Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Cooler weather in Cyprus

What a relief! After some excessively hot days last week, we're back to a more normal (for April) 22-25C during the daytime. This is ideal as far as I'm concerned. Last night it even rained... for all of two minutes. It sounded quite heavy, too, but - alas - didn't last any longer.

It's a week since Daniel departed although in some ways it feels like much longer. He just posted a new blog entry about his first week in Carlisle, if you're interested. Evidently he's keeping busy, and also learning how to be somewhat domesticated, not to mention becoming even more familiar with British trains.

It is said that for 'third culture kids' (ie those who grow up in a country that's not their birth country, or that of their parents) aeroplanes are more familiar than either trains or buses, and that's certainly true for Dan and Tim. There are no trains in Cyprus, and the only buses are the rather infrequent ones that run between the cities - no local ones at all. Not that one needs a local bus in Larnaka, since it's possible to walk just about everywhere.

It's still the Easter break here for schools and other activities. All shops were closed yesterday, and the mother-and-toddler group where I help on Tuesdays was also closed today. We're expecting some overnight visitors in our guest flat tonight, but they didn't arrive this morning - they went straight to another appointment, and won't be here till this evening.

We had some other overnight visitors last week. Next Sunday we're expecting some visitors for a week, and then a day after they leave our first set of overnight visitors return for almost another week. So, like last year, April and May are popular months for our guest flat. After that we don't have anyone booked in definitely, although two families have mentioned that they might come out in the Autumn.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Sorry, this is completely unrelated, but I notice that you were a home-educator, and I also read that people that are native to Cyprus are obliged to send their children to local schools and are not legally able to home-school; is this true? I'm asking because we are moving back to Cyprus this summer, we're Greek-Cypriot, but have dual citizenship (Canadian)...my older son will be 10 and doesn't speak or understand Greek, I'd like to home-school him for a while, maybe permanently. Any advice? Thanks!

Sue said...

Hello, Yes I'm afraid that Cypriots are legally required to send their children to school. I've known of two or three families with one Cypriot parent and one British who tried home educating for a while. One ended up in court, and one eventually did decide to send their children to school, but had managed to home educate for a few years without problem.

You might be able to claim Canadian citizenship and get away with it, at least for a year or two. It depends how willing you are to fight, really, if it comes to it.

If you want to email, my home ed site (linked in the sidebar) has an email address for contact; I also run a group for Cyprus home educators on yahoo groups, which is linked from the home ed site, although it's mostly very quiet - there are usually only about 10-15 families home educating on the whole island at any time.