Finally, the day of the meeting had arrived where we made it into the final 637 out of 43,000 people, and we were heading towards Ankara. I was going from Kütahya to Ankara, and my friend Furkan was going from Istanbul to Ankara. Finally, the bus arrived in Ankara. I took a quick walk around. Then I grabbed my phone and called Furkan. He had already arrived. We met up and so on. We started looking for our destination. Or rather, we didn’t know how to get there. By the way, apparently they call the Ankara Bus Terminal “AŞTİ”. In Kütahya, the guy asked me 2-3 times “Are you getting off at AŞTİ?” and when I answered “huh?”, he said “Are you getting off in Ankara?” and I immediately said “uh-huh”. I kept saying to myself, “What the heck is Aşti?” When I arrived in Ankara, I understood that AŞTİ meant “Ankara Intercity Terminal Enterprise”.
Let me continue telling the story without getting into more details. I met up with Furkan. Apparently, there is free transportation to the city center in Ankara. We got on these buses and got off at Etlik. But when we asked 3 people on the bus where Etlik was, 2 of them turned out to be people who didn’t know Ankara. Then, well, we got off at Etlik and started looking for the Antares Mall—whatever Antares means. I just couldn’t keep its name in my head; I keep forgetting it. After a long walk, we arrived at the Antares Mall. But it was only 7:30 in the morning. Our meeting was going to start at 3:30 PM. We were hungry too, so we hit the road looking for a bakery. We filled our stomachs and hit the road again. We decided to go to the First Parliament first; taking buses from here to there, we found the first parliament.
There was a 5 lira entrance fee; we went in, did a short tour, and headed towards our new destination, Anıtkabir. Even though the minibus driver said he passes very close by, we walked for about 20 minutes from where we got off until we reached Anıtkabir. Actually, it said on the Youth Bus Facebook page that we would go to the mall after making our visit to Anıtkabir, but we were there around 10:00 AM. Since we had no intention of waiting under the sun for about 2 hours, we returned to the mall after our visit.
When we returned to the mall, we grabbed something to eat again. Then we got our teas. I had brought my laptop; I was stuck on a part of coding a website, I showed it to Furkan and we messed around with it a bit there. And finally, the time slowly started approaching 3:30 PM. We approached the hall door, there was a wedding inside, so we turned back :D. I’m serious, it was one of those expensive wedding halls. Then, while waiting in front of the door, we saw 2-3 more friends. I said, “Are you guys here for the Youth Bus too?” and the meeting phase started. We even shared the same table with these friends, chatted, took a selfie, and on top of that, set up a WhatsApp group.
After entering the hall, I looked at the tables; a friend was sitting alone at a table, so we went and quietly sat next to him. Then the table slowly started to fill up, and if I remember correctly, there were 9 of us. Then one thing led to another, and we totally bonded. 😀 But for a long time, no one asked anyone their name. Then, once we learned the names, the selfie and WhatsApp group immediately followed. The selfie thing was nice though. I hope we will be with these friends on the bus too, and hopefully, we will continue with photos like this.
By the way, while we were chatting like this, Maksut Hoca was continuing his presentation :D. Honestly, I thought there would be an elimination here, but there was no elimination or anything :D. As far as I understood, we were supposed to prepare references regarding what we explained in the video by the beginning or middle of June. That was it. Also, signatures were collected at the meeting like collecting signatures at school. Wherever we go, it’s signatures now.
Meanwhile, during the meeting break, Youth Bus Youth Cards were being distributed. 3 people at the table had applied. Honestly, it had only been about a week since I applied, I figured mine wouldn’t be there, but the first card that arrived was mine :D.
Everything finished, we were approaching the end, so as a table, we went to the door and took our selfies. It was really nice. We took a selfie with people I had met just 3 hours ago :D. And then, as bus times started approaching, we slowly started to disperse. Of course, since our bus was at 11:00 PM, Furkan and I said let’s do another short Ankara tour; we said it, but we couldn’t, we went and ate again. If you ask why we couldn’t, we were standing in Etlik, waiting for an Etlik minibus to go to Etlik. That’s the state of mind we were in. 😀 Then, to get our heads straight, we went into a pita (pide) restaurant. After satisfying our hunger there nicely, we headed towards the terminal, got on the buses, and headed home. This time, I returned to Istanbul with Furkan too. I missed my home, what can you do :D. Also, lots of love from here to Furkan, the other Furkan, Ece, Eda, Muhammet, Mehmet, Erdi, and Salih, who shared the same table with us. 🙂 Finally, there were 3-4 friends who recognized me from the behind-the-scenes video I put on YouTube and said hi to me; greetings to them from here as well 😀
