Saturday, April 07, 2007

Rainy week forecast

My sister and her family arrive this evening!

The guest flat is as clean and tidy as I can make it, given this generally dusty country. Beds are made. Coffee, milk, Flora (since Bertolli is still unavailable), Marmite, jam, cereal and fruit in the kitchen for breakfasts (our family is not by nature sociable in mornings, so guests Do Their Own Thing as far as breakfast is concerned). I shall shortly go and buy some sliced bread to add to the supplies. Tomorrow being both Eastern and Western Easter, all the shops will be closed - even the bakeries that are usually open every day from about 7am till at least 9pm. The supermarkets will be closed on Monday too (though, bizarrely, they were open all day on Friday, which is surely a more important holiday than Easter Monday in this predominantly Greek Orthodox country).

I checked the flight arrival time at the useful Flightstats site, and it's predicted to be ten minutes early. Amazing! However when I looked at the stats for this flight in general, I was told it has 0% history of being on time, with an average delay of 58 minutes. So we won't hold our breaths. I'm not entirely sure how they can estimate that a flight is going to be ten minutes early when it hasn't even taken off yet, anyway.

Then I checked the UK weather site forecast for Larnaka. Not good news. It's grey at present, not particularly warm, and rained this morning. Tomorrow, it tells us, will be warm with sunshine, and shade temperatures of up to 23C, which would be pleasant, but then there's cloud and showers for the rest of the week, other than Thursday.

Uh-oh.

Still, the forecast isn't always accurate. So I looked at the BBC site forecast for Larnaka. Oh dear. Even worse. They only show five days, but they're saying rain today, more rain tomorrow, rain Monday, and thunder on Monday and Tuesday.

Oh dear.

Finally I looked at the Weather Underground forecast for Larnaka - that's the site where I get my little icon in the sidebar showing the current weather (and it's usually fairly accurate). They tell me there's a 20% chance of more rain today, that tomorrow will be clear and sunny, Monday will have scattered clouds, Tuesday has a 20% chance of rain, and Wednesday will be clear though only 18C.

Hmm. So much for modern, accurate weather forecasting. I just hope we get at least some days of sunshine and reasonable warmth. It's a long way to come to Cyprus for weather that's not much better than the UK.

No comments: