What to see in Larnaka

 For the first ten days of the month, we had some friends visiting: a couple we used to know well when we lived in Colorado Springs, back in the early 1990s.  We had not seen one of them for over thirty years! It was wonderful to spend time together, and also to show them something of the area. Richard took a week off (well, mostly off...) and took them on a few trips further afield. But we also liked showing them some of the sights and places of interest in and around Larnaka. 

On the first morning, we took a walk to the Salt Lake trail. We only went as far as the bird-watching platform, and it was disappointing: a couple of flamingoes in the distance, and not much else. There haven't been as many flamingoes as usual this year, and signs have been posted clearly prohibiting visitors from leaving the trail and walking closer to the lake. I didn't take any photos.

In the afternoon, we walked along Larnaka sea front, looking at statues and shops, and eventually reached St Lazarus Church. This is where Lazarus - sister of Mary and Martha - came to be bishop, and where he was buried, according to tradition, when he died for the second time. 

There's often construction or repair work going on, and sometimes hordes of pigeons in the grounds. But we didn't see many birds, and the church was open for visitors. One has to dress appropriately - no shorts, or bare shoulders. But it's February; we were all dressed in long trousers and more than one warm, long-sleeved layer. 

I've been inside the church several times previously, and am not a huge fan of the ornate decorations found in many Greek Orthodox churches. But it's an interesting place to see, and visitors always seem impressed with the interior. Here's just one image (taken by one of our friends).

I didn't go down to the crypt, although our friends did. 

Not far from St Lazarus is the Larnaka mosque:

We didn't go inside - I'm not sure if it was open to the public. But it's also quite an impressive looking building. It was closed down when we first moved here, but there's a growing Muslim population, including some of the asylum seekers and refugees, and so the mosque is now refurbished and used. 

Walking back to the sea-front, the third imposing building is the old fort:

We didn't go inside that, either. It was near to the closing time, and we didn't want to have to pay for just twenty minutes or so inside.  From past experience, it's not all that extensive or exciting anyway. But we could see through the entrance:

It's nicely renovated, and although I haven't been for some years now, I understand there's an indoor mini museum as well as the uncovered area, and information about how the fort was used, many years ago.

On Tuesday afternoon, we had thought of going to Cyherbia. But when Richard checked the location on his phone, we learned that it was closed during February, other than at weekends. So instead we drove to the Oroklini bird-watching platform, hoping to get a better view of flamingoes. We had never been there before, but other friends who visit go there regularly.  I was quite surprised at the impressive view of Oroklini lake:

The platform has a display showing different kinds of local birds, and our friends were able to identify many of them. We did see flamingoes, although not many, and not very close. 

Then we went to have ice cream on the Makenzy promenade, and walked around the fishing 'village' - really a kind of mini harbour for fishing boats. 

On other days our friends went sailing, and we drove to Curium, which I'll write about in a separate post at some point. We had a couple of take-away evening meals, and were treated to a meze at our favourite restaurant, Kyra Giorgena. 

We decided, after all, not to visit CyHerbia this time. On Saturday morning - when it was raining - Richard took our friends to see Angeloktisti (the church of the angels) in Kiti. Then they went to the Sultan Tekke mosque near the Salt Lake. All worth seeing, but I had seen them before and needed to do things at home. 

There are several museums in Larnaka, but we decided against going to any of those - we didn't need to fill up every minute of time with places of interest. Just walking around the block, seeing typical Cypriot homes, is something of an adventure to people new to the country.

But we did do two more fairly local things: we drove to the top of Rizoleia hill to see the view over Larnaka (and to have some hot drinks).

And on our friends' last afternoon, after a morning trip to Nicosia with Richard, one of our friends and Richard went to Salina Park, for more hot drinks, and time to chat.

It was good to have places to visit and see that were within walking distance, or a short drive, rather than taking up a whole morning or day out.  The weather was mostly dry and sunny, but not over-warm, so we didn't have ice cream more than once. Nor did we go to the beach. Since there were no children, we also didn't go to any of the many playgrounds that can be found within Larnaka and nearby locations. 

Repairing the Roof

Anyone who has followed or popped into this blog over the course of the past decade and a half will probably have come across mention of our roof leaking. It's not uncommon in Cyprus to have areas where heavy rain leads to dripping through the roof, and we're thankful that it's only ever been above the stairs. Since stairs don't generally have carpets here, it's annoying but it doesn't take long to mop it up afterwards.

