Experience Ankara like you know someone here.

One for a proper night out in the embassy quarter, one for cheap plates and cafés with the Bahçelievler students — learn both and you've learned how the city eats.

Kızılay's pedestrian strip — fried anchovies and a cold Efes on a plastic stool, kokoreç at midnight, and the loudest, youngest crowd in the capital.

The capital's polite side — a shopping avenue, swans in a park, and a side street that turns into Ankara's bar strip after dark.

The republic's founder under a limestone colonnade on a hill over the city — the one place in Ankara that every Turk visits, and the reason to walk slowly.

A restored Ottoman quarter below the citadel — konaks turned into tea gardens, a bath from 1440, and the house where the national anthem was written.

A reed-fringed lake inside a university's own forest, free on foot, with a loop track that Ankara runs, cycles and walks its dogs around every weekend.

Ankara's other lake — a long lakeside park, kites, breakfast places and birds — and an honest word about the drought.

Hot mineral water and a black-pine national park an hour north — Ankara's answer to a cold weekend.

A real winter — dry cold, blue skies, snow on the citadel — and a hill twenty-five kilometres out where the city goes to slide.