Antalya 2013. 4 Days of Pure Bliss (PART II)

Hey guys,

I hope you all enjoyed your weekends, back to boring Monday's again for those of you that are still working on in school. If you're on faux holiday like myself then Monday's are a lot more bearable aren't they? (I say faux because technically I don't finish school till I hand in my dissertation in September, booo). Anyways, as I promised I'm back to fill you in on how the other 2 days of my 4 days of bliss in Antalya went, let's resume on Friday morning shall we? :)

Woke up nice and early again but this time it wasn't to make the massive breakfast; Friday was the day of my mum's actual birthday and to kick off the day of celebrations we had a Service of Praise. There was singing and dancing to the Most High as well as a short sermon by one of her best friends before a select few people got to give speeches/tributes. (Obviously mine was the best, it made people teary-eyed! Ha!) After all of that we were treated to a lovely brunch and some cake.

Mummy looking gorgeous in pink & silver! Check out that gele!

                                    

Apologies for the blurry pictures above, they were taken by my iPhone which I will never compare to my camera again! Especially on zoomed in pictures. Once again after brunch and gathering everyone together to slap on some of Ibi's sun screen (yes, black people do need sun screen!) we headed back down to the beach for our waterfall tour and some ringo. The waterfall tour was supposed to take place on Thursday with the rest of our beach day activities but the guy kept telling us that his boat was due to arrive any moment and it never did arrive on Thursday before we had to leave! Because of this we were pretty skeptical about his antics and I wouldn't have been surprised if he just didn't turn up the next day as well, especially since we had already paid him! Lol. But I guess the Turkish don't have too much 419 blood in them because he turned up on time and with refreshments for us during our trip!

There was a little bit of a wait before we could actually get on the boat and I really wanted to try wake-boarding; I know fellow blogger Afam of The Ramblings of a Mad Man, does it quite often and the pictures looks like such fun! I hear it's quite difficult though? After hearing how difficult it was and not particularly wanting to belly flop in the water, my cousins and I opted for the Great Mable which is pretty much a massive float with handles attached for gripping on tight for dear life!

After getting a suitable adrenaline rush and a little wet, the boat was loaded and ready to take us on our waterfall tour. There were four in total and each one was bigger than the next but the pictures all kind of looked the same so I only put up two of them.

This one was the smallest of them and was also the first one we saw, I was a bit disappointed with it because I didn't know what was yet to come! Also can I just say, how awesome is the colour of that water?? Mediterranean Sea at it's finest!

Excuse my cousins head in this shot, lol. There were some pretty deep crevices in the nearby cliffs. I guess this is where all the pebbles on the beach are formed or something by some erosion process.

We finally got to the big one and it was pretty exciting to see! You could feel the mist that was being created from quite a distance away. I know it's no Niagra Falls but I've never been this close to a waterfall before so I'd say it was quite cool!

So cool we even took a group picture! Haha.

Weirdly enough we didn't see any marine life at all throughout the tour which was a bit disappointing but at the same time a great relief! I don't know how I'd have reacted if I noticed anything bigger than a goldfish casually swimming around our little boat! After the tour I went back to the hotel because I really just needed to rest before the activities of the birthday party!

Instead of just lazing about in my room though I decided that a spa moment would be in order, especially as I couldn't see any other time to enjoy the facilities. When in Turkey, do as the Turkish do and so I opted for a Turkish bath (hamam) followed by a full body massage. I don't have any pictures of the spa time because 1. I was too relaxed to be bothered about my camera and 2. It would have been very explicit photos because in the hamam you lie on a slab like the one in the picture below and a masseuse comes to scrub you and bath you, haha. Oh and there are other people being bathed at the same time as you, lol. Luckily for me I had my cousins so no strangers odd bits to stare at. It was extremely cringe-worthy at first but the girls were very professional and I fell into a trance afterwards. Oh plus you get to wear a paper thong. **giggles**

After the exfoliating bath and the amazing oil massage it was already time to head upstairs to get ready for the Dinner & Dance. Lord knows I would have lived in that spa if I had the chance! Lol. So I got dressed, did my make-up and tried to do something cute with my unruly 15 weeks post relaxer hair! The end result was something like this:

And I felt pretty fly until I saw my mother looking like this! She literally looked flawless and not at all of age, I better be looking like this when I'm at that age; the genes are somewhere inside me. Can I get an amen?!?!

There was a delicious 6 course meal and some other entertainment including this belly dancer who was trying to seduce my brother with her fingers. Lol.

I realised that I have absolutely no pictures of any of the food we had all through the time there which is really quite poor but I guess there was always something more interesting going on around me. After a night filled with drinking and dancing the crowd eventually thinned out and we all went to bed looking forward to our last full day in the dreamy city of Antalya.

My goodness can I just stop here and say this post feels really really long?! I feel like I've been typing away for absolute ages! Thank you for making it this far... It's the final day now, Saturday! I'm sure you're used to us waking up bright and early and heading for the massive breakfast by now, but on this day we found out breakfast ended at 10.30 and not 10. Can I get a whoop whoop for an extra 30 minutes in bed?? Especially after that Friday night we just had!

Saturday was a really simple day, we went on a boat cruise which featured the waterfall tour! (Had I known I would have saved my money!) and got to go swimming in the sea. Sadly when the yatch stopped moving about half of the party started feeling extremely sea sick from all the bobbing about so we couldn't really swim for that long before we had to head back to shore.

Pirates watching over us to keep us safe from the other pirate ships!

Ibi & Iretidee. Sunglasses and Cheeses Crew!

The mummies wouldn't let us swim without life jackets. They still don't trust our swimming skills even after all that money on lessons from when we were kids! Lol.

