Istanbul (not Constantinople)

Last weekend, Mark and I took my mum to Istanbul for her 70th birthday present (she's probably going to kill me for revealing her age – she discovered this blog because she was googling me. How embarrassing!).

Because it was a special occasion, we stayed in style at the Empress Zoe hotel, a lovely little boutique Byzantine job in the middle of old Istanbul, just round the corner form key tourist venues like the Topkapi Palace, the Ayia Sophia mosque and (inevitably) the Grand Bazaar.

Shopping played a relatively large part of the weekend (something Mark bore with remarkable fortitude, standing patiently by the door of shop after shop, with an ever-growing pile of bags clustered at his feet). I was relatively restrained, and returned home with an embroidered coat and a pair of shoes made from an old piece of hand-embroidered material (Laszlo has already had a good gnaw on one of them, but only managed to damage the sole, luckily).

We also spent a fair amount of time strolling through the Spice Bazaar. As a matter of fact, I think I preferred the Spice Bazaar to the Grand Bazaar: it smelled more interesting for starters, with its blend of sumac, cinnamon, thyme and rosewater. I almost bought a kilo's worth of mixed spice, and only managed to restrain myself in time (I've got all the spices I need at home in my kitchen), and mum couldn't resist buying bags and bags of almonds, dried fruit and loukoum – she said it was for presents, but I'm not convinced she wasn't intending to scoff half the goodies when she got home.

We ate well, too – although, as I discovered, a girl can have too many kebabs over the course of a long weekend. Our best meal, however, was the one we enjoyed at Körfez (left). Part of the treat was the drive through Istanbul's suburbs, from gritty inner-town concrete jungle to upmarket Hampstead-on-sea beachfront apartments, followed by the short boat ride across the Bosphorous to the restaurant. We sat down for dinner just before sunset, and as the starters arrived, the lights of the city started twinkling and soon all we could see of the opposite shore was a galaxy of lights and the vague outlines of the hills and buildings. The food was excellent, too, particularly the sea bass baked in a salt crust (although we suspect we were ripped off as they only served us half the fish but charged us for a whole one when the bill came).

Luckily, after an attempt to order a couple of glasses of wine on the first night, I wasn't too tempted afterwards. They were the worst wines I've tasted since I went to Cyprus on a work trip...