AnkaraMap
August The city is located in the middle of a desert. ![]() The buildings and greenery allow you to forget about the desolate landscape and monotonous sand dunes. ![]() Downtown, the lampposts grow in arcs, creating the impression of driving through a whale skeleton. ![]() The capital’s typical bench, made of pipe of different diameters, looks ugly. ![]() Directional signs resemble the old French model (like in Algeria or Togo), only without the signature pointed tip. ![]() A street sign. ![]() The post boxes are gigantic and have four mail slots—one on every side. They’re decorated with ethnic ornaments and look like they’re made of cast iron. Tap tap. Ew, plastic. ![]() Taxis don’t drive around looking for clients; instead, they wait in special parking areas which exist in every neighborhood. ![]() And there are taxi call boxes every hundred meters on the lampposts for those who are too lazy to walk three hundred meters. You press the button, and in a minute a car shows up. It’s unbelievably convenient and practical; I’ve never seen a taxi call system of this scale anywhere else (usually, they just set up one pillar with a call box in the central square and call it a day—like in Milan or Rostov). ![]() The city’s most astounding feature is the empty five-liter water bottles used to collect plastic caps from smaller bottles. They’re hung up with the same frequency as the taxi call boxes, sometimes on the same posts. ![]() The reason is that bottle caps are a currency for the poor. One kilo of caps costs 8 liras. Kind-hearted people put their caps in the empty bottles instead of throwing them out, so that the disabled can collect them afterwards. The manufacturers, in turn, economize on plastic: on the left is a normal cap, on the right is a Turkish one. ![]() Part of the sidewalks in the city are separated from the roadway with bollards that resemble chess pieces. Like the post boxes, the bollards are made of plastic. ![]() The rest of the sidewalks are set apart with little concrete mushrooms and spheres, which, one must assume, are better suited for the job than plastic. ![]() Trash cans are placed inside decorative wood cases, like in Ramallah. ![]() Half of the city’s attributes have gathered in one place: there’s a taxi call box, a cap collection bottle, a trash can hiding behind the post, and chess piece bollards in the background. ![]() A paper recycling container. ![]() A glass recycling container. ![]() An example of poor urban planning: the underground garbage containers (which have a bunker-sized below-ground component) have been placed behind a barrier, making it a huge pain to get to them. ![]() A typical billboard mounting structure. ![]() A house being demolished. ![]() The school buses are minibuses with a mandatory decoration of yellow and black diagonal stripes on the back. ![]() The traffic divider is decorated in a similar fashion. ![]() Bus stops have oval signs listing the bus route numbers and names. ![]() The new Turkish lira symbol already appears on half the price labels. ![]() Remarkably, the main bulk of Ankara’s real estate developments resemble Tel Aviv: the same neighborhood setup, the same boom gates in front of every driveway. And the same lattice utility poles adorned with a spiky skirt to ward off climbers. ![]() A lamppost adorned with what are probably capacitors and transformers in the form of round barrels. ![]() In some places, the poles are covered with special anti-poster nubs. ![]() Old payphones. ![]() New payphones. ![]() A hydrant. ![]() A manhole cover on a hinge. ![]() The traffic lights are the same as in Istanbul. ![]() Road is slippery when it rains. ![]() In general, the city is quite nice, although a sea or even a river would make a world of difference. ![]() |
august
|
august
|
august 2012
Ankara
← Ctrl →
|
september
|
september
|
© 19952025 Artemy Lebedev |