I'm sitting on a white cement lounge bench table and there's a friendly grey striped stray cat next to me grooming himself. The weather is very mild, light breeze, and the clouds have migrated somewhere else today. Given current New England weather, it's more beautiful than anywhere remotely near where I'd call home.
Sunset, from the hallway in our hotel
I've been in Cyprus for a week now and it's far surpassing my expectations. After a slightly confusing first few days in Larnaca - where the main int'l. airport is - we rented a car and drove out to Paphos, on the opposite, western coast, where I am now. Larnaca feels like a slightly run-down Middle Eastern hub of commerce that still bustles with a lot of nightlife, Paphos is the sleepier resort town that seems perpetually in an off-season slump. To be fair, the whole island is off the tourism season, and a lot of the places I've strolled by and seen the insides looking like a mess could easily be in the middle of renovation in time for the summer (although based on how few people I see milling around, and based on the current economic climate, I kind of doubt it). A lot of business are closed and full of rubble on the inside, and some facades crumbling, but I honestly really think it adds to the feel here. It's a fascinating geographic smoothie of Middle Eastern culture, relaxing Greek lifestyle, the occasional uber-modern European splash of sleek minimalism and coolness, and then a lot of crumbling, bombed-out, stuck-in-the-80s Russian/Eastern European buildings in the background. It's a charming, asynchronous, anachronistic, completely un-American mix.
Like New Zealand, the only other island nation on which I've spent a significant amount of time, crime seems nonexistant. The chain-smoking rental car rep we spoke to, who had dyed red hair and some pretty intimidating nails, pretty much laughed when even entertaining the notion of our car being stolen. I've walked down several dimly-lit streets full of gutted, rubble-filled storefronts late at night, even taking pictures like the (probably idiotic) tourist I am, and never really felt like I was about to get jumped by some Greek soccer hooligans. It's lovely and really makes everything a lot friendlier. The only sketchy hoodlums I actually run into while walking around at night are the cats.
The cats. Ah yes. I didn't find a single mention of this in either tour book I found, nor on online sites like WikiTravel, but oh man, there's stray cats everywhere. It's awesome. On an average day - we've been counting - I run into about 10-15 cats. They're really quite friendly and will solicit for some petting and attention, and a few will get attached and follow you around for quite some distance. I've yet to see a feral cat, though. One particularly friendly black cat, whom Julie and I dubbed Marcus, plopped himself right in Julie's lap less than five minutes after meeting her. He then shadowed us for about half an hour walking down the waterfront at night. Pretty adorable. I bet there's barely a mouse problem anywhere here.
cat tongues = the best
Some interesting observations, made at random:
-All the rental cars are designated with a special red license plate, as a surprisingly helpful way of making the tourists on the road stick out like a sore thumb while they struggle to learn driving on the left side of the road (thank god for having a year of training on this in NZ). Cypriot drivers are a lot better than people in the US seemed to assume they are - perhaps after hearing horror stories about their Greek neighbors - but they still go around turns fast enough that I found it useful to be given a wide berth thanks to that red license plate.
-Everything closes from 1:30pm-3pm. (Also, everyone usually uses the 12-hr clock, how convenient!) Pharmacies in particular close around then every day and they don't seem to feel very obligated to re-open in the afternoon if they don't want to that day. It's kinda tricky to find some stuff sometimes.
-The power plugs are the typical, super-chunky UK kind, with the switches on the outlets themselves (YES.) All the light switches are upside-down pedal-style ones and the toilets have that 1/2 button system that NZ uses, and so should the US, seriously.
-I got randomly breathalyzed by a cop driving around late at night and he seemed particularly humorless about it. I was clean, which is no coincidence to me since Julie and I traipse around at 2am all the time, but it made me wonder if this is a common problem?
-Our current hotel, Almyra in Paphos, is pretty excellent, and, given the off-season rate, probably one of the best values I've found in a hotel anywhere. I've had a small number of hotel experiences that were superior, but they all cost significantly more.
-Cyprus' signature cheese, haloumi, is grilled and put on everything. It's a bit salty but milder and firmer than feta, and it rules. Especially jammed in a big thick fluffy pita with some veggies.
-I think Americans are particularly conditioned to seeing images of bombed-out Middle Eastern cities where every other building is a gutted concrete shell, and thus imagine oppressive regimes and complete lack of safety, when in Cyprus that couldn't be further from the truth. My first impression of Larnaca at nighttime was that the whole city looked sketchy, and I kind of needed to force myself to readjust that perspective when I realized that for the most part, a lot of business have just closed up due to the economic downturn and not because of, say, some government lockdown. Just because we're surprisingly close to Syria geographically doesn't mean it's anything like Syria.
-There's tons of British tourists on holiday here, enough that one expressed genuine surprise when I didn't have an English accent. Her first reaction was, "How come you don't have an English accent?", implying that she assumed I was still English/British even if I didn't have an English accent. Weird. It really proves how few Americans even consider venturing here, when they really should if they want to try something less-travelled and more politically/economically stable than Greece or Egypt.
-There's amazing heritage sites, mosques, Byzantine churches, bits of excavated archaeological rubble, etc. everywhere. Basically every time I don't go out with a camera, I sorely regret it thanks to the neat shit and cute cats I see.
-In Paphos there's some fast food joint called "Bostonian Taste" complete with a "Boston Menu". I laughed my ass off when I walked by this place (which was closed for the season) because there's literally nothing 'Boston' about their food offerings and they're pretty much identical to every other Mediterranean restaurant in the area, with stuff like souvlaki and kebabs rather than, say, clam chowda, baked beans, or even lobster. I mean, cmon guys! There's tons of seafood around the island - even lobster - but nope.
-The graffiti is pretty creative and often amusing, and nobody really seems to care that much about it. Saw a placard at a construction site yesterday that read "MultiBuild" but somebody had scrawled on it so it said "Multi Orgasms". Heh heh.
That's about all I can think of. More impressions and photos later!
Coming up next: the Olympics...
