“Jamaican in New York” or a trip to Antalya

Last week I went to Antalya to see my friend. I haven’t been to Antalya for about three months. Every time I come there, I feel like a “Jamaican in New York”. Compared to Mahmutlar and Alanya, the traffic there is too busy, the streets are too crowded, the distances are too long… Really, I feel like a villager there. Once I was nearly knocked by a tram just because the traffic was so confusing. The other time I tried to stop a bus “müsait bir yerde” (“somewhere available”), as you can do it in here, and immediately felt the disdainful looks of the other passengers over me. Apparently, in Antalya center, you cannot stop a bus wherever you want. Thank god, I was going to get off, anyway…

We used to live in Antalya for 1.5 year several years ago, but I never liked it. We stayed in Lara District, it was beautiful and modern, but if you needed to buy, say, a sewing needle or a bulb, you had go to the city center or walk for an hour to the nearest electrician’s shop. In the last years, the situation has not changed very much. With my friend, we have visited new posh Terracity shopping center, the biggest mall in Antalya with 150 shops and 30 restaurants. Now that the residents of Lara have this shopping center, they can buy the world’s famous brands’ clothes, diamonds, iPhone or even a car just next door, but still, there are no the simplest stores.

I wondered how Lara’s cliffy coastline was doing. I like that place very much. It was wonderful as usual. Apart from natural awesome view, the Municipality has significantly developed it, building multiple parks, playgrounds, sports facilities and bicycle tracks. Hopefully, soon, Mahmutlar’s coastline will be developed and looked after just as well.

After the coastline inspection, we decided to take a bus to the city center. My friend has told me about the several innovations in Antalya’s bus traffic, which, I hope, soon will be adopted by Alanya, always trying to follow and take for a model its big sister Antalya.

First, the buses are available for 24 hours. It is a great decision for the tourism city. Second, a new card system was implemented in Antalya. It is pretty convenient, since, having a bus card, you don’t have to deal with a change anymore. Also, paying by a card is cheaper. Say, if you have to pay 2.50 TL for a ride, it withdraws just 1.70 TL from your card. The only inconvenient thing, which, I hope, will be solved soon, is that you can recharge your account just at particular offices. However, there is a great option — you can use your mobile phone instead of a bus card. It requires registering on some website and then they send you MMS with so-called square code, which you display every time you take a ride and a scanner in the bus reads it. The last thing, which I liked very much and hope that it will also be implemented on Alanya’s bus system, is that once you paid for your trip by a card, during 45 minutes you can change the buses and travel all over the city not paying anymore. I don’t know if Alanya authorities will ever accept it, but it would be great and somehow justifying the high fees of the public transport.

Still, no matter how modern and developed Antalya is, I was glad to come back home to a small cozy Mahmutlar with incomplete coastal road, two streets and the buses, passing just every 20 minutes.