Advantages of Ankara (2) - We Deliver!

Another serendipitous aspect of life here is that just about everyone delivers. Businesses are in a highly competitive environment struggling to differentiate themselves, and home delivery is one byproduct.

Clean drinking water is one essential item here, since it's not safe to drink from the tap. But large jugs of water weigh around 75 pounds and who wants to lug them up the steep (icy) hills and flights of stairs?  Thankfully, there is water delivery in every neighborhood.  We dial a number, tell them our customer ID number and how many jugs we want. Usually within 15 minutes we have a knock on our door, and the deliveryman takes our old jugs as well. (Here you can see the pump attached to the top.)

But it's just not water that delivers, many of the local grocers do as well. We've not gotten confident enough in Turkish to try this and are uncertain about what the delivery minimum and charges are at each store, but it's an added convenience of Turkish cities. As we get more confident in language, some trips to the grocery will be eliminated, particularly for heavy items. Local bread stores and men walking around selling things like simit also deliver by way of people on upper floors lowering a basket down from their balconies.

Most restaurants deliver as well, including the Western ones here: McDonalds, Popeye's Chicken, Burger King, KFC, Domino's and Little Caesar's (Starbucks is here but, to my knowledge, does not deliver). Some clever Turkish entrepreneur created a website to allow people to place orders, even in English, to the various restaurants in town. YemekSepeti.com ("food basket") allows us to see menus of dozens of restaurants in our area, pick what we want, and select what time we want it delivered. Customers rate the restaurants on quality and speed, leaving helpful comments.  This is fantastic as it allows local restaurants to cheaply advertise their menus and allows people like us who are unaware of what certain dishes are to look them up online (there is a helpful glossary on the site as well). After we registered we received a call in English from a customer service agent to answer any questions we had.

We ordered some pide (kind of like a thin-crust pizza) and lahmacun via YemekSepeti last week and it was fantastic. Elias ate much of his pide; he loves sausage pizza and this was similar. Joni had what was basically a cheese and spinach calzone and highly approved.

(We've only eaten at McDonalds once and none of the other American places for those keeping score at home.) A couple of the larger department stores here also deliver, including offering a free shuttle service home for customers.

So, we like Turkish service so far. It hasn't completely eliminated the need to travel long distances and walk steep hills, but we greatly appreciate that these conveniences exist.