Whatever-lahno: Turkey Trip Part 1: Istanbul, here I am

Istanbul, aku datang!

Salam semua, so here I am as promised. Lets’ get started.

So here we are on the journey again. We meet at KLIA and 2 of my travel buddies are from my Europe trip last year and another one is from Forum Cari. We took our 9 days 7 nights package from Panaroma Tours during March MATTA Fair. I will review about the tour more on the last entry for this trip.
We took 3.30am Qatar Airways flight to Doha, connecting us to Istanbul. Overall, the flight was great, except for my left neighbour whom listen to the music loudly and sometimes humming to sound. Usually, I don't mind but it is 7 hours plane journey and I barely have sound sleep.

When we arrived at Doha, it was 6am. Previously, during my Europe trip, the airport was under renovation. Now it was ready and it looks amazing. It is one of beautiful airport I've ever seen.
After freshen up, we went to line up for our next flight to Turkey. There it will take us around 4 hours to Istanbul. We reached there around 12.30pm, so we, ladies took some time to freshen up, again. Before the journey, we have already imagined about our tour guide. My friend, Asma, who is our “liaison officer” with the tour agency, has already demanded a guy as our tour guide hehe, so we already make a pact that we will shy away and to promote Asma with the tour guide. So of course we imagine him to be the one with grey or green eyes of course hehe.

So, now it is time to meet our tour guide, so he has grey eyes of course but a little bit older than we imagine. Nevertheless, throughout the 8 days journeys, he becomes our favourite man of the hour. He is just great and we love him. So, here we are meeting our tour guide, Mr. Cengiz and meeting our best transportation ever, our own van, just for four of us. It is spacious, got extra seats, we can stand tall in it and the best part is, it got wifi. I sure miss the van now.

Afterwards, we went to lunch at this beautiful restaurant overlooking Marmara Sea, Sehir Restaurant. So that is the first time we tried their cuisine. What I can say, it just so healthy and a lot. From our itinerary, we are supposed to go to Bolu, and visit Istanbul on second last day when we are here, but Mr. Cengiz bring us to Topkapi Palace first because the palace will be close during the intended time of visit.

According to Wikipedia, The Topkapı Palace is a large palace in Istanbul, Turkey, that was the primary residence of the Ottoman sultans for approximately 400 years (1465–1856) of their 624-year reign. As well as a royal residence, the palace was a setting for state occasions and royal entertainments. It is now a museum and as such a major tourist attraction. It also contains important holy relics of the Muslim world, including Muhammed's cloak and sword.^[3] The Topkapı Palace is among the monuments contained within the "Historic Areas of Istanbul", which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, and is described under UNESCO's criterion iv as "the best example[s] of ensembles of palaces [...] of the Ottoman period."^[4]

It is a large complex with many small buildings. Mr. Cengiz brought us in and tells us the history of the palace. He also brings us from the Imperial Gate to the Third Courtyard. He was patiently waited for us as we are making a lot of stops for photo sessions and selfies. Yes, my friend Asma brings a monopod and it has an interesting story that I will tell you in later posts.

The decorations of the palace especially on the ceiling are beautiful. It fills with Islamic calligraphy and gold plated geometric patterns. There are a lot of red, turquoise and blue colours in the pattern. I just remember that we did learn about Ottomans’ era (Kerajaan Uthmaniyah) in Sejarah Dunia (World History) when I was in Form 4. I thought, I would like to travel in time to see people during tha era and although I was like 1000 years too late, I’m glad to see the remaining are still intact.

There are a lot of tourists when we visiting the place. After the tour with Mr. Cengiz, we were given 45 minutes to look around the place. At first we wanted to go to see Prophet Mohammad’s museum but there are a lot of people lining to go in. So we decided to take photo instead. One of the reason why the palace was build at the current location is because the view of Bosphorus. We can see the Asia part of Istanbul from the palace and it was stunning.

So after a lot of photo taking sessions, we are on our way to the next stop, Bolu to spend the night there. It took around 3.5 hours to arrive because of the traffic in Istanbul, especially when crossing the bridge to Asia side. Remind me of Penang Bridge a little bit.

We reached at Bolu around 9pm and having our dinner at Koru Hotel. The hotel was nice and has a small forest behind it. It reminds me of Twilight a little bit. So that is the story of the first day we are in Turkey and the next story will be on our visit to Ankara and Cappadocia’s underground city. Stay tuned!