Monday, February 18, 2008
Here’s a load of cardboard and paper collected for recycling. We see trucks like this parked on side streets in Ankara. Men drive the trucks, but it’s mostly young teens or tweenage boys who do the collecting; we see them dragging dirty gray striped bags like these along the main streets downtown. The boys are generally no cleaner than the bags. This Desoto truck is parked in a village on the outskirts of the city. It’s at the end of the 317 bus line on which the Innocents went yoyoing last Sunday. The village seemed to be a awash with this business as we saw several other trucks with similar loads. The village did not seem to be the final destination for the loads of paper, but rather just seemed to be a sort of place where paper recyclers happen to live. Part of the village is in a little valley; part of it climbs a hill.
Desoto and Fargo are brand names still used in Turkey for light duty trucks. Originally, of course, they were Chrysler brands, DeSoto being a popular car line up until the sixties and Fargo being the name under which Dodge trucks were marketed in Canada. The names came to Turkey when Chrysler set up a joint production facility here in 1962. In 1978, when the local partners bought out Chrysler’s interest, they retained the rights to local use of the brand names. Another American company, Ford, remains strong in Turkey and in fact has just announced plans to export Turkish made delivery vans to the United States.
We passed a couple of smaller scale businesses on our Sunday excursion. Out in the village we saw the Onay Brothers Monument Works.
Back in town Eve was dismayed by the Destiny Butcher Shop.
Yoyoing, in case you’re wondering, refers to the act of taking a particular public transport to the end of its line, just to see what’s out there, and then taking the same line back again to where you started. Some of my earliest and best yoyoing experiences were with daughter Vanessa when she was seven or so and we lived in Bratislava. Ankara is also a good place for yoyoing, especially since there are no maps of the bus system, so you really don’t know where you’re going till you get there. Here’s a pretty fancy apartment building out near the end of the 317.
We’ll end this set of snowy and finger freezing photographs with one back in our neighborhood, just opposite the bus stop where our journey started.
