Okay, so it’s the wrong palace and the wrong country for that matter… but all day as we’ve walked around the Topkapi Palace, all I can hear in my head is Yul Brenner saying to Deborah Kerr in that particularly arrogant, yet attractive way… “you live in palace!… in palace!” Sigh… the shit that gets stuck in my head 🙂
Anyway, I’ve had an uber cool day doing the Topkapi Palace the way it’s supposed to be done. Last time I was here, we raced around the place with the somewhat jaded eyes of people that had seen WAY too many crumblies over the previous six weeks, and I realised that we had missed most of the really cool stuff. Today we didn’t miss a thing I reckon 🙂 We started out early before the rush… and that god for that, as the rush consisted of about 10 different groups of school kids being noisily ferried around the palace by even noisier (and understandably, harrassed) teachers. We managed to see all the different pavilions, and the kitchens, and massive amount of Ming Dynasty ceramics etc before doing the tour of the Harem area. And let me tell you… the Harem is where it’s at! There are rooms upon rooms of areas for eunuchs, concubines, the sultans each had their own apartments, the crown prince had his hang out and the sultan mother had huge apartments too/ And all of them covered in the most amazingly detailed and beautiful tile mosaics and painted walls and ceilings. Absolutely gorgeous, like nothing you’ve ever seen before … especially if you come from Australia where the culture is a little thin on the ground. 🙂
We also went through the Treasury rooms to see all those massive emerald jewels again, the armoury where Dr Nick wanted to take home a European medieval sword that was about as tall as Yaleman 🙂 we also went through the fabulously named circumcision room, the portrait gallery of the old sultans… where we saw 15thC and 16thC manuscripts being stored in a room with no humidity control! 🙁 And even swung by to have a quick squizz at the carriages (even if they are unfortunately all behind glass). All up, I think a rather thorough tour of the palace was had, evidenced by the fact that our feets were too sore to carry us back up the hill for divine Turkish pastries this afternoon!
After that, we went for a wander through the Turkey Archaeology Museum, which was full of crumblies as you might expect, plenty of classical statuary, egyptian sarcophagi (sp?) and islamic tiles. Wandered around there until the aforementioned sore feets cried uncle!
MR K : Miss you ‘bunches’ already and definately missing my Angel cuddles
Yale: Missing you too….. hmmm … hands…. ‘Page Cannot Be Displayed’ !!! Sigh…. 😉
Womble: Stop stirring the gorgeous and patient Ms LG !!
LG: We haven’t met – but….. “Hi!… All is good – dont worry!” 🙂