Notice in our mailbox about Cyprus sewerage works...

A couple of days there was a piece of paper stuck in our mailbox that wasn't the usual junk mail. It was an A4 sheet headed "IACOVOU-ZEMCO JOINT VENTURE" with an address and other contact details underneath, all in English.

The rest was in Greek. And while I could probably have figured out what it said with the aid of a dictionary, I knew from previous experience that it would be a lengthy and tedious exercise, so I thought I'd try Google Translate, instead. It even allows phonetic typing, so I started by typing the words with their English equivalent letters, although after a couple of paragraphs I switched to typing in Greek as it was easier.

In a nutshell, the letter said that sewerage works were due to start in our street on June 29th, and could last up to three weeks. They apologised for the inconvenience, and asked that people move their cars and keep their children out of the way. Then there was a note that residents can't yet connect their own houses up to the new sewarage system.

However Greek still seems to be fairly formal when written, so that brief paragraph took up a whole sheet of paper. I was surprised at how readable the translation was. So for anyone else who happens to have received this piece of paper and wonders what it says, and for the sake of posterity, here's some of the translation - after the bit that simply tells us what date they're due to start working and how long it should take.

Conducting this work will cause some discomfort which we will try and minimise, and for which we apologise. Your co-operation and understanding are useful and necessary.

Please park your car away from the area of construction work for both the uninterrupted passage of machinery and safety of your vehicle. And to avoid delays in the execution of the work.

Great attention will be given to safeguarding your children, who should be kept away from the dances of the work and the handling of machines, to avoid accidents.

In case of error, please contact the responsible security person (name, number)

Please, at this stage, note that the network of sewerage and rain water is not in operation, so you must not connect your premises to the sewerage system without permission of the Larnaka Sewerage Council. They will inform you in due course.

Other than the 'dances' of the work (and the concept is rather appealing...) I thought the automatic translator handled it extremely well. And it was much quicker than sitting down with a dictionary to do it myself.

However...

Today is June 29th, and it's nearly 5.00pm. And other than some red dots being painted down the centre of our street, to mark where it will be dug up, nothing has happened so far...

Disruption in Drosia

I suppose it was a couple of weeks ago that we became aware of the extensive road-works in our neighbourhood. Or perhaps it was a bit longer ago. There are so many random diggers and other disruptions to the roads in Cyprus that we've almost stopped noticing them. But Richard mentioned that he was having to drive a little further to get home, due to diversions, and I could hardly help noticing that there were road-works which I had to skirt carefully while walking to the local shops:


The digger was creating a channel right through the tarmac on the road.

Then our mains water went off for a few hours, about ten days ago. We've got so used to having constant mains water that we no longer store lots of bottles, and I'd just run the washing machine. Thankfully it was on again by lunch-time, a reminder of the days gone by when we only had mains water two or three times per week.

However, it reminded me that, slowly, Cyprus is being converted from septic tanks to mains drainage. I believe it's funded by the EU and was one of the requirements of Cyprus joining the European Union seven years ago. There have been extensive road works in many districts, and apparently it's now our turn. Not that they've reached our street yet. But I continued to take photos when going to the shops - such as these slightly confusing diversion signs:


Or this machine, which our most intelligent cat, Sophia, appears to think is a cat-eating monster. Not that she's seen one for a while, but she was sitting on the balcony one day when a machine of this ilk was turning around, with the 'mouth' apparently opening and closing in her direction. She is not a nervous cat, in general, but I have never seen her so petrified. She hid under my desk for some hours. She will not be happy when the construction workers reach our street.


Here's a glimpse of the new pipes and drainage that are being installed:


The workers seem to be progressing rapidly, possibly hoping to have finished before it gets really hot and humid. They have started work before 7.30 each morning this week, and by today most of the holes had been filled in. The roads look scrappy and dusty - it's probably too much to hope that they'll be nicely re-surfaced, but at least the diversion signs seem to have gone.

Summer has arrived in Cyprus

So, the first day of Summer was a couple of days ago, June 21st. Tomorrow, June 24th, is Midsummer's Day.

Logically speaking, then, the last day of summer should be June 27th.