And if you haven't come across any of those posts, and/or are interested in seeing some, this post from 2009 was all about rain, with a photo at the end of our cool box and a yellow bucket strategically placed to catch the drips. In our first few years here, we had two or three people come to look at the roof.  One or two broken tiles got fixed, and suggestions were made, but in the end the regular response was along the lines of, 'This is Cyprus. Roofs leak.' 

The problem was that it got worse each year, or so it seemed. Then in 2010, a couple of Richard's sailing friends took a look at the roof, and discovered a hole, and also a large amount of pigeon mess which was making the rain bounce in an odd direction. I wrote in this post about how they cleaned the mess away, and sealed the hole. And it definitely helped the problem that winter.  

But a year later, there was more torrential rain, and once again our roof leaked. I wrote this post, illustrated again with a photo, except that by then we had moved from a yellow bucket to a blue one. In 2014, we had some loft insulation installed, and another hole in the roof was fixed. And so it went on... each year, we expected rain through the roof when the wind was high and the rain was heavy.

So it wasn't any surprise that it happened this year, when it rained - except that it seemed considerably worse than last year's. Out came the cool box again, although this time it was accompanied by a large empty paint pot. 

But I had to remove photos from the walls, something I hadn't had to do for some years. And it seemed that the rain was coming through in more places than previously. We realised it had been a while since the roof was last cleaned, and we knew there was a lot of bird mess up there. So we called our friendly roofing guy, who eventually came at the end of last week, with another guy, to check the roof and fix whatever problems they could find.

It was important that they came on Friday, as heavy rain was predicted for last weekend, and our roofing friend told us he'd been asked, urgently, to look at two other roofs as well that morning. 

It turned out that there were more problems than just an excess of bird mess. Richard had asked if something could be done to make the problem less severe in future, possibly by moving some of the pipes on the roof. Since I didn't go up there (and have no wish to do so) I didn't entirely understand, but it all sounded like a good idea. 

However, when they moved the pipes, they discovered an entire area of the roof that had never been sealed, with some wood that was rotting away. 

And when they'd replaced the wood and sealed the area, they went over the whole roof carefully. They discovered a couple of broken tiles which they removed and replaced. Here are the broken ones:

I think the roofing guys expected to be here for about an hour, but in the end it was nearly three hours. Thankfully it hadn't started raining, so after cleaning up they hurried off to the next job, hoping to fix another roof before the predicted rain.

Except that it didn't rain. There was a bit of lightning and thunder in the distance, but not a drop of rain. On Saturday evening we had maybe five minutes of light rain, but not the kind that would have leaked through. On Sunday it stayed fine and sunny. 

I don't think I have ever before heard Richard express a wish that we could have some really heavy rain - not because he likes rain, but because we would really like to know if this latest repairwork has actually fixed the problem, at least for this winter. 

There's rain predicted for later this week, and Saturday, so maybe we'll find out then:

Or maybe it will be another fine weekend.  Perhaps fixing the roof is the equivalent of going out with an umbrella, and ensures that it won't rain after all. 

Lady Jane, Cat Grass and Birds...

Lady Jane Grey, our smaller cat, has lived with us for over four years now. She moved into our household when our younger son Tim moved back to the UK, and although it took her a few weeks to adjust - and maybe a year to be fully integrated, she and Alexander the Great are now good buddies - typical siblings, in fact. Sometimes getting alone well, sometimes looking out for each other, sometimes play-fighting and scampering all over the house.

But despite being originally from the same litter, they are very different in personality. Alex is placid, on the whole, quite demanding when he wants attention, and generally interested in people. Alex goes outside when he wants to during the daytime, although we keep him in at night. But, as with most cats, he spends a lot of his time asleep, oblivious to his surroundings. 

Jane is a lot more skittish. She's around half Alex's weight, and an excellent jumper. She is quite picky about who she gives her affection to; it's taken her four years to accept Richard properly, although she does now settle on him sometimes. She's nervous of visitors, other than those she has known for years, and she's terrified of workmen of any kind.  She sleeps, but usually remains very alert. 

Jane doesn't go out at all; two years living in a flat, with nowhere to go outside, means that she hasn't developed any road sense. And the few times she has managed to get out, she's been terrified; so much so that she's mostly entirely happy to stay inside. 

However, that means that her diet is limited to the cat food we give her: wet food at lunchtime, dry food available all day. The first time we wondered whether she needed something extra was three-and-a-half years ago, when she started nibbling bits out of a bouquet I had been given. We don't often have flowers, but the same thing has happened any time I'm given any - she sniffs around carefully, then finds something which takes her fancy, and starts chewing.

