn't have it, he ordered people around, got some movers in there in within 2 hours everything was in place. That felt good getting that backing. The work proceeded on schedule all the way and there was no hickups except the old UPS (big battery powering servers in case of power blackouts) that wasn't working and screwing things up. So I just eliminated the problem and hoped the power was gonna be on uninterrupted. It wasn't...

Our luggage still hadn't arrived in the second day and a third day in the same clothes felt a bit off so we went out shopping one new set of clothes, kept the reciept and had the embassy call the airline and they got the luggage there pretty quickly and sure enough, we were gonna be reimbersed. As it would turn our - one month later I got a letter, in turkish, from the airline saying "contact us and let us know how you want to be reimbursed". So I walked into their office in stockholm but they couldn't help me since this letter was from their Ankara office and they didn't have a budget to reimburse me so I had to take it up with them in Ankara. That's a nicely thought out system to make sure not having to reimburse people unless they really, really, really mean it. Which I didn't.

There were some places to go eat around there but one thing I noticed was that they didn't serve up alot of food. Not even close to getting me full. Same thing with dinner. I kept eating snacks and stuff all the time! We tried some restaurants a little everywhere but didn't find any really, really awesome place unfortunately. Either we were looking in the wrong place or this city just doesn't have alot to offer tourists??

On the weekend we went out walking around town, checking out this HUGE mosque and trying out the local communiting system but we didn't have any real goal except to get up as high as we could to get a good overview of the city and man was it big!! After that we did it the cheap way by going up in the big needle they have in the center of town. We were also invited to the ambassador's mansion and sat there discussing politics and if turkey was ready for the European Union with the ambassador and her 12 year old daughter. Seriously, she was really into it! Guess that's the price you pay for being daughter of an international business man and ambassador changing country every 4th year, can't be easy... During one of the weekdays we ended up in a marketplace where all the products that don't meet the "quality assurance" approval of all major brands end up, you know Levi jeans with a slight miscolored spot for $10 and stuff. Pretty good place for bargains, if I was actually looking for something...

Then back to work, finishing it off and going home was totally uneventful. Overall I was pretty disappointed in this since we came in totally wrong season, it was way cold and the air was so terrible I felt my asthma going off again! The food wasn't great, not much for a tourist to do there at all.

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