The Palace

While this place from the outside may seem astonishing, the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul was a bit of a letdown. After you have seen real three-dimesional decorations on walls and ceilings, this place (in most of its 450-ısh rooms) were painted, not hand-crafted like in other places we have seen. True, it was grand, but not the sort of grand we were expecting. Also, the tour guides moved fast and got angry if we wanted to look at a room for more than a millisecond. But a sight that was interesting to see nonetheless. (My favorıte part was when they said the harem was where the "family" of the Sultan stayed.)

Derrick Says:
I did not like this palace and would not recommend it to anyone. It wasnt worth the 20 Lira to get into. The rooms were old, broken and dirty. I was expecting to see some really neat ornate old furniture but instead it looked like plastic cheap and right out of the trash. The palace was cheesy. In pictures it appears that the ceilings are very nice with all sorts of molding but when you see the real thing, you can see it is just a painting of molding. The tour that we were required to take moved so fast that it was not possible to hardly glance in a room before the tour moved on. Note: the guided tour is required to see the inside. The furnature looked like it was moved around and not in its original place. The carpets on the floors were tauted as the largest carpets in the world, however they were so worn it was difficult to even make out the pictures on them. Its a tourist trap where the turkish government gouges tourist and does not deliever.