keçiören, or: how i spent my student loan on traffic and simit

okay, so you wanna know about keçiören? strap in, because this isn't some glossy travel brochure. it's the place where my student loan vanished into thin air, mostly on shitty internet and simit from the guy outside the metro. i'm a broke student, so my perspective is through the lens of 'where the hell is my next scholarship payment?' and 'why does rent here feel like a steal but still hurts?'

first, the vibe. it's not 'vibrant,' it's just... loud. constantly. a chaotic, diesel-scented hum of dolmuşes, kids screaming from the schools, and that one guy selling köy göğüsü from a cart who started at 6am and is still going at 10pm. the air has this particular dryness, like someone left a bag of cement open in a sunbeam. it's a short dolmuş ride from çankaya, where all the fancy balconies with geraniums are, and you can feel the class shift in your bones when you cross that imaginary border. çankaya is where politicians sip çay; keçiören is where we chug it and rush to the next lecture.

let's talk numbers, because my bank account screams them. a studio apartment in the core areas (think around çamlık or the little streets off atatürk bulvarı) will set you back around 200-250 euros a month. sounds cheap? sure, until you realize your monthly budget is 300 euros total. the job market? it's a ghost town for students unless you want to be a waiter at one of the 47 döner spots on the same block, all competing for the same tourist who got lost coming from the castle. official unemployment for ankara hovers around 12%, but here it feels like 50% among my friends. it's the city of overqualified baristas.

> "my cousin's friend's brother says the mayor's new traffic plan is just to collect more fines. he's probably right."

one thing you can't ignore is the teleferik. that cable car. it's our weird, rickety monument. locals either swear by it for avoiding the traffic clusterfuck on the main road, or avoid it because it looks like it's held together by hope and rust. the view over the keçiören forest (which is more 'scrappy hillside with random sheep' than forest) is actually kind of breathtaking in a sad, smog-filtered way. pictures don't do it justice, especially at sunset when everything is orange and gray.

> "drunk advice from a guy at a çay bahçesi: 'if you want real life, go to the market on tuesdays. if you want to die inside, go to the post office on pension day.'"

and the reviews? oh, the reviews. on tripadvisor, the top-rated 'attraction' is the atatürk forest farm and zoo. it's... a zoo. from 1995. the animals look as over it as the students. yelp is just people arguing about which的了kebap place has the most mystery meat. the real talk happens on r/ankara. search 'keçiören' and you get gems like 'is the 401 bus still a war crime?' and 'where can i find an apartment that doesn't have a view of a construction site?' spoiler: nowhere.

Crowded street in Keçiören with minibuses

history, right. they say this place was just orchards and vineyards a century ago. then the 50s hit, the government built a bajillion 'gecekondu' (that's 'built overnight') apartment blocks to house the rural influx. boom. a city of concrete boxes and By责任制 (that's 'personal responsibility' propaganda from the old days) painted on walls. my history professor, a total nerd who wears marxist pins, calls it 'the triumph of pragmatic, ugly urbanization.' i call it home. most buildings are from the 70s-90s, all that brutalist, sun-bleached concrete that radiates heat in summer (which is brutal, a dry 40c heat that makes the pavement melt). the 'old' stuff? a couple of Ottoman-era fountains that people use as trash cans now. progress.

Keçiören district view from above, dense buildings

the future? it's gentrification, baby. the kids from çankaya are discovering our 'affordable' rents, driving up prices, and opening third-wave coffee shops that charge 6 lira for a pour-over. we, the old guard, are being priced out of our own chaos. there's talk of a new metro line that might actually solve the traffic, or might just be another excuse to rip up roads for a decade. somebody from the municipality definitely warned me: 'beware of the potholes after the first rain. they eat cars for breakfast.'

the weather's a beast. right now, it's that crispy, almost-warm spring air where you sweat in the sun and freeze in the shade. in a month, it'll be a furnace. in winter, a damp cold that crawls into your bones through those old concrete walls. and yeah, it's just a short flight-or a 4-hour bus ride if you're broke-from the aegean coast's stupidly blue water. the contrast is physical.

so if you come, come for the absurdity. come for the 3am kebab that saves your soul after a study session. come for the view from the teleferik that makes you feel both on top of the world and utterly trapped in its sprawl. just don't come expecting 'vibrant' or 'nestled.' expect dust, noise, incredible simit, and a thousand stories about how this place grew too fast, got stuck, and is now just trying to survive. i'm trying to survive here too. hence the ramen noodles.

check out the nightmare-fueling traffic reports on the ankara subreddit
that one yelp list of 'student-budget eats in keçiören' that is mostly accurate
the official municipality page for the teleferik hours (which change based on the mayor's mood)
someone's angry tripadvisor review about the zoo animals looking depressed (accurate)

keçiören, or: how i spent my student loan on traffic and simit

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About the author: Logan Frost

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