‘Cause I have.
This Saturday we decided with a friend to be courageous and go to IKEA to check out the huge store that’s on the other side of the world for me. It’s not that far from where I live especially since I only need to catch two different buses to get there but it still was annoying to get to (even though the second bus drops you right in front.) We jumped on a bus from Mecidiyekoy and even though there was a little traffic on the bridge, we ended up at IKEA half an hour later.

When you enter the IKEA, you get greeted by a team of IKEAiens that want you to have a pencil and a little paper pamphlet and a little measuring thingy and the famous yellow bag. Ahhh the yellow bag.. anyway.
Saturday seemed to be a good day to go, it was busy but not too busy. Then again I’m used to the extra huge IKEAs in Europe so it’s really not comparable since this one was rather small compared to the others.

When you go to IKEA, could I advice you to go there already knowing what you want to buy? If you don’t, you walk around for hours, aimlessly, trying to dodge the hord of people who are too busy pretending to know what they or that push their pram towards you in an effort to make you move out of their way. No way is your way, it’s all their way. We probably checked out every area of the shop. Since it was smaller than the others, it didn’t take us that long, just an average of 1.5hrs. Seeing the familiar IKEA products made me smile, it reminded me of Belgium a lot. Once we were done drooling over the toys and colored pens in the children’s section, we stopped at the food court which obviously was very nice, I’ve always liked the food they serve, especially when I get salmon.

The cooked salmon was 6YTL, the smoked salmon dish was 6.50YTL, if you want a soft drink that’s 1YTL for the first glass and the rest are for free. The food court was very very busy but we managed to throw ourselves down on a table in the non smoking area. People didn’t really seem to care if it was smoking or non smoking area though, they just seemed to smoke wherever they saw fit. We are after all in Turkey. Once we finished having our food we headed for the ground floor where you can find kitchen and bathroom utensils, gardening utilities etc.
After getting all we needed we headed for the cash registers, which were over packed as you’d imagine. Ten minutes later I had purchased for 7YTL a salad bowl, a living bamboo stick, a vase for the bamboo stick and 10 Swedish lollypops. They have this food supermarket at the entrance of the shop who sells all things Swedish (cookies, frozen cakes, jams etc..). I wanted to get jam but it seems that they were packed with more sugar than fruit so I decided against getting anything at all.
All in all, the IKEA in Istanbul is small but cute, a must see for all of those who like all things IKEAish.
IKEA Istanbul
Çakmak Mahallesi No: 243 Tepeüstü Mevkii
34768 Ümraniye-İstanbul
10AM-22PM 7 days a week.