Almond Business Suites Nicosia

And to think yesterday my biggest worry was not seeing anything interesting at all in Cyprus. What I saw today absolutely blew me away and had everything I look for in my travels...it was gritty, raw, real and not sanitized for the tourists. To date this is the most fascinating stop on my world tour. I didn't find any natural beauty or spectacular ruins but what I did find is a pretty amazing human interest story. I feel kind of stupid now worrying about ...

... visitors remain ensconsed in their beachside enclaves and will never venture inland to see what surprises this island holds. I fully understand some people just need to be isolated and turn off the world on vacation but that's not me. Besides, I don