Alas, it doesn't work that way in Cyprus. In the UK, some summers do seem to have only about a week of warm weather (though not, I gather, right now). But we're pretty much guaranteed heat and high humidity for the next two or three months, now that June is coming to an end. I really can't complain: the weather during May was warm but not over-hot. We had a couple of days earlier in June that seemed to threaten summer, but then a thunderstorm and some rain about ten days ago cooled the climate down, to about 27-28C, which is quite bearable.

We did run the air conditioning at night a few times, for a couple of hours, since the evenings were rather sticky. I've also got into my summer mode of doing any housework or shopping before 9.00am... as far as possible. Except that yesterday it wasn't possible. On Wednesdays I change our sheets and clean upstairs, and we have someone from the office to a cold lunch... and last night we were expecting friends for a meal too, who needed to go to the airport later.

So I needed to get out to the Froutaria; I did manage to do that fairly early. And I put a loaf of bread to cook in the breadmaker, and made some more lemonade as we had run out, and froze some extra lemon juice in ice cube trays...

By which time it was almost 10.00.

I was aware that I was feeling warmer than I like to be, but I took things fairly slowly. I changed the sheets, and did the laundry, and put away Monday's laundry, and dusted and mopped and cleaned out the cat litter trays and made the bed... which doesn't sound like much, but took me until nearly 1.00, with very few (short) breaks to sit down. Then I cleaned out the glass bottles where we store lemonade (using crushed eggshells to do so - very useful) and bottled the lemonade and made egg mayonnaise and washed tomatoes and hung the sheets and towels out to dry...

Then we had lunch and I sat down for half an hour or so to look at email and Facebook, etc. And was aware that I was feeling extremely hot and rather headachey and very tired.

So when I went to the kitchen at 2.30 to start cutting up fruit for fruit salad, and making ice cream, I put the air conditioning on. At 28C as usual... and I was astounded at what a difference it made. I don't think the kitchen was more than about 30C, but having the cooler air, and the humidity removed gave me a new lease of life. So I washed vegetables and fruit and chopped them and prepared food for an hour or two, feeling much more energetic than I had expected. I cleaned the kitchen too, fairly thoroughly, and emptied the dishwasher which went on after lunch, and FINALLY got into the shower around 5.00pm.

By then it was a little cooler, and I'd switched off the kitchen a/c. Our friends arrived with Richard shortly after 6.00 and we ate our meal by open windows with the ceiling fan on, and it didn't feel too hot at all. When we went to bed we ran the bedroom a/c for a couple of hours, as it gets humid in the evenings, but I slept just fine, and at 5.30am when I woke this morning it was still a little cooler out than in.

But I had a feeling it was going to be hot today. The prediction was for 33C in the shade. So I put away the laundry, and even did a little ironing, and emptied the dishwasher, and made orange juice, and froze 2.5kg tomatoes in a-little-over-400g pots, all before 8.00.

At 8.30, even having just had my shower, I felt rather over-warm. I checked the weather forecast, and it told me that it was already 32C. So I turned on my study air conditioner, and will probably leave it on for most of the day. Running it at 28 isn't very expensive, and is amazingly effective. I am very, very thankful for air conditioning.

So, summer is here, and will probably stay here for at least three more months.

Adding another bookcase to our collection...

It is, of course, pretty much impossible to have too many books. However, it's entirely possible to have too many books to fit on one's current bookcases.

Early in our marriage, such a situation would cause Richard to mutter something akin to blasphemy... about 'getting rid' of books. Thankfully he soon learned one does not 'get rid' of books. One might, if one has duplicates, donate one or two to a charity shop. One might, if one's children have outgrown 'easy-read' books donate them to relatives or friends with younger children, although even that is something of a wrench. But in general, the correct response to having more books than bookcase space is: 'we need a new bookcase'.

Despite the rate of increase of books to our house reducing somewhat (thanks to my Kindle, and a strange feeling that perhaps we're almost approaching saturation point, book-wise) we had reached the stage of having more books than shelving-for-books a few months ago. I can usually deal with this by having a significant number of books out on loan at any one stage, but one friend went away for a few months and returned ten without borrowing any more... and I think it's possible that books breed, when left in peace. Here's how our living room (non-fiction) bookcases looked a few days ago:


Yes, there was only one extra pile of books, but the others were jammed in solidly, and there was no room at all for any more. We've moved some to the guest flat but that's also running out of space for books - and since people only usually stay there for a week or two, they are unlikely to need a thousand or so books to choose from.

