Continuing unpacking

For the last couple of days, we've been working on Daniel's room. Richard hasn't finished the desk under the bed yet, but Tim will be sleeping in there for the next fortnight, when another guest will be staying with us, and sleeping in Tim's room. The mattress was delivered last week, and we hope to have Dan's room in some semblance of order by Sunday...


It's a good motivation to unpack the pile of boxes that were stacked in the corner! I started with the books - that was easy as he doesn't have a huge number and they easily fit in his two bookcases.


Then I tried to separate paperwork from useful things and also see if there was any real clutter that could be discarded. Dan liked to collect anything and everything! When we moved house, we did get rid of a large quantity of empty tissue boxes, milk bottles, kitchen roll centre tubes, and the like. Yesterday I also decided to discard several holey socks which he was going to make into glove puppets, or put around juggling balls to make poi. After all, by the time he comes back after two years away, I'm sure he'll have collected many more holey socks.

But it still all seemed rather overwhelming!

Last night Richard cut up some white melamine board someone had given him, and made three shelves in one of Dan's closets, so I could unpack and sort some more. Four main categories: ornaments, music things, juggling equipment, art supplies.


This morning I unpacked his box of CDs and put the computer ones in his computer CD folder. He took a small selection of music CDs with him, but there were at least 60 more packed in a box, all muddled up with the computer ones. Amongst them I also discovered two other CDs which we had thought were lost, which didn't belong to Dan at all!


Today I saw him online on Instant Messenger, and he said I could also throw away his Marmite jar collection. About eight of them, cleaned and filled with polystyrene packing beads, packed neatly away in shoe boxes. So we're getting there, slowly...

Panic over!

There was Marmite in Metro again this morning. I bought two 250g jars, which should last us about a month.

What a relief!

Disappearing from the shelves...

We're getting used to the vagaries of Cyprus supermarkets. Well, we should be after eight-and-a-half years! Seasonal fruit and vegetables make sense. We miss oranges in the summer, and grapes in the winter, but realise it's better for us - and the environment in general - to have fresh locally grown produce (on the whole) rather than fruit that's forced and then shipped across the world.

We cope, too, with things occasionally vanishing from the shelves entirely. It's happened once or twice with vanilla essence (extract). The disgusting artificial vanilla flavouring is there, but no essence. So we do without. No big deal. Last time I was in the UK we bought a large bottle from Lakeland, and that should last us a couple of years, at least. Peppermint essence hasn't been available for a couple of years now, but again - it's not a huge problem. We only want it about twice a year, anyway, for making peppermint creams or choc-mint ice cream.

It's more of a problem when water filters vanish, but they soon reappear. Last time we wanted to change the one in the kitchen, we had to wait a couple of extra weeks. The mains water tasted a bit chemically, but we could always buy bottled water.

A bigger problem still is that Biokill - our insecticide of choice - has been gone for about six months now. It's environmentally friendly, and (most important) safe for all warm-blooded animals. Such as cats - and of course people! So I usually spray the insides of our kitchen cabinets with Biokill, to keep away ants in the summer, and all entry points to the house to deter cockroaches. But Biokill has not been seen since last summer... and I'm not sure what we'll do once insects start appearing again.

However none of these compare to the huge problem we found this morning: there was no Marmite in Metro! They reorganised the shop a while ago so we thought perhaps it had been moved, but no - it was gone. We couldn't even find the place where it should have been.

Perhaps only other Brits can appreciate the enormity of this. How can we manage without Marmite? I eat it with peanut butter, with cheese, with cream cheese and coleslaw. It's a great source of B-vitamins, and it's delicious! Of course a medium (250g) jar will last us a couple of weeks now that Dan's not at home any more, and we still have about half a jar left so it's not quite an emergency yet. We just hope this is only temporary and that it will be back soon. We know from experience that there's little point searching in the other supermarkets: if something's gone from Metro, it's almost certainly gone from Orphanides and Chris too.

When we lived in the USA we survived by asking all guests to bring out Marmite - in the large, 500g jars, which aren't available here - and when we ran out, we managed to find a small and expensive 'British foods' shop which, joy of joys, sold Marmite. But we don't have any guests coming for awhile, and as it comes in glass jars it's not something that can be posted.

Perhaps life in Cyprus isn't as easy as it sometimes seems...

How do they do it?!

I know of some people who can cook vast quantities of delicious food, and be relaxed and waiting half an hour before guests arrive, with food fully prepared, and kitchens cleaned. Sometimes they have considerably less workspace than I have but still emerge smiling.

On Wednesdays we usually have a colleague or two of Richard's to lunch. Our lunches are basically cold: bread-based, with salad veggies, cheese, marmite, etc. In the summer we have grapes to follow, most days (local Cyprus grapes are excellent in season); in autumn and winter when I'm more inclined to spend time in the kitchen, I'll often make some kind of cake if guests are coming.

So, today I planned to bake gingerbread. Easy-peasy, throw the ingredients together, put mixture in a lined roasting pan, 40 minutes in the oven. I didn't plan to make any bread as one loaf wouldn't be enough for six people, so Tim went out to buy fresh bread from our local baker's.

Then I thought about some soup. Nothing complicated: just a leftover vegetable soup. My 'more-with-less cookbook' suggests putting any leftover veggies, rice, pasta, cooking water etc in a large plastic container in the freezer. Then, when it's full, cook them all together with a bit of extra water, liquidise, re-heat, and serve. I had collected a box of this kind of leftovers, so stuck it all in a large pan and put it on to simmer.

Then I remembered we had run out of home-made lemonade, there were no useable lemons in the supermarket last week, and our bottle of commercial lemon squash was almost empty. The boys and I mostly drink plain water, but Richard likes some fruity concentrate added, as do the guests. So, as we had some oranges (and more on a tree outside) and half a litre of frozen lemon juice (though no peel), I decided to try and orange squash drink from one of my recipe books, that uses both oranges and lemons. Not difficult, so I washed and peeled the oranges, squeezed the juice, and prepared it.

I started all this about nine o'clock, thinking that would give LOADS of time.

By 11.15 I thought I was well-organised. Gingerbread was in the oven, orange squash was cooling in its pan, soup had finished simmering and was also cooling, prior to being liquidised. Tim had made some egg mayonnaise too, and that was in the fridge. Both the boys asked to do tests for their home education coursework at that stage, so I went through to the dining room to supervise those. Dan's was fairly quick - only twenty questions, not particularly difficult, on New Testament church history. Tim's was a maths test, but it was from a workbook he had found fairly easy, so even though maths tests can take an hour or more, this one was only about 25 minutes long. I marked the tests, then returned to the kitchen to take out the gingerbread - which, I was pleased to see, seemed to have cooked perfectly.

I scooped out about a litre of the soup, added a little extra water, and liquidised it.

Then... I wondered where to put it! I couldn't return it to the same pan, since there were another couple of litres of mixture that also needed to be turned into soup. I couldn't put it in one of the small saucepans, or it would overflow. The pan I needed to transfer it to was the other large one currently containing cooling orange squash.

I temporarily abandoned the soup in the blender, and started to strain the orange mixture. It made about two litres, so I bottled that and put it in the fridge. Then I had to wash the pan, which was a bit complicated because the washing-up bowl had been moved to the side of the sink, and the sink itself was full of pans, mixing bowls and spoons from making the gingerbread.
Eventually I had a clean pan to transfer the soup to, and was able to liquidise the rest and then put it on to simmer once more, now looking like soup rather than sad watery vegetables. So that was fine..

Trouble was, by this time the kitchen was in utter chaos. Then I remembered that I had a load of laundry to hang outside, and when I opened the back door I saw that two loads of yesterday's laundry was still hanging out. Totally dry, but it had to be sorted and put away.

So at 12.30 I collected up each person's clean, dry laundry, and put it in the relevant rooms, then hung out today's wet stuff. At 12.45 I cut up the gingerbread and put it on a plate, then began the mountain of dish-washing.... and gradually felt less and less relaxed. Not that it would matter if the kitchen was still a mess, of course; I just couldn't understand why, with four hours available, I couldn't succeed in making ultra-easy soup, fairly-easy lemonade, and reasonably-easy gingerbread AND have a clean kitchen at the end of it.

Oh well.

The soup tasted all right - better than I had expected, actually. The orange was popular although I thought it had a slightly bitter aftertaste. The gingerbread was fine. Half of it's gone in the freezer for some future occasion, along with about half the soup which wasn't finished, so it was all worth doing. I just wish it didn't take me so long to cook things that are basically so straightforward.

Cost of living in Cyprus

Anvilcloud commented that people from the USA and Canada think of Europe as an expensive place to live. I've heard this kind of comment before from North Americans; indeed in the past year when the US dollar has lost a lot in value against world currencies, I know of some American families who've had to return to the USA or who have struggled greatly to make their US income stretch to live here.

On the other hand, we found it very expensive to live in the USA when we spent two years there, back in 1992. Again the exchange rate was relevant: at the time, the pound sterling was only worth about $1.50 and our income was in sterling. But we know of other Brits who consider America an expensive place to live.

Meanwhile I fairly often get asked what the cost of living is here, so I thought I'd explore the subject a little for future reference. 'Expensive' is a relative term, and if you're living on another country's currency, the exchange rate is crucial. A small change in the rate can increase - or decrease - your income drastically. We tend to track on oanda although it doesn't give the exact rates that we can find in the banks. But it shows the trends.

According to Oanda, the Cyprus pound is currently equivalent to:

American dollars - $2.12
Canadian dollars - $2.61
British pounds - £1.21
Euros - €1.75

- but these vary. Anyone seriously wishing to research this will need to check their own currency, and the current rate.

So, to the cost of living. All values given in Cyprus pounds, which use the same symbol as UK pounds sterling, but which are divided into 100 Cyprus cents rather than pence.

Renting in Larnaka is pretty inexpensive, in my view. For about £100 per month it's possible to find a reasonable two-bedroom flat (apartment). Rent for a three- or four-bedroom bungalow or house is usually in the region of about £300 or a bit more, depending on condition and neighbourhood. We actually pay a bit less than that for our 4-bedroom bungalow in a nice district, but that's because it's not in very good condition on the outside, and we do inside maintenance ourselves.

Of course it's possible to find luxury homes with swimming pools at far higher rents, and in other cities on the island costs do tend to be a bit higher for similar properties.

Buying a small flat in Larnaka starts at about £50,000; houses start about £100,000. But that's even more variable, depending on where you go and who you know. It's possible to buy land and have a house built for rather less than this, since labour costs tend to be low. Several of our friends have done that.

Rental does not usually include any utilities. Our electricity bill is typically about £60 - £120 bi-monthly, depending on the season. In the summer we run a lot of fans overnight, and an air-conditioner by day. But the sun is sufficient for solar heating of all our hot water. In the winter we run some electric heaters, and also have to use an electric water heater. So the bills are lowest in the spring and autumn.

Our water bill is usually about £10 per quarter. I think this is remarkably low - water is metered, and even in the summer when I'm thoroughly watering the garden once a week (and it's a huge garden) the bill only goes up by a few pounds.

There's no piped gas; instead we buy gas barrels for our gas cooker. We get ours delivered, and pay about £20 every two to three months. Some people buy them at the supermarkets, and save a little by doing so; however so many people get back injuries as a result, we decided to pay a bit more and have them delivered.

The phone bill is very low, but then we dont use the phone much. The standing charge is about £6 per month, our call charges are usually in the region of £3. However our entire phone bill per month is about £40-£45 because we're on broadband internet and subscribe through the phone company - so that includes our broadband charges and ISP subscription. Before we had broadband, our phone bill was higher from all the dial-up charges!

Mobile phone charges are very inexpensive. Contracts (for those resident on the island) are £1 per month, or £2 per month, depending which sort you want. Actual call charges are not much more than landline charges, text messages are 1c each, and the contract includes 30 free texts per month. Alternatively the pay-as-you-go Cyprus-only cards start at £5, and - for instance - Tim finds one lasts him at least six months.

Insurance is pretty cheap too, but obviously depends what you want to insure, and what excess - if any - you're prepared to have. The medical insurance we've taken out costs just over £400 per year for the four of us, but that only covers hospital stays. It's about what we paid per month in the USA!! However emergency care is free for everyone here, as is some treatment at hospitals, and an ordinary visit to any kind of doctor is typically about £10 - £15.

As for groceries - typically we pay about £75 per week. I don't think that's too bad for a family of four including two teenage boys, plus four cats. It would be possible to spend less, but we do buy some ready-made imported things such as breakfast cereals, Marmite, veggie sausages etc. In the summer we buy even more pre-prepared foods - such as frozen pies, or ready-made spaghetti sauce - as it's far too hot to do much cooking. But oddly, the grocery bill doesn't seem to go up much as a result.

So that covers the basic cost of living here. Household appliances and furniture vary enormously in price. For very rough figures, check online at Dalco, a discount store not far from where we live, although by shopping around we've found most things slightly cheaper at other places. People who've just arrived can always check the Larnaka Thrift Store, which has lots of stock in good condition, mostly at excellent prices.

Clothes too vary a great deal in cost, with significant sales in January and July. It's possible to spend vast amounts on brand-name clothes from boutiques, or very little in markets, supermarkets or other discount stores. We recently bought adult-size plain tee-shirts for £2 each, bermuda-length shorts for about £7 each, and jeans for about £5 each.

Cost of labour is one of the things that still surprises us, as it's very low. A plumber spent about an hour here, including changing a small part, and charged us £5. Our washing machine went wrong, and the engineer came out the same day, changed part of the spinning mechanism, and charged us £7. A good haircut lasting nearly an hour is £4. A one-on-one music lesson for an hour is at most £7.50.

However when one gets to books, CDs and DVDs, prices become higher. I suppose this reflects the general trend that it's easy to live here cheaply, but luxury goods are expensive. Unfortunately we consider books a necessity in our family! The thrift store does have some books at 50c each, but the stock doesn't change very fast and we've bought all the ones we want to read. The only library is 90% Greek with very little of interest in English. There are some bookshops with a fair selection of English books, but they charge full list price in Cyprus pounds - which is currently 20% more than the UK price. DVDs tend to start about £12.99.

So we buy almost all books and DVDs online, usually from Play.com which offers free postage anywhere in Europe, and prices mostly about40% less than list price.

Petrol (gasoline) has just gone up to about 50c per litre, which is probably high compared to the USA, but still low compared with the UK. However we only spend about £10 per month on petrol typically, because distances are so small and most places within Larnaka are within walking distance. Repairs on the car vary, but we've discovered an excellent mechanic who seems to charge little more than the cost of the parts, and does a great job.

Then there are true luxury goods - hi-fi equipment, digital cameras and so on. Those are definitely expensive here, and again we tend to buy in the UK on the rare occasions we want something like this. US prices tend to be better still, but shipping rates are high from the USA to Europe.

Oh, and eating out - important to visitors and those from the USA, less so to residents. We eat out ourselves about twice a year, plus sometimes with guests. It's quite possible to get a good meal on the sea-front, including soft drinks and dessert, for about £6-7 per person. At nicer restaurants we'd expect the cost to be about £10-£15 per person. Again this is less than the UK, but more than the USA; however we recently learned that in the USA a tip of 20% is expected, since many waiters and waitresses don't get a salary! If this is true, that would put the price up considerably. In the UK, a tip of 10% (or perhaps a little more) is generally expected when service is good; in Cyprus tips are optional, and not expected at all at the cheaper restaurants.

So... is it expensive to live here? It depends what you want to do. If you want a luxurious home, designer clothes, top-of-the range technology, and pre-processed food (or restaurants) then yes, it probably is. On the other hand, if you're going to live like a local with mostly seasonal food that you cook yourself, in an ordinary home with basic equipment, it's easy to manage quite happily on a figure that - even given the exchange rate - would probably count as below the poverty line in the USA.

A Long and Detailed Post about a 'Typical' Day.... part 2

(Here's a photo of the orange tree. The blossom just about shows... unfortunately it's not possible to send the scent!)

9.00 - Took my shower; the water was just the right temperature to run the hot only. The bath was looking a bit soapy so I gave it a quick clean, then as I was getting dressed I saw a large insect on the wall. My instant reaction was that it was like an emormous mosquito - with the body at least 3cm long. I couldn't think what it was... not big enough for a dragonfly, though, so probably harmless. And it wasn't flying around. Suddenly I remembered what it was: a daddy long-legs (aka crane fly, I believe). I can't remember having seen one of those for years and have no idea what it was doing in our bathroom in the morning. I made sure the window was open wide so it could escape if it wished to... I don't like insects, and was glad I hadn't noticed it before taking my shower, but I don't like personally killing anything bigger than a mosquito.

Had a quick look at tonight's menu - we keep a four-week plan of evening meals on the fridge, which makes life so much easier. Tim organised this a few years back. Tonight is Stove-top barbecue Chicken for the meat-eaters, molasses bean bake for the veggies, with potato wedges, courgettes and broad beans. Remembered that I used up the last of the frozen pre-cooked beans, so put some more on to soak. Remembered that soya beans take a lot longer than others, so I put them in a separate pan; in the large one I used about a cup each of aduki beans, pinto beans, black-eye beans and black turtle beans. I gave up using red kidney beans ages ago when I realised they give me stomach-ache, no matter how well-cooked they are, and they're recommended to 'avoid' for my blood group in the ER4YT plans, which I loosely follow.

Went to get breakfast for myself - there's still plenty of the pear mixture from yesterday, and some lovely big strawberries. I had a bit of home made yogurt with it too. As I was about to start eating I saw Tim wander through to the bathroom in his pyjamas, then come out again, then go back with some newspaper, then come out again... 'Oh,' he said, 'I've just killed a daddy long-legs.' Ah well, that solves that one. Dan looked in at the door, dressed and ready to go, and said he was off. The performance this morning is at 10am apparently.

Tim had breakfast with me and finished yesterday's pear mixture. I commented on the current glut of pears meaning that they're selling off bags of slightly bruised pears very cheaply, yet it's spring and I doubt if they grow in Cyprus at all. We wondered where they came from - presumably somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere where it would currently be Autumn. South Africa, perhaps? It doesn't usually mention country of origin at the supermarket.

That reminded Tim to ask me if I knew what a 'tim-tam' is. Apparently one of his online friends in Australia is going to the USA soon and is going to miss tim-tams (and also Marmite). I've never heard of them...

Tim went to have his shower and I cleared up the kitchen, then realised I couldn't do the washing up since water used in the kitchen affects the flow of water in the bathroom. Still, I put away the clean glasses and wiped the kitchen surfaces. I noticed Richard's mobile phone ringing three times during the last 20 minutes or so... I'm glad our main phone isn't so active.

I checked my watch and found it was already 9.30... I wish I knew where time rushes by to. I don't seem to have done anything yet, but have already been up for two hours. Sigh.

Richard dashed into the kitchen to say goodbye; apparently there's a problem at the theatre with the lighting desk so he's popping in there to see if he can solve it before the show.

A Long and Detailed Post about a 'Typical' Day.... part 5

(The yogurt maker [and steamer, and bottles of water] on top of hte washing machine in our rather tastelessly tiled kitchen - not our taste!! It's a rental house....) 

12.30 - Richard and Tim should be back in half an hour or so, so there's just time to read the various forums I belong to online and any more email that might have arrived in the meantime.

Did that - it took about ten minutes. Checked the BBC news site briefly, and the Cyprus weather page - they're still predicting rain for Friday and the weekend. I do hope they're right and that it's more than a few spots.

Not much that's new on the forums, and nothing I want to reply to! Remembered that I finished reading a book last night so that needs to be added to my books blog so went to do that, only to find that the main blogger page is down with an apology message from the engineers. So instead I read the latest entries from people whose blogs I enjoy... at least they're still showing. The technical glitch reminded me that sometimes entire databases do disappear, so I copied all my previous entries into a text document for keeping on my hard drive.

12.55 - went to get some bread from our local bakery, and some milk since we had nearly run out. I love the bakery - the smells are wonderful, the selection of bread excellent. We usually avoid the various cakes and pastries although sometimes guests are intrigued (and often treat us!) - if we ate them every day we'd put on vast amounts of weight. There's a refrigerated section too with dairy products, ham, humus (etc) and also some soft drinks. Very useful when we run out of milk as this bakery is open for about 14 hours every day other than Christmas and Greek Easter. We usually get through abpit a loaf of bread each day. Today I chose a brown oval one that I quite like - there weren't any of my favourite, a square brown loaf rather like those available in British bakeries.

When I got back Dan set the table and I phoned Richard to check that he and Tim were coming back shortly. Then sat down to have a quick look at this week's Sunday School lesson, just in case there was anything I need to do in advance. It looks like quite a nice one, about the disciples on the road to Emmaus after the Resurrection.

Then I washed some lettuce and cherry tomatoes for lunch, and realised the fridge was a bit over-crowded with leftovers from previous night's meals. I re-packed two portions of cauliflower cheese and half a portion of sausage-tomato bake in tubs and put them in the freezer, and we got out last night's leftover beef and mushroom pie, and cheese and onion pie, as we knew Tim would probably eat them for lunch.

1.20 - Tim and Richard were back, I washed some lettuce and tomatoes, and we had lunch. We almost always have a cold lunch (other than on Sundays) with bread, cheese, salads etc, and anything else we come across in the fridge. Sure enough, Tim ate his way through about 1/4 of the meat pie, and 1/2 the cheese pie... he loves pies! The rest of us ate sandwiches as usual. My favourite at present is marmite, cheese, cherry tomatoes and pickle.

We usually chat about all kinds of things around the table - today it was mostly about the theatre, talking about some people who booked it at the weekend but left it in a terrible mess, and some frustrations Richard's had at work this morning.

At the end of the meal Richard made coffee for himself and me, and blackcurrant and green tea for Daniel. Tim doesn't really like hot drinks.

2.00 - Richard went back to the office; Tim cleared the table and then did some piano practice; Dan was doing something on their computer. I went to take some photos of the garden and in looking out of the kitchen window noticed how bad the weeds are in the little patch of ground there... and also realised that the grass there (such as it is) quite badly needs cutting. So I did about 20 minutes' worth of weeding before I became too hot to stay outside (why, oh why can't I remember that I should always wear gardening gloves before pulling up nettles?!) and then washed up from lunch.

2.30 - Sat down to try again with my books blog, but the system is still down. Strange. Quickly read through the email that had arrived since this morning, and some which I hadn't read earlier. Checked the forums again - not much that's new. Read a few articles at the BBC news site - the earthquake in Indonesia on Monday has been absolutely devastating, even without the feared tsunami afterwards. Apparently over 1000 are dead. Terrible.

3.00 - Dan did some drum practice (much to the disgust of Sophia, his cat); Tim was reading mail and forums on his computer. I did about five minutes of juggling - just ordinary three-ball juggling. A couple of weeks ago I couldn't do more than four throws without dropping the balls or ending up with them all in my hands, but suddenly about a week ago something clicked and I did eight... now I can fairly easily do up to about 12 throws, and actually managed 18 one time today. Apparently it's opening up new neural pathways in my brain.... not sure if I'll manage any of the complex tricks and patterns Dan can do, but if I could get to 50 throws I'd feel I could say 'I can juggle'!

It's surprisingly tiring even though I juggle next to the bed so it's not too far to bend to pick up dropped balls. So after that I sat down to read my current Georgette Heyer novel for 25 minutes.