Dikmen Vadisi

Today we visited yet ANOTHER amazing park in Ankara with some friends who live near it. This may, in fact, be the coolest and most beautiful park we've found yet. Dikmen Vadisi literally means Valley of the Dikmen district. I've told before about how hilly Ankara is, so in this particular place the city just put a beautiful park into one of the steep valleys between major roads.

Taking the long steps down to the center

The park is HUGE - we only walked a small portion of it - but green and lovely. Even though the weather is sweltering right now, it was cool and breezy in the shade of the many trees.

There is a large pool at the bottom of the park with a pretty gazebo we enjoyed.

Then midway through our visit they turned the fountains on! So this was our view for our picnic lunch.

We also enjoyed playing on the cool playground there.

Elias totally digging the triceratops slide

Swinging on the treehouse

Then maybe the coolest part of our visit to the park was that there's a waterfall you can walk under. Elias LOVED this!

I didn't get pictures of it, but there's also a neat section of the pond that has cattails and a bunch of frogs, which of course the kiddos loved. What a fun and beautiful family adventure!

Caillou Concert / Ankara Shopping Fest

(Justin) This month, Ankara is attempting to set a Guinness record for retail sales (um, how would this be measured and verified?...yeah, the Guinness talk is purely just for promotion). So, every day there are large sales, free concerts, and much hype and traffic. I think it's great. Turkish Caillou has become a regular show in our household in the last month, so we were excited when AnkaMall held a free Caillou & Friends concert in its parking lot last Saturday as part of the promotion.  Joni was home sick but I was determined to brave the crowds to take Elias. The news video below shows the massive throng of families there, we're in the crowd somewhere.(The headline reads "Caillou Rocks Ankara.")


When you heavily promote a free concert in a central location of a city of 5 million, you'll get plenty of people to show up.  Note all the dads struggling to keep their kids on their shoulders for long periods of time. (Elias is off the charts in terms of height/weight, so I was very sore the next day.) Elias LOVED it when Caillou finally came on stage and eagerly sang along to the English songs. The band also sang some Turkish folk/children's songs that apparently every Turk child knows as the kids got really into it.

There was also an amusement park set up in the parking lot complete with roller coaster and log flume water slide. Elias became so fascinated with watching the log ride which was behind the stage that we eventually abandoned the show to watch it. Elias entertained passers-by squealing at every splash of the water. He still talks excitedly about "the water slide at Caillou!" Elias was a trooper, it was about an hour journey both ways on packed public transport but he did a great job.

You can follow the Ankara Shopping fest on Twitter (@shoppingfest).