Greetings from Cyprus where we feel very much at home, it was raining when we arrived, they drive on the left and all the sockets are the UK 3 pin variety.
We decided on taking advantage of cheap air tickets, £50 each one way from Bristol but of course it is not cheap as there is the £37 each train fare, £16 airport bus, £70 Bristol hotel, £80 dinner last night and then £32 for a not very good airport breakfast before take off so this bargain actually costs £372. Never mind it was an uneventful trip and we did manage a fun couple of hours in “We the Curious”, a science museum in Bristol aimed at children and OAP’s. Of course being Bristol they had a big section on animation with many original models from Wallace and Grommet and other Ardman productions, hence the animals at the top of this page.
Whilst on the subject of money it is out of season in Cyprus so the car hire companies are desperate to get anyone to take their cars. Europcar are charging us £7 a day for our car but wanted to charge us another £7 a day for a second driver, an option we declined, and then of course wanted another load of money for insurance which we kindly refused (we have our own policy thank you) and then tried to smooth talk me into an upgrade which would double the cost of the hire. Why is car hire such a scam?
I am pleased to say the rain stopped at 8am and it has been nice and warm. We spent the morning doing the old city which is not old, we were asked by a couple of German girls where the old city was, their iPhone said they were in the centre but were surrounded by new buildings!
It seems that Paphos was the European City of Culture in 2017 and consequently the EU funded lots of projects to create nice squares and pedestrian areas in the old town. Like many Greek projects the work is not quite complete (bare wires where lights should be etc) and no maintenance seems to be done so it is already looking a bit scruffy.
The monument above celebrates Oxi Day (No Day), Greece's greatest success since 100 BC. On 28th October 1940 Mussolini told the Greeks to submit to the Italian army, the one word telegram reply was OXI (No). The Italians attacked and the Greeks fought them off and won, Churchill said "if only everyone fought like Greeks" which made them very proud. It was very short lived, the Germans invaded the country soon after so it is the only success the modern Greeks have.
The afternoon has been spent in the site of the Roman city where there are some very fine mosaics of which we took hundreds of photos to bore you all with on our return.
As you can see the sun is shining and it was a very pleasant temperature, fingers crossed it stays like this for the next two weeks.