Turkey Day 4 - The Palace

Today we got up earlyish as we had to check out and get to the Palace by 9.30. Once again, breakfast was bread, hard boiled egg, cheese, and coffee.

The palace was amazing. We think between the three of us we took enough pictures to recreate a 3-D picture of the whole palace. It reminds me of the Tower of London, as it contains the armory, the crown jewels, and any number of towers, apartments, and other things amongst its interior gardens.

We discovered the Harem tour did not go until 10.30, so we spent the time wandering around. The library was very cool, though it no longer has books. There is a fine collection of thrones, clothing, various medals and awards, and bowls, jeweled containers, diamond encrusted candle sticks, and other trophies of 1500 years of empire. The armory has one of the most complete collections from the 7th to the 20th century. There was the building that the Sultan's used to greet visitors and the rooms where he used to watch his ministers debate form an adjoining room.

The Harem, or private chambers were very interesting, lots of tile work, very ornate high ceilinged rooms. Lots and lots of pictures we took. There are 400 rooms in the Harem, and we saw maybe 30 or 40 of them.

We had lunch over looking the Bosporus from the top of the palace outer inner walls. I had stuffed chicken with lots of spices (4 self administered varieties all good.) The view was stupendous, the bill was almost just as stupendous, but worth it.

There were a lot of harem jokes, and jokes about the circumcision room we saw after lunch. After the palace we did a quick tour of the obolisques and then waited about half an hour for our shuttle to the biggest bus terminal any of us had ever seen. We also discovered that we were staying right next to the recommended hotel.

The bus trip was notable for the amount of construction and the brightly coloured houses along the way, including an amazing number of tall apartment buildings and a Pepto Bismol pink house. All of the buildings were tall and narrow, even if they were not in a crowded area, and many still had concrete and rebar sticking out of the roof, ready for the next story to be added. There was a huge amount of construction going on in the Istanbul suburbs, including a large area of what appeared to be large houses in an American style suburban setting.

One thing that struck me was the lack of trees. There were a few, but they were small and mostly around houses. The countryside seemed to be devoid of them. As it got dark, I switched to reading one of the big, heavy, books I brought, the Da Vinci Code. It was a very exciting read, I powered through 450 pages in about 3.5 hours. We arrived in Cannukke about 8.30 and took the ferry over to Asia and checked into the Anzac Hotel where we will spend the next two days. Tomorrow we take a tour the battle fields of Galippoli and in the afternoon Troy.

We had fish for dinner at the seaside.