Sadly, Saturday was our very last day as the flight on Sunday was at 8 a.m. or some equally ridiculous time! The only thing I regret was not having more time to explore the actual city (I went to the beach instead, typical huh?) so it's definitely on my list of places to go back to! Here's saying bye to Antalya; my four days of pure utter bliss!

See my brother Modee the professional photo bomber! <3

Hope this has provided some sort of escapism for an otherwise boring Monday lunchtime. Enjoy the rest of your day, I'm off to continue with school work too :(.

Ciao!

Reni x

Antalya 2013. 4 Days of Pure Bliss

Hey guys!

So when I first thought of writing this post I thought I'd do a little outfit of the days, lookbook type thing but I decided against it because honestly, I'm just not that fashionable. I wear what I can to get by looking nice enough that I'm not called a tramp but I'm rarely ever the most fashionably dressed person in the room! I like comfort way too much. Nonetheless, I feel I must warn you, this post and the next one is FILLED with selfies and other random pictures of my different outfits, this was the first time in a long time that I was using my 'proper' camera so I got a bit snap happy. Some of the pictures are still taken with my iPhone though, I wonder if you'd be able to tell which ones. Anyways, let's get down to business.

At the end of June my beautiful mama had a big birthday to celebrate and she decided to do so by taking a well deserved holiday with her favourite people to the beautiful city of Antalya, Turkey. Antalya is one of those places that I had literally never heard of before my mum mentioned it in passing and although I was sad that Istanbul was out of the question, I trusted her choice completely. Also not going to Istanbul meant that all the jokes about being "taken" a la "Taken 2" finally had to stop! Haha. We arrived on a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon even though I'm quite sure the weather there is always gorgeous, having just been in rainy Manchester, I was a very happy bunny for the change. The whole of the first day was spent exploring the hotel, Rixos Downtown, and taking pictures of any and everything that looked interesting!

The view from the elevator; I thought the interior of the hotel was fantastic! I felt like I was in some exotic paradise land!

The poolside was definitely my favourite area of the hotel even though I didn't get to spend too much time there, the days that followed were too action packed to have any real lazing about by the pool but I did manage it once!

I feel like my black hat is slightly reminiscent of Boj! Lol. Maybe it's just the picture.

This view of the hotel from the poolside is one of my favourite shots from the whole trip. Don't you just love how it looks like a massive ship! All the trees in the surrounding area make it look so gorgeous.

After wondering about the hotel and lounging by the poolside it was time to get ready for thew welcome dinner and drinks fiesta. Unfortunately by this time I was too tired to take any more blog-worthy pictures so we're going to have to skip on by to day 2, the Thursday. We woke up bright and early to make the massive breakfast buffet, quite unfortunately I found I don't really like turkish breakfast. There's just something about not having any sausages with a big breakfast that doesn't sit right with me, but fortunately they had some of the best American style pancakes I've ever tasted with a huge variety of toppings! Being well fed and well rested my cousins and I decided it was beach time!

Can I just say that the novelty of a pebble beach wears of very very quickly! Stepping in boiling sand is one thing but stepping on hot pebbles reminds me of that challenge that those crazy people do when they run across hot coal! We hopped, skipped and jumped until we reached the sanctity of deck chairs and umbrellas to protect us from the sun. Turkish people are extremely friendly, even when they are trying to rob you of all your money for extortionately priced umbrella's! The lovely man ended up giving us two for 'free'.

At the beach we got to go jet skiing and parasailing. Two things I've never done before; parasailing was a lot more calming than it looked and I was so sad I didn't have my camera up there with me to take pictures of the view from such a high vantage point, but truth be told I was so concerned with holding on to the harness that I doubt I could have taken any photos!

This jet-skiing picture was taken before the funniest part of the whole day at the beach. You see me over there, rocking my shades feeling like a real cool cat before Iya and I take off to the deep end of the water...

What you don't see is what happened a few minutes later when Iya was feeling like a formula one driver and I was egging her on to go faster and faster until she made a very swift left turn which saw me flying off the jet-ski and straight into the deep blue sea! It would have looked perfect on camera or slow motion tape; me flying off and thinking to myself that I needed to grab my sunglasses before they became property of the ocean floor and then water treading while I waited for Iya to realise I had fallen off and turn around to come and get me! In the 15 seconds it took her to realise I was gone I got terrified by the thoughts of any form of sea life, be it fish, whale or mermaid coming to say hello. Luckily there were none but I noticed how startlingly blue and clear the water was. Beautiful I tell ya.

We eventually made it back to shore and then back to the hotel where we had an hour or less to get ready for the pre-birthday party which was an all white affair at this lovely restaurant called Aura. While white is not my favourite colour in the world (read I'm far too clumsy/messy to wear white) and it took me forever to find an outfit, I was happy I finally found something that worked from Topshop!

Lil cuz Iretidee!

Just to clarify, I don't have a sister. But if you think that we look like twins you wouldn't be too far off the mark. We even had identical hairstyles until mine got soaking wet from the earlier dive!

Shortly after this picture was taken, several groups of locals ran up to my cousins and I begging if they could take pictures with us, I kid you not. I guess they don't see that many black people down in Antalya because one of the girls kept blowing us kisses from her passing car! It was very exhausting and strange indeed, I think that now if a celebrity ever said no to a picture with me I would just nod my head understandingly. And then day 2 was over.

I feel like this is one of the longest posts I've ever written and I may be wrong but it's pretty long! Thanks for making it to the end. Haha.

Enjoy your Friday night guys! I'd tell you about my Friday in Antalya in due time :)

Reni J x