The fiction ones in the dining room are worse, and we haven't quite decided what to do about those. But I kept looking at the non-fiction bookcases, and getting out my tape-measure, and realised that the black bookcase, shelving DVDs in the photo (perpendicular to the dark brown ones) would in fact fit on the same wall as the other two, if we moved them along a little. And Richard had been saying, for about four years, that we should really run a cable behind the two dark brown bookcases so as to be able to use a lamp we were given that sits on a table out of reach of any plug socket...

So we pondered getting another one to fit there, but wondered if it would all look too dark. Besides, Ikea is in Nicosia, a good half hour's drive from here, and I'm not a fan of shopping in general. So probably nothing would have happened if Richard hadn't received a call from some local friends. The office where they work is closing, and they are taking some of the rather nice bookcases from it; so they have three which they now want to pass on to someone else. And they thought of us. So, the following day we went to have a look, and were excited to see that one of the bookcases is an Ikea one. Pine coloured rather than dark, but we thought that might be all right. And two smaller bookcases. We said we would definitely like the Ikea one and would think about the others.

Yesterday afternoon, we went to collect the Ikea one. It was heavy, but in slow stages Richard and I managed to get it up our outside stairs and into the house. Then we had to remove ALL the books from the dark brown bookcases so that they could be moved, and so that Richard could make the skirting-board cut-out bit a little bigger, to take a cable.

I forgot all about taking a photo until Richard had cut the holes and moved the bookcases, and I had cleaned the rather yucky area behind and underneath. He put the Christian books back in their bookcase quickly, and we found that we didn't need to take all the DVDs out of the black bookcase in order to move it. I'd just started putting the general non-fiction books back when I thought I should probably take a picture of the mess:


Then I put more of the books back, spreading them out a little. Then we moved the new bookcase to its position, and put all the DVDs in it:


We were pleased that it looked just fine to have light wood there. Rather better than the black did, in fact. Richard plugged in the lamp just to check that it would actually work after all this time, and we were pleased to find that it did:


Then I decided to try a few ornaments on the empty shelves so that the black bookcase didn't look too bare while awaiting more books. And after a few experiments (I am far from artistic) settled on this look, with two photos, three animal ornaments (which once belonged to my grandmother), and the digital photo frame:


I'm surprised how much better it looks, and not too crowded at all.

The whole process was complete in about two and a half hours ,but it's getting warm in Cyprus now and we were exhausted by the time we had finished!

Another post about supermarket shopping in Cyprus

Eight months ago I wrote about the new Lidl supermarkets in Cyprus, and how generally underwhelmed we were. Since then, advertising mail has continued to arrive, and been filed immediately in the recycling. In my attempt to become more health-conscious, 'green' and economical, I'm buying almost nothing that's pre-processed these days. I do the majority of my grocery shopping at the local Achna Froutaria, popping in also, perhaps once a week, to Achna Discount and/or Orphanides Express. All these shops are within easy walking distance of our home so I go on foot, as early as possible now that the weather is getting decidedly warmer.

But, about once a month, we have to do a bigger shop for things I can't buy locally, or can't carry home on foot. Cat litter, for instance, or washing powder (which I prefer to buy in bulk) or long-life milk, which I need for making yogurt. So we go to our favourite supermarket, Metro, in the car. We buy almost all our meat there, too, as it's good quality and the prices are usually reasonable. On Thursday evening I realised that we needed to do a big shop before too long, so we decided to go on Friday morning.

However... several of our friends have mentioned using Lidl, and finding bargains there. Over the months I suppose there's been something of a trickle effect in our minds. So, as we got in the car yesterday, Richard said, 'Shall we try Lidl first?'

I knew that long-life milk cost under a euro at Lidl, also sugar (which has recently shot up in price - the standard supermarket price appears to be 1.49 euros per kilogram). So I shrugged, and said yes, why not?

It didn't take as long to get there as I'd expected, and - no longer being new - the car park was fairly empty.


We found a trolley - using the key token thing we were given months ago - and made our way slowly around. I can't say I was over-impressed. There were vast quantities of junk food - fizzy drinks, pre-processed migraine-inducing packs of imported chemicals masquerading as food - and the fruit and vegetable section was small, expensive and generally unimpressive.

