In February 2020 – when the Coronavirus was far away – I got the chance to visit the beautiful country of Turkey. EESTEC LC Ankara held two events in parallel “Brand.com” and the workshop “Breaking Web”. In the latter, I participated. It was in the week between the last exam and the start of the new semester and I thought it would be nice to go South, to the sun, and the warm weather.
Arriving with only one pair of long pants in my luggage, I thought the taxi driver in Istanbul was kidding as he said it will snow tomorrow. The next day I was shocked as I saw the sea and the snow around it. The journey from Istanbul to Ankara by high-speed train took 4 hours and I saw beautiful landscapes given that the snowfall wasn’t too strong.
The workshop started with an opening ceremony and a campus marathon in the morning. It was the biggest campus I have ever seen! It had hundreds of buildings, dormitories, cafeterias, a Burger King and even a sports stadium. The view from the top of the stadium was amazing and you could see the skyline of Ankara. In Zurich, we have the Prime Tower but in Ankara, you can see like 20 of them all at once! In the afternoon, we had the first lecture on the topic of soft skills.
The main part of the workshop included an introduction to web design. It started with the main language “HTML” which is the basis of every website and continued with “CSS” which is used to give the website the look you want. These two parts were held by a PhD student from the computer science department. The next part was about “JavaScript”. It was a bit more complex, but this language is used on most modern websites and is the core of dynamic elements on websites.
Besides the workshop, we also had a sightseeing day in Ankara, where we visited the castle, from which you have a nice view. You could turn 360° around and you couldn’t see the end of the city. After that, we saw the Atatürk memorial. It was the most impressive place I’ve visited on my trip! It was architecturally amazing and it was protected by guards similar to the ones in London. Our guide told us the history of the founding of modern Turkey and we saw a lot of interesting objects and pictures.
On the last day of the workshop, we built our own webpage with the tools they taught us. It was very nice to see what you learned with a practical example. They supported us very well and everyone with and without previous knowledge could finish their website.
Every night there was a theme party. There was a neon party, a karaoke night, as well as a Turkish night with typical mezze dishes and we drank Rakia and danced at the end. The international night was amazing and the best one I took part in so far! The table of Ankara was filled with so much very tasty food and also all other countries brought nice food and drinks.
Finally, I would recommend everyone to visit Ankara. It is a nice city with very nice people. You can eat a lot of tasty food and you can even buy alcohol in the local equivalent of Migros. It was the first time I visited an Islamic country but it is much more European than I expected. It is a completely different culture than in Switzerland but it was very nice and interesting to see it!
