Saturday 5 April 2008

Everyday I Go For A Walk


Turkey is a great place in many many ways.  One thing I love about living here is the way our city actually encourages people to get out there and get in shape.  

Since I have such a wonderful and amazing husband who is willing to give me a chance to get out of the house while he watches the kids, every morning I go to the park for a walk.  Today I decided to take my camera.  Unfortunately, today it was raining so I can't show you all the people out there walking and exercising.  Apparently today I'm the only silly person who was willing to risk getting too cold.
The park is a couple of blocks away and it has a nice long walking track.  One lap is 3/4 mile.  On most mornings if you go out really early, like 7 am, this track is full of men walking and working out a little before heading off to work.  If you wait another hour you'll see more women out here.  I love that everyone gets out here and walks together.  Oh, and in case you can't tell by the picture, the track is made of that squishy rubbery stuff.  
Now here's the part I really really like.  Somewhere around two years ago our city started installing exercise equipment in the parks!  
There are stationary bikes and stair master type machines.  There are ski type machines and machines that you twist and pull and push.  I wish there had been people to photograph this morning, that would have made it much more interesting, but you get the idea.

Okay, so this next series of photos is obviously not from today.  But just to make this post a little more interesting I found these pictures from a couple weeks ago.  

This isn't the same park, its another one that's only about a block away.  This is the "I'm kind of trying to lose weight but I'm really out here to talk and gossip" exercise park.  I normally don't go to this one because everyone moves at such a slow pace and it's more about chatting it up than about getting some exercise, but on the day these pictures were taken, Elise and I were out "exercising" with some neighbors from our building. 


I love that I don't have to buy a gym membership to use these kinds of machines.  And I love being one of the many many people out here every morning walking.  It's fun.  I'm gonna miss this stuff while I'm gone.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you forgot to mention that the two types of people who are out excersizing are 1) those who have paid a ton of Turkish Lira for the full-on adidas wind breaker, shirt, pants and shoes and 2) those ladies who came out in slippers, a few pairs of pants (in order not to get cold), a trenchcoat that goes all the way down to their slippers and their head covering.

Anonymous said...

This is great! we have these exercise parks in Beijing as well. They are really popular.

And now I'm doing a proposal for the city of Vancouver,Canada as a school project.

Nice to see these in Turkey, anyone know what other places have these?