Around the time this happened in the summer, I discovered that it was possible to buy grass seeds specially intended for cats. The grass grows quickly, and provides a few extra vitamins and minerals.  I discovered some on Amazon, and since I was ordering something else anyway, I added a pack of seeds to the order. 

I planted some of them in a little pot, as directed, and within about five days they had grown to a height of around five or six centimetres.  I put them on the table in the living room, wondering if - as is typical for cats - she would entirely ignore them. 

But she was immediately drawn to them: 

She was so enthusiastic that I wondered if she was going to eat the entire pot's worth of grass. But instead she just gently nibbled the ends, until each stem was at a length of about 2cm:

They grew a bit more overnight, and the following morning she repeated the process.  After a couple of days I planted another pot, and when those seeds had grown to a reasonable amount, I started alternating them indoors, so that they had more of a chance to grow. When I open the kitchen doors in the morning, Jane goes and checks her grass, and usually has a quick munch. Then she takes no notice of them for the rest of the day.

Alexander, meanwhile, doesn't even seem to have noticed that they are there. But he's never been interested in bouquets, either. 

I don't know if Jane is now feeling fitter and healthier, or if she feels the need of more protein in her diet, to balance the green stuff, but she's started another new habit within the last few months. And we really don't like this one at all.

The one place where she can get outside into the sunshine is a biggish balcony area outside our bedroom, where Richard sits in the morning to eat his breakfast. Tbe cats usually join him, and about six months ago we used an old dust sheet with a ladder that's up there to make them a kind of den or playhouse. And they did play in it, batting each other through the cloth, for the first few weeks. 

But it grew hotter, and Alex mostly just flopped when he was outside, rather than joining in with anything. Jane, who likes the weather to be very hot (she refuses to stay in a room with air conditioning on) stayed indoors during most of the summer months, as it was cooler outside on the balcony, first thing. 

However, in the past few weeks, she has taken to hiding under this den. When cats can't see out, they assume they cannot be seen.  Nobody would guess there was a grey-and-white cat sitting under that dustsheet (which was a curtain originally), after all: 

It took us a while to realise that she wasn't just meditating, or needing time to herself when she sits up there, sometimes for hours. Instead, she was waiting for a bird to land on the balcony. There seem to be birds nesting in part of our roof, and they often fly overhead.  Alex has occasionally caught one, and brought it into the house fluttering around, much to my horror.  Jane, until this summer, had rarely caught anything bigger than a lizard. 

But she is more subtle than her brother. She seems to know that we don't want her chasing birds around the house. And it all happens when we're not there, so it's still speculation, though it's not at all Alex's style. The first time I found a little pile of feathers at the end of the ladder, I was a bit surprised, but swept them up (not an easy thing to do!) and thought no more about it.

Until it happened a second time.  And a third time:

It's not entirely obvious from the photo, but there are yet more tiny feathers in a pile at the end of the ladder. Jane, at six years old, has turned into a hunter. It doesn't seem to have done her any harm; indeed she's looking healthier than ever, and also a bit fatter.  I thought at first that she was fluffing her fur out to keep warm, in this chilly (to her) 25 degree temperature we now have in the house.  But I wonder if the combination of cat grass and fresh birds is giving her the nutrition she actually needs.

Short of keeping her inside the house all the time, not allowing her even on the balcony (which would be very stressful for her), I don't see any way of stopping it.  At least she's not bringing them into the house. 

How to stop random birds from nesting on air conditioners...

There are a lot of birds around here - pigeons mostly - and they're a bit of a nuisance. They flap around the rooftops, producing droppings that either mess up the outside steps, or - worse - make a kind of channel in the tiles that can cause serious leakages when it rains heavily, as it does from time to time in the winter months.

They also like to nest on top of the outside sections of air conditioning units. Any time I opened my study door during nesting season, until about six months ago, I'd hear a fluttering and flapping and birds would take off hastily, while bits of stick landed on the ground below. Sometimes the cats would sit at the window, or on the chair below the air conditioner, chattering noisily, trying to protect the house - or, depending on the cat, trying unsuccessfully to fly after the birds.

I know, I know. This is very much a 'first world' problem. The birds don't, as far as we know, carry disease, and we're very blessed to have a house at all, let alone air conditioners. We don't want to harm the birds so we're not going to put out poison, as some locals might consider. And while we talked about putting a kind of netting on parts of the roof, it was complicated to do and would have made it even more difficult to clean if droppings landed anyway.