Still, we did find sugar (which I need in large quantities for jam-making currently) and long-life milk, and also good value white flour, though no wholemeal. We thought we would try some Lidl chocolate, too, as that seemed a good price. And we found some special offer kitchen roll. We looked at various other items but most of them seemed to be more expensive than we would pay elsewhere, or else not the kind we liked. I was pleased, however, to find some dried chick-peas, something I've been looking for (in vain) for a couple of months now.

So, it was worth going; we ended up with about thirty euros of groceries:


- which doesn't look like much in the trolley at all, despite being discounted prices!

Unfortunately, we still had to go to Metro:


Two shops in one day is not much fun... but at least we know our way around Metro. We spent about 45 minutes in Lidl - which isn't very big - just looking around and finding a few items; we were only 40 minutes in Metro. And still spent a couple of hundred euros:


And yes, it all fit in one trolley. Even a year ago we would have needed two trolleys for that amount of money.

The cost of living in Cyprus has gone up phenomenally in the last year or so. About seventy euros of that was meat for the next month, most of which went directly in the freezer, to be used in the crockpot. Being a vegetarian would be a lot cheaper. Nearly thirteen euros was Biokill insecticide, rather necessary for the summer season; nearly twenty euros was cat food and litter; fifteen was toilet rolls. But it's still a bit scary that a few other groceries - olive oil, mayonnaise (I haven't yet found a good recipe for that), tuna, eggs, milk, cheese and a few other bits can add up to so much. I didn't even buy any washing powder this time.

Lunar eclipse as seen from Cyprus

For once, I knew in advance that there was going to be a lunar eclipse last night. More importantly, it was supposed to start in the evening when I would still be awake. I might still have forgotten about it, if I hadn't seen this fairly amazing huge and beautiful full moon in the evening sky, just as I was pulling the curtains around 8.00pm:


I checked a couple of websites, which said that the eclipse would be visible in Europe and Asia, primarily - either of which could apply to Cyprus. They said it would start at 18.30 UT, which I gather is the new politically correct GMT. So I added a couple of hours, entirely forgetting that we're now in Summer Time. Which explains why, at 8.30, the moon still looked full, albeit rather higher in the sky (and less easy to photograph without camera shake):


Realising that I was an hour out in my calculations, I didn't look at it again until 9.30, by which time the eclipse had undoubtedly started:


I thought about it again at 9.50, and took this picture, holding the camera as still as I could:


I suppose I should have found a tripod, but it hardly seemed worth it just to capture a few pictures for my personal use. Still, I was quite pleased with that one.

I realised the moon was disappearing quite fast, so I only left it ten minutes before taking the next picture:


Being much more of a lark than a night owl, I don't like staying up much beyond 10.00pm if I can avoid it, but for the sake of posterity, I did take one more picture just after 10.15:


So much for astronomy. The last eclipse I wrote about was over five years ago, when Tim and I watched a partial solar eclipse.

A large box arrived...

I was upstairs mopping the floors mid-morning today, when the doorbell rang.

I wasn't expecting anyone, I hurried down the stairs to open it, hoping I didn't look too hot and dishevelled! Perhaps, I thought, it was someone coming to borrow books. Or, as often happens, somebody looking for someone I'd never heard of.

It was a young man, with a clipboard. He asked if Richard lives here. I said that he does, and a slight look of resignation passed over the guy's face. 'I get box', he said with a sigh, and went down our outside staircase to the street.

I didn't think we were expecting any boxes, but waited at the door. When the young man appeared again, I could see why he checked first that it was the correct house, before bringing the parcel up. He struggled to balance it in his arms as he came up again, and it was evidently not light. He put it down in some relief just inside our front door, and I signed for it.

I glanced at the label, which was indeed addressed to Richard. From, as far as I could gather, somewhere in Italy.

At last!

It's the mock-up of the engine for King Malu, something which he and his sailing buddy have been waiting for for over a year now.

I didn't attempt to move it. It's really quite big:


Cleo, who has always loved cardboard boxes, investigated immediately and quickly realised that she couldn't get inside. But she likes sitting on top of things too. And, by Cleo standards, seems very relaxed and comfortable:


I'm not entirely sure how she'll feel when the box is taken to the boat... but I can't say it adds to the ambience of the room to have a large and rather ugly cardboard box there, even if Cleo has taken to it in a big way.

Cleo and the printer

Now that the weather is turning warmer, the cats are finding cooler places to sleep. Such as the floor. Or (when children are present) the top of bookcases.

Or, in Cleo's case, this remarkably uncomfortable-looking spot on top of our laserjet printer:


Cleo has a very good sense of balance, in general, but for some reason the other day she misjudged it. One moment she was on the printer, elegantly washing places where cats like to wash with one leg high in the air, and the next moment she had fallen, remarkably neatly, into the waste paper basket below:


She stayed there, looking faintly bemused, for a couple of minutes. Plenty of time for me to find my camera and snap a photo. She didn't struggle, or even try to get out. Perhaps she was pondering whether it was another good place to sleep.

I took pity on her, picked her up, and put her back on the printer. Which, she decided, was not quite such a good place to sleep after all.

Summer in Cyprus: first trip to the beach

Yesterday afternoon, some of the Cyprus home educators decided to meet on the beach, taking picnics. I went with our friends - Richard joined us later - and was surprised to find how very warm the sea was, given that the weather hasn't yet got REALLY hot, and it's only early June. I walked out into the sea up to waist height and didn't feel at all chilly. I didn't swim; I was wearing my swimsuit but hadn't taken my tee-shirt off, thinking I wouldn't want to go more than ankle deep, but it was very nice to be in the sea again.

Elisabeth spent some time trying to dig in the sand with a selection of small spades, then thought she might like a drink of water:


She is quite determined, but did become somewhat annoyed that she couldn't work out how to get into it by herself:


Helen was there too, but spent a lot of time playing with the other children and digging by the sea. I spent some time showing her how to pack sand in a bucket and the turn it over to make a little castle, which she promptly knocked down. She did sit still for a couple of minutes, though:


Then she was off, running around and playing. The small have so much energy. It was lovely to see how, at two-and-three-quarters, Helen is now starting to play with another friend's daughter Aimee, who is of similar age. At one point they found a "stage" where they stood side by side singing:


The sun starts to go down in Cyprus fairly early, even at this time of year. All the older children had been playing in and out of the sea, coming to eat a bit and then going back into the water. As the light faded, they were still doing so:


Before we ate, I took Elisabeth into the sea to get most of the sand off her, and to wash my own hands (not that sea water is particularly hygienic, but it's better than mixing food with sand). She stayed fairly clean, on one or other of her parents, while she ate some bread and cheese and cucumber, but then decided to get down and explore the beach some more.

A while later, Helen, who had seen me washing her little sister earlier, sidled up to me, pulled a sad face, and said, 'Sue.... Elisabess is dirty again!'

I think she's learning the art of understatement...

More signs of summer

I might sometimes give the impression that Summer in Cyprus is a lengthy period of intense suffering, relieved only by air-conditioning and general aestivation.

To be sure, I don't do well in high temperatures or high humidity, and don't particularly enjoy July or August in this country. But, not everything about the approaching season is negative. A week ago I decided to abandon my jeans in favour of shorts - well, my shorts are mostly below-the-knee, so they're not really short, but they're a bit cooler, anyway. The ceiling fans give a pleasant breeze - it hasn't yet got hot enough to need air conditioning. This morning when I made the bed with clean sheets I put away our thin duvet, to be washed at some point in the next few months, and just put a top sheet as a bed cover.

Early mornings are pleasantly cool, and I've moved to my summer schedule of doing any housework or shopping, as far as possible, before 8.00am. I feel more lethargic in the winter, somehow; less inclined to get moving first thing. But in June, 6.00am or even earlier is an energising time of day.

Best of all are the opportunities for iced drinks. Soft fruit is abundant in Cyprus in the summer - peaches and apricots are just starting to appear inexpensively in the Froutaria, and watermelons have been available for a while. On Monday evening I made our first smoothie of the year:


It was watermelon and mango, a combination highly recommended in my Smoothie book; unfortunately we couldn't really taste the mango as the predominant taste was watermelon, but it was quite pleasant anyway.

Today I got out the frappé maker and after lunch we had the first frappés of the year. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoy them!

Spending time with friends

On Sunday, I took my young friend Katie to the service at St Helena's Church (Katie claims to like the songs they sing there, and the peaceful atmosphere). Afterwards she had a couple of biscuits, and spoke to a few people who evidently found her delightful, and then we walked to the nearby Municipal Park. There's a playground with plenty of interesting things to climb on, but the day was warm and there wasn't any shade, so five minutes was plenty of time.

She suggested we go and look at the birds in cages nearby. They always make me feel rather sad - birds should be free, in my view, not sitting in small, hot cages. The peacock displayed his tail proudly, and Katie thought it would make a good photo:


I preferred this picture of Katie herself, who will soon be six and is growing up rapidly:


We heard some music being played, so we walked to another area of the park, to see some kind of event being set up. Then we walked home - the rest of her family were at another church service that morning.

I don't often spend time with Katie on her own, so it was fun to be able to read her a couple of chapters of 'The Folk of the Faraway Tree' by Enid Blyton (one of my very favourite books as a child) without interruption, followed by some watermelon to cool us down a bit, and then, for variety, a few chapters of 'Sophie Hits Six' by Dick King-Smith. That's one of the books that wasn't around when I was a child, but which I very much enjoyed during my sons' childhood.

Two days later was the regular Tuesday morning slot when my friend Sheila comes over for a couple of hours with Katie, Helen and Elisabeth. We started doing this about a year ago when the local Mother and Toddler group (which I used to help at) stopped running on a Tuesday.

Katie and Helen asked for some pictures to be printed - sometimes I very much appreciate the immediiacy of the Internet! - which they coloured; Katie is gradually decorating their room with nicely coloured pictures of animals, princesses and other subjects that appeal to her.

I read a couple more chapters of Faraway Tree, and also read a couple of picture books to Helen. Elisabeth played with Lego - she's been fascinated with it for several months now; of course we have to keep an eye on her as she's technically two years too young to play with Lego, but we keep the tiny pieces away from her.

Then Helen remembered the bubbles which I was given on my birthday over a year ago... we've finished two of the six bottles so far. They have been very successful! So out they came... Elisabeth (who will be a year old in a few days) is fascinated by bubbles:


And Helen, who is two-and-three-quarters and still seems to consider me her best friend, has recently learned to catch bubbles on the wand:

A slightly freaky experience

Things, as the old song says, ain't what they used to be.

When we first moved to Cyprus, at the end of 1997, it was considered a very safe country. Hardly anyone locked their cars; front doors would sit open all day long. A couple of times we went out, forgetting to close large windows in the bungalow we were renting. We did have a few unwelcome male cat visitors, who left their distinctive scent... but it never occurred to us that anyone might get inside and take something away.

Being British, we did tend to lock the car, and house when leaving them empty. We didn't leave computers or cameras visible in the car - no point leaving temptation in anyone's path - but we were pretty comfortable with the low level of crime around the island. Of course, there was corporate crime - failing businesses setting their offices on fire so as to get insurance money; tax-evasion; insurance claim fiddling. There were unpleasant crimes against animals, too. But it's a family-orientated culture, and it seemed that individuals and their homes were, on the whole, respected.

In 2004, Cyprus joined the EU. We looked forward to this - it meant that it was easier for Brits to live here, and it would mean higher standards of, for example, roads and sewage collection. Some older people were more cynical, telling us that joining Europe meant that we would also start to see European level crime rates. It was hard to believe at the time...

I don't know when it was that we started hearing about burglaries being on the increase. But within the last two years ,three families that we know well have been burgled. The police said that the culprits were Eastern European teenagers, probably working for someone else. Our friends lost laptops, money, jewellery... and the entry was, in each case, via a small, open bathroom window. We hoped we were safe, living upstairs in a three-storey house, with our bathroom on the top floor. But we started double-locking our front door at night, and taking laptops and purses upstairs rather than leaving them lying around in the living room.

I was a little anxious about keeping our kitchen window open for the cats to go in and out, but they had to jump on the outdoor part of an air conditioner to get in, and we didn't really think a person could manage it. And, indeed, we didn't have a problem.. other than the inevitable male cat visitors.

Earlier this year, two of the homes in our small street were burgled - again, through open windows, often not very accessible ones. So we started leaving our outside lights on all night. Richard installed a cat flap before leaving for the UK mid-April, too, and trained our cats to use that. It has the added bonus that fewer male cats have left their mark.

But despite these extra precautions, I've still felt pretty safe, on the whole. At this time of year I tend to throw open windows and doors around the house, and only close them if I go out, or at night.

At least, that was what happened until last Thursday.

Richard and his sailing buddy had flown to Italy for four days, to meet the people supplying their boat engine. I don't in the least mind a few days on my own, and was pottering around the house, doing various things, with my study door (onto a side balcony) wide open, as usual. I'd just had something to eat, and had gone back into the study to look at email when I became aware of someone outside. I thought at first that it was a friend come to call.. so I went out of the door...

.. and saw a young man, perhaps 16 or 17 years old. I don't know for sure if he was Eastern European, but that was my instant impression. He looked a bit startled to see me, so I said hello, raising my eyebrows in query.

He then said what sounded like 'Larnaka police'. Or, perhaps it was 'Larnaka polis' (town). He evidently didn't speak English, and the way he said 'Larnaka' was nothing like the way Cypriots say it.

Since I didn't know what he meant - and was feeling rather panicky anyway - I just shrugged.. and he turned and went away.

I went back inside and closed the door firmly. I saw that my handbag - with purse, camera, Kindle and more - was sitting on the sofa, just inside the room. If I had not been there, it would have been the work of about ten seconds for the young man to grab my bag and make off with it.

I peeked out of the front windows of our living room to see where he went, and saw him going up the stairs next-door. Their front door stood open. He went up to it, then backed away a little, Then he went closer, and started peeping inside. I wondered what on earth I would do if he went in, and emerged carrying something, but thankfully I didn't have to make a decision, since the man of the house appeared at the door, and they started talking. Perhaps the young man did, after all, speak Greek.

That night I was extra-careful to lock up the house and leave lights on. I put a box of Lego by the study door too, that would make a noise if anyone broke in and stepped in it in the dark. And I prayed for protection. Thankfully the house was still secure in the morning, and I haven't seen any sign of the young man returning. I was extremely pleased to see Richard home safely again last night!

Of course, I don't know for sure that the young man was an opportunistic thief. Perhaps he really did want to know where Larnaka town was, although it seems odd that he'd come upstairs and look so surprised to see me. However, I do totally believe that God was looking after me, ensuring that I was in my study when the young man appeared.

But I was freaked out sufficiently that I no longer leave my handbag on the sofa in full view of the door. Nor do I leave the door open any more. I really hope we won't reach the stage of needing security cameras and bars across the windows.. but, alas, gone are the days when Cyprus was considered a safe country to live in.

The first - and worst - sign that Summer is almost here.

Wednesday morning, June 1st, was bright and sunny, but it wasn't unpleasantly hot when I went downstairs first thing in the morning. Nothing to let me know that Summer is indeed here, in Cyprus.

Nothing, that is, until in my not-quite-awake morning-routine way I pulled the cords that open the curtains in my study.

'Plop!'

It wasn't a very loud noise, but out of the corner of my eye I noticed something fall to the floor.

Something brown, about an inch long, which quickly ran away.

Ugh. Shudder.

I didn't scream, as I did nearly fourteen years ago when I first saw one of these nasty creatures that somehow get inside our houses during the summer months, but I did make a loud gasp. Then I rushed for the Biokill, and sprayed the area where it had disappeared to. And other darker spots in the room where I thought it might go.

Then I went to make my morning coffee. And to fetch a yogurt pot. Thankfully I spotted the nasty insect running across the floor, apparently undeterred by the Biokill, and managed to clamp the pot over it. Then, hearing it struggling, and concerned that one of the cats might knock the pot off, I put the Biokill container on top to weigh it down:


And there it still sits.

On Friday, when I was sweeping my study, I found another one under the sofa - thankfully not alive; perhaps the Biokill was effective anyway. I took a deep breath and swept it out of the door. That one was easy.

This morning I had to repress a shudder again, as I found one in an unexpected place where I wasn't expecting anything to move....


-oh, and if anyone is in doubt about what exactly I am talking about - you can find the answer in this post about yogurt pots and nasty insects!