Monastery Wine in Cyprus

We awoke in our nice little Paphos, Cyprus hotel. There were still a few hours left to fill with fun stuff so we hopped to it. I pulled the room key out of its slot in the wall, which deactivated the room's power and went to the front desk to ask for them to call us a cab.

I bought this massive 10% alcohol beer just because it was funny. It was so big that it was in a steel can.

This was a different desk guy but he had the same friendly demeanor and willingness to talk your ear off. When we told him we'd only be in Cyprus for a day he went on about it for so long he was making our time shortage even worse.

Anyway, he made finding the bus stop sound so easy that we forgot about the taxi plan. We walked confident in the crudely drawn map he gave us and faced the Cypriot morning.

It was hot and we had our full packs on. Bleh.

Predictably it took a really long time with several do-overs before we found the bus stop. The old British people sitting there said the last bus hadn't even stopped it was so full. Screw that. We walked to the nearest hotel and asked them to call us that cab. While we waited I asked the desk people what was up with all the Greek flags I kept seeing everywhere. The short version of the reply is that Greece is their mother country and they have Greek language and culture. I then asked about the Northerners and she said they speak Turkish or "Greek Cypriot". Very interesting.

From the relatively short list of available attractions we picked the UNESCO recognized "Tomb of the Kings" site. In hindsight this may have set ourselves up for disappointment considering we were just hanging out in Egyptian pyramids.

The site was entertaining enough, though the people buried here weren't even kings, but random rich people. Lies! There were a couple bits that were supported by underground columns which I thought were pretty neat.

I could use a break from anything ruined, underground, or stone for about 10 years.

I asked our cab man to meet us where he dropped us off and he didn't even make us pay up front for the first part of the trip. I appreciated the trust.

When we told him we're American he volunteered that his daughter is in Atlanta getting some sort of eye surgery. He said he's been a cab driver for 30 something years. The cab was a pretty nice looking Mercedes with like 180k miles on it.

My next idea was kind of a longshot but I asked anyway. There's a monastery in the mountains that makes wine. What say you, cab man? Well he told us the drive there was 30 min and another 30 back, leaving us 30 to see the monastery. The die is cast.

The drive was a significant part of the excitement of the trip. We zoomed across winding road higher and higher into the mountains. The tongue-injuring Chrysorrogiatissa Monastery was pretty cool and was completely deserted. We kept hearing what sounded like gunshots or little explosions. Our cab driver told us that it was something meant to freak the birds out and keep them from eating the winery grapes. We had a glass of wine with a great view and then it was time to go to the airport. Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately the signs said no pictures inside the chapel.

Here's one of the pictures I took inside the chapel.

Cab man!

This sign was in a duty free shop in the airport. It reads "Travelling to UK NO LIMITS on tobacco for personal use as advised by HM Revenue and Customs. * If carrying over 800 cigarettes or 1 kg of tobacco you may be asked by HM Customs to prove these are for personal use or gifts." I just laughed to myself imagining someone bringing 3,000 cigarettes in their bag and then the only way they can prove they are for personal use is by smoking them one by one in the customs office. Oh, customs humor, I can't quit you.

Athens we missed you!

Back in Athens we had one last dinner with Zeke and Angela and then it was just the two of us.

Plan C: Cyprus

Today we had been planning on going SCUBA diving but that was cancelled due to the weather. I think we are SCUBA cursed. Every time we try to get something set up either the weather is bad or one of us is sick. It’s getting to the point where we are probably forgetting how to do everything.

Plan B was to go to Piraeus where all of the ferries depart from and take this nice sounding cruise that visited three different Greek islands. Well… we got to the docks and couldn’t find the right boat and none of the travel agent offices seemed to know what we were talking about so we gave up.

I was having a little brain storm though. The island nation of Cyprus was very nearby and when we looked it up a round trip ticket was only $100ish. Why not?

We had a fruit juice break.

We booked a flight later that evening and then had a few hours to spend in sunny Athens. We headed over to the Acropolis Museum to learn a little more about what we had seen the day prior.

Even the area outside the entrance to the museum is cool. The ground is made of giant glass panels where you can see active excavations taking place.

Apparently many of those nice white marble statues that you’re used to seeing used to be in full color. Some of the statues in the museum had a replica nearby painted how it would have been to give you an idea of the original. Lydia liked these but I thought they looked pretty garish. Especially when the statue is of a god I don’t want to see it with candy apple red lips and bright yellow hair. It reminded me of something a little kid would color. Oh well.

A nice statue with its clown equivalent.

This was an exhibit I enjoyed about how they made the different pigments. That cross section of a pot in the center there is illustrating how they made white by suspending some lead in vinegar and something else to get it to oxidize, which they would then scrape off.

The Erechtheion’s Caryatids were an especial favorite of mine and they were in a section of the museum which allowed pictures which was nice.



The Acropolis is so important it even has a Lego model.

The museum has a section built for the Parthenon’s marble exterior statues, many of which are in the British Museum, as a way to pressure the British to return the statues. I thought that was an interesting bit of international politics.

This is a little model of what one end of the Parthenon's top part is supposed to look like. There's a lot  of godding going on there.

We did a little bit of strolling afterward to find lunch at a place our guidebook said was killer.

The Drachma was Greece's currency prior to the Euro.

The cheap flight we snagged was on Ryanair which was a notable experience. They are one of those airlines with an initial low price which then attempts to fee you to death. They were going to charge us $15 a person just to print out our boarding passes so luckily we found an internet cafe ahead of time to print them out ourselves. Baggage is another danger zone but luckily we just have our backpacks so we got through the fee gauntlet unscathed.

Once on board it was kind of amusing. There were ads on the backs of the seats, and spots for ads on the overhead compartments although they weren’t being used on this flight. During the flight they came by with maybe 5 or 6 different carts full of crap they were selling: food, drinks, toys, perfume, some kind of portable cell phone charger, etc. The music that plays while boarding even had ads in it.

My favorite sell was when they came out with these scratch off lottery ticket things that were supposed to benefit charity.

There were no tray tables and no seat back pocket things, I assume to save on weight and to make cleaning the airplane faster. It was sort of like if IKEA ran an airline. It wasn’t a long flight and it got the job done so more power to them.

The emergency info was just printed right on the seat back.

Paphos, Cyprus is sort of like what the Caribbean was supposed to be. Very quaint and serene. Somehow I got wrapped up in this minutes long conversation with the hotel man about the banana plants next door. He was very friendly and had plenty of time to spend talking with us. Cyprus is sort of like Greece’s little brother, so I got the impression that Greece’s economic woes are being shared with Cyprus.

Said banana plants.

The hotel was pretty nice and dirt cheap.

I don't know if it's the whole country or just this hotel but they had that unfortunate "no flushing toilet paper" policy.

Cyprus has an interesting history. Apparently it was conquered by King Richard I while on his way to the Holy Land for some crusadin'. He wasn't even planning on conquering the island but some of his soldiers ship wrecked there and were imprisoned so he laid the stomp down. Richard apparently didn't even want the island because soon after he sold it to the Knights Templar. So awesome. More recently there's been a bit of a tug of war over the island between Greece and Turkey. The Republic of Cyprus has legal authority over the island but the northern half of the island is under Turkish occupation, which is a major roadblock in Turkey's flirtation with joining the EU as Cyprus is a member state.

I would say that some people who asked how long we were staying acted just shy of insulted that our stay would be so brief. This was pretty similar to how locals responded in the Caribbean. I wonder if really small countries are self conscious of the fact that there isn’t really much to see and do.

Well it was already pretty late so there wasn’t much time to do anything other than walk to a little restaurant in the neighborhood. Lydia had some souvlaki which is what the Greeks sometimes call gyros. It's a long story. This was comparable to what we’ve had in Greece except it had an unfortunately large amount of cilantro.