Then, perhaps eight months ago, Sheila and I were talking to an acquaintance on the Salt Lake trail one morning. She said something about using plastic snakes to keep the birds away. I was skeptical; it sounded like a coincidence to me, and I didn't think birds could be quite so stupid as to think a toy snake was real... could they?

A few days later, Richard and I were in Kleima, a big shop that sells hardware and household goods and some furniture and various other random items. As I was wandering up the aisles looking for something we needed, I spotted a tray of remarkably realistic looking plastic snakes. They cost a couple of euros each, and I recalled the recent conversation. Shuddering slightly as I chose a green and curly serpent, I added it to our shopping basket.

One of the cats saw the snake sitting on our living room table after we got home, and approached cautiously. A quick sniff and she realised it was harmless, so she batted it a little and then ignored it. The others didn't even bother to investigate. I know birds are less intelligent than cats, but even so... surely they would be able to sense that a plastic toy was no threat to them. And how would they know what a snake was anyway....?

We got out a ladder and I placed the snake on top of the air conditioner, and then pretty much forgot about it. It wasn't the season for nesting anyway, and then when we saw pigeons appearing on our neighbour's roof, I thought it was probably a coincidence that we didn't seem to have any birds on my study air conditioner.

Then, yesterday morning, I opened my study door and heard wild flapping of wings and fluttering, and two birds emerged from my air conditioner. I smiled wryly. They must have got used to the plastic snake, I thought. Or perhaps these birds were a bit brighter than the others. Or maybe none of them had been interesting in nesting there until then.

Later that morning I heard one of our cats making strange noises outside. I peered outside, and he was sitting on the chair underneath the air conditioner, looking up at the birds who were flapping around. I opened the door and they flew away as usual. I went out to talk to the cat... and saw this on the ground:

It had been a very windy night, and evidently the snake had blown down.

The birds continued fluttering to and fro, so later that morning I managed to get the snake back on top of the air conditioner.

A bird flapped around about half an hour later... but then flew away again.

And, this morning, when I opened the door, there were no birds out there. There were several on our neighbours' roof, and sitting on their air conditioning unit, but none at all coming anywhere near mine.

It appears that this method actually works, at least for us. We did wonder if we could get some more of these unpleasant looking toys and put them on different sections of our roof, but we were concerned that they would blow off much too easily; my air conditioner is quite protected by the balcony and it takes a very strong wind to make it fall. But any heavy rain or gusts of wind could blow one from the roof... and we really don't like the idea of random plastic snakes landing on the ground around our house.

Flamingo photo... sort of

On this morning's walk along the Salt Lake trail, the flamingoes were clearly in evidence, close enough that I thought they would look quite clear on a photo:

As so often, they just stood in a long, long row, rather crowded at one end and well spaced out at the other. They were chattering away, but it sounded a lot more amicable than the noisy argument they were having ten days ago.

I was a bit disappointed to see that they still looked rather like dark blobs on the photo. However when I cropped it really close to the flamingoes, they could at last be - just about - recognised:

We have no idea how they manage to arrange themselves in these rows, nor why...

A Sunny Stroll around the Salt Lake at the Solstice

(Apologies to those who are cringing at the excess of alliteration in the title!)

December in Cyprus can be chilly, but equally it can be sunny and warm during the daytime, with temperatures hovering around 20C (68F). Yesterday morning was one such beautiful day, and I was invited by some friends to go for a walk around part of the Salt Lake trail. It's not far away, and I hadn't been for a while; I knew the Salt Lake had plenty of water after the rain last month.

We could see the flamingoes almost as soon as we arrived - probably thousands of them:

They return year by year, although it's hard to see how such a relatively small stretch of water can provide all the food they need.

The sun was out, the sky was blue, and there were some pretty clouds over the mountains:

I don't know how far we walked - perhaps a kilometre or so. We weren't walking fast. There were small children with us, who kept stopping and starting, and we were deep in conversation, as ever. We walked towards the aqueduct, until we met the other family who were joining us, then we turned around and walked back.

At one point two of the children ran toward the Salt Lake, shouting... and the flamingoes took flight:

If you click on the picture to see the larger version, you can see how startlingly pink they are.

Somehow I didn't manage to take any photos of people, other than this one of Elisabeth, who is now 18 months old:

.. and this one of the bird-watching place, where some of us walked to and then took a break:

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: