Ankara, Turkey

We made it!  Left Houston on Friday evening, December 20, 2013, and arrived in Ankara, Turkey Saturday evening, Dec. 21st.  It was a direct flight from Houston to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines.  I highly recommend Turkish Airlines because the prices and service were good, and if you have a long layover (6 hrs+) in Istanbul there are city tours from the airport that sound like a great way to pass the time.  

Ankara is the capital of Turkey, and the second largest city in the country, about an hour's flight southeast of Istanbul. It is a huge city, population ~4.5 million, sits at an elevation of 938 m (3,000 ft), so the weather is similar to Salt Lake City.  Ankara has been compared to being Washington DC while Istanbul (the largest city) is the New York City of Turkey.  
Ankara is a sea of apartment buildings as far as you can see.  So, naturally, we live in an apartment.  We choose to live in an older part of town, in the midst of the Embassy district (more about that later).  Our furnished apartment on the 8th floor is small, but just right for the two of us.  Each day we give thanks to have an elevator; another Bechtel employee lives nearby in a 5th floor walk-up.  The elevator is roughly a meter square, so Roy and I with grocery bags are a tight fit (romantic?), and definitely has a personality, sometimes stopping for no reason between floors.  Water, hot water, heat (old fashioned radiators) and cable TV are included in the rent.  We pay for electricity, Internet, and natural gas for our two-burner kitchen stove (it also has 2 electric burners and the oven is electric - this is a typical arrangement here).  We gave up on the cable as it is set to German channels and our very nice, non-English speaking janitor/superintendent has no idea how to fix it.  We owe our Houston Apple tech-support friend Greg BIG TIME for recommending Apple TV.  

It was COLD when we arrived; in fact, it had snowed the week before.  Can you see the frozen ponds at Kugulu (swan) Park near our apartment? 
For right now, we have decided not to buy a car while we are here; cars are expensive to buy and gas is about $9/gallon (not to mention there's no place to park in the entire city).  Taxis, of which there are a zillion zooming around, are relatively cheap.   Roy catches a ride to and from work with his deputy, Doruk.  

this view from our extra bedroom/office is probably the reason we rented the place.  Spectacular at night 

Kugulu Park - "Swan Park' which has white and Australian black
swans and ducks kids can feed.  All of the swans died last summer
after being tear-gassed during a demonstration and had to
be replaced. Yikes!! 

 We hit the ground running Sunday morning as we sprinted to get to Church; why not sleep in, you ask?  We already had a calling!  Team teaching Junior Primary, 4-7 year olds, all 6 of them.  It's been 30+ years since I have been in Primary (not counting Cub Scouts), so it sounded like a nice change and we are excited to be able to do this together.  

"chapel" for the Ankara Branch

Not your everyday Chapel front door

The Ankara Branch is small, maybe 50 people attend counting kids.  The congregation consists mainly of US Embassy employees and their families.  There are also some other oil/gas people like us, three Turkish converts, and a handful of Iranian refugees and other Middle East and North Africans.  A friendly welcoming group.  I immediately felt a strong Spirit there.  Prayers are split between Turkish and English.  Headsets are available with missionaries translating talks given in English.  I was amazed to find a small booklet of hymns in Turkish.  There is a Senior Missionary couple here from Colorado, as well as three sets of young Elders out of the Bulgarian Mission.  They do wear  their suits but not name tags and go out daily to talk to people, eventually asking if they might be interested in learning more about a Christian religion.  The Church has a slim toe hold in a Muslim country and the work is proceeding very slowly and carefully.  
The building, by the way, was built by a wealthy family but turned out to be too big, (4 stories, complete with a very small lap pool in the basement).  It served as the Portuguese Embassy for a time and now the Church has rented it.  The narrow, steep, tightly-wound spiral stairway up the middle is interesting and I fear a small child will fall and land in a broken heap at the bottom (we've nearly done so).  Our primary class is upstairs and part of the old house is used for missionary apartments.

beautiful surprise at the top

We had a very quiet Christmas day but were thankful to be together.  Thank you to Elder and Sister Weaver, our missionary couple, for a delicious roast beef dinner and relaxing afternoon. 
New Years Eve was also quiet as we stayed home, had pizza delivered and watched a movie on Netflix. More thanks to Greg for helping us get that set up on my computer before we left Houston.  Three cheers for Little Caesars Pizza for an on-time delivery, but corn on a pizza?  Really?  We are also not sure what the round pieces of meat are - hotdogs? It turned out to be pretty darn tasty though.  Roy did the best he could ordering online from a Turkish menu.  

 For the first time in several years we stayed up until midnight.  There was some kind of a party with loud music down in Kugulu Park, which we overlook from our office/bedroom northeast window.  We feared the noise would go far into the night but maybe 20 minutes after midnight, the music abruptly stopped, which was a relief. There were a few fireworks but unfortunately, a weird fog had moved in and we could barely see them.  We did see some floating lanterns, like in the movie Tangled, which we understand is a local tradition.