Fun in the Winter: Excursions

Another thing we're doing to try to keep ourselves entertained in the wintertime is take excursions to various places about town.  We've explored some new places and found some neat things, and it's always good to get a change of scenery.  Using public transportation and taxis, it's really not hard to get anywhere we want to go, although we definitely need to allow plenty of time if we're riding a bus!

Last week we went back to the 365 mall, which is the "small" one in our neighborhood.  We had errands to run there anyway, but we thought we'd make it fun by enjoying the train ride we had seen there!  They were very kind to let Justin ride for free with Elias!

We also visited a bazaar-type building called Nişantaşı with lots of individual booths selling LOTS of various things!  It was fun to wander and see what all was there, and we even found a couple things we wanted: a toy piano for Elias, electric hair clippers, and some homemade hazelnut fudge that is to DIE for!  Yum!

Even just walking to the store around the corner helps when we all have cabin fever!

Snow Videos

I have some videos of Elias playing in the snow, but it turns out there are some technical difficulties between YouTube and Turkey, so I couldn't get them uploaded earlier.  I'm using a different site to host videos now, though, so hopefully this should work!  Enjoy seeing our sweet boy play in the snow:

Fun in the Winter: Playing in the Snow

If you follow Justin or me on Twitter, you've seen us posting the past few days about our winter weather.  Apparently, Turkey is having an unseasonably harsh winter (as opposed to the unusually mild winter in the US this year), so we've seen a LOT of snow and really cold temperatures.  This has been a real challenge for us when combined with the adjustment to apartment living; in fact, I think I can say this has been the hardest part of moving here so far.  We know that Ankara has a LOT of beautiful playgrounds and plenty of open spaces, parks, and trails for outdoor activity.  However, with the harsh winter weather, we are unable to take advantage of any of that, and for the most part we're stuck in our apartment where noise is a factor to how rowdy our play can get!  However, we're finding ways to keep ourselves (and our extremely energetic 3-year-old!) entertained, so this is the first in a small series on how we're having fun in the city this winter.

The obvious answer to that is, of course, going out and playing in the snow!  We had a HUGE snowfall yesterday - my estimate is about 15 inches.  Definitely over a foot!  So today we bundled up and went out to play in it for a little while!

This is a small flat area next to our building.  I think it's a parking lot, but with all the snow, no cars could possibly get in or out of it.  So we play in it instead!

 

 

We were disappointed to discover that the snow was too powdery to pack, so we couldn't make a snowman.  We still had fun throwing it, and Elias loved flopping down in it!

(See the next post for some videos of Elias playing in the snow.)

Then when we came in, we pulled out the white Play-Doh and made snowmen.  There's more than one way to skin a cat!  :)

Please do not ask what is up with the face he is making.  I have no idea.  Also, please don't ask what is wrong with his hair.  For some reason, he wakes up looking like this. Every. Morning.  Could it be the down pillow?!

Then Elias gleefully enjoyed smooshing him flat.  Over and over and over.

Check back tomorrow for our next installment of Fun in the Winter!

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.

Advantages of Ankara (1)

(Justin) I'm inspired by this recent post at Adventures in Ankara that examines why so many expats move to Turkey to list some reasons why we find Ankara appealing as expats. Rather than one large post, we'll break them up into smaller ones.

1. Smoking in Turkey is illegal in all public buildings and public transportation. The tossing of cigarette butts onto the ground is illegal littering.

I'm coming at this from both my experiences in Russia and Central Asia, where maybe 70% of men smoke and I've spent many an hour in smoke-filled tea houses and bus stations. And also from a Kentucky and Missouri perspective, where it's still common to find very smoky restaurants. Our parents live near some great restaurants that they can't go to because it's just too smoky.  We don't have that problem here, and it's wonderful! No suffocating taxi rides either.

One oddity to go along with this: imported movies and TV shows broadcast on TV here have the cigarettes covered over, usually by a picture of a flower or something; this is funny when you first see it.  Signs in the metro stations and elsewhere discourage people from smoking. Cigarettes are sold with large bold warnings in English that "smoking kills." 

You still see smoking areas outside of buildings, and usually plenty of young girls out there smoking like it's a fashionable thing (so many girls smoking is also an oddity from a Central Asian perspective). Plenty of people still smoke, but the current government has clearly made it a priority to reduce that number.

This might offend some libertarian sensitivities, but it's a breath of fresh air for us and an Ankara advantage.

A BIG Mall

Yesterday we visited one of the bigger malls that's a little further from our house, called Panora.  (They have a great website which is in Turkish, but you could still look around and see the floor plan and store listings.)  This mall really IS big!  Seven levels and hundreds of stores. Mind-boggling!  Now before I even talk about the mall, I have to tell about a cultural lesson I had.  Justin suggested we go to check out this mall on Saturday, and I said I didn't want to on a weekend because it would be so crowded.  I mean, in this weather, what else does everybody have to do besides go to the mall?!  But Justin persuaded me that it'll be fun even if it's crowded, so we loaded into a taxi and got there just after it opened at 10am.  We walked in and it was like a ghost town.  Completely empty.  I was baffled!  However, what I have learned is that Turkish culture runs on a much later schedule than I'm used to in the U.S.  They go to bed much later than we do, and they get up much later too.  So at 10am, most families are still sleeping!  Pretty much anyplace we go before noon, there is a very small crowd.  Numbers begin to pick up after lunch, and by evening everyplace is packed.  That's convenient for us to get our errands run before the crowds come out, since Elias still gets up at 7am - he doesn't seem worried about fitting in with Turkish culture!  So I learned my lesson about that, and I won't argue with Justin wanting to go anywhere in the morning, even on a Saturday!

So we walked in and the first thing we noticed, besides the vast size of the place, is the glass elevator!

Our mall has some great escalators, but no elevator.  So that's fun!  There were a LOT of recognizable stores in this mall - you can see on the top level in this picture the Nike store on the left side of the elevator and the Adidas store on the right.

This was taken from the top floor, which is called Level 2.  Below you can see Level 1 and Level 0 (Ground Floor).  Then the underground levels are called -1, -2, and -3!

One thing that was neat about the way this mall was set up is that some of the stores were organized by category.  They had a section marked "Sports Street" where all the athletic stores were in one place.  They also had a "Kids Street," so it was easy to find the kids clothes and toys!  There were two huge toy stores that were not in that section, though, but we found them too!

Most of the toys in all these stores were way overpriced, but we did find a Winnie-the-Pooh pinwheel for only $1 - Elias carried that all around the rest of the mall!

Our FAVORITE thing about this mall, though, is there was a HUGE saltwater fish tank that was beautiful and fun to look at!  We stood there for a long time just admiring the fish!

So this was a really fun activity for us to do - we'll go back again!

Then at the end of our visit, we discovered in the bottom level a store called Kipa (again, website in Turkish), which I had heard from a friend was really awesome.  And wow, it was!!!!  It was a huge supermarket that had a huge selection, but what we were most excited about was the low prices!  WAY cheaper than we've seen anywhere else.  A friend told us there's another one even closer to our house, so we'll probably go there often!

For more photos of Panora than I've put here, check out the photo albums on their website!

*Note: The legend I hear is that there are still bigger malls than this one, so I'll report when we explore them!

Doing Business in Turkey - payroll taxes

(Justin) One of the best overviews I've seen on doing business in Turkey is guide written by Price Waterhouse Coopers entitled "Doing Business in Turkey in a Nutshell." While published in 2008, it is still very relevant and gives you a sense of the ever-changing tax codes and regulatory environment. As Turkey moves closer in line with OECD and EU standards, business will become easier. But for 2011 the World Bank ranks Turkey as only #71 in ease of doing business (behind Belarus and Kyrgyzstan) and #61 in starting a business. It doesn't fit the image of what you'd expect with the #16 size economy in the world and one of the currently fastest-growing.

One difficulty business owners face is a high payroll tax for Social Security. In the U.S. the employer pays 6.2% of a person's salary up $110,100. In Turkey, the statutory rate for Social Security and unemployment totals to about 18.8% of gross salary. (Employers I've talked to quote a percentage well beyond 50% for this, it's one thing I'm trying to figure out.) Additionally, businesses are required to provide several weeks of severance pay to employees who have worked longer than a month. Employees who have been terminated have a right to get paid a certain number of hours a day while they seek new employment (you can read the labor law here). This makes it more costly for businesses to fire employees, makes it cost-prohibitive to hire replacements, and makes a business hesitant to hire a person in the first place.

To reduce the tax burden, businesses will under-report the salaries they are paying workers and then pay the workers the difference off-the-books. This creates a dilemma for business owners who want to do everything above-board and on-the-books.  I'm told that even the smallest businesses here have to hire someone to keep track of their taxes. 

One business we've been talking to here has been suffering that burden. To be above-board meant to be unprofitable and unable to hire the necessary workers to run the business. The government allows deferral of payroll taxes but with something like a 5% penalty per month.

The labor and tax laws are something we're learning more about as we talk to businesses here and seek possible employment or to start a business of our own. Every country has its challenges and hurdles to business; the cost of legal labor might be Turkey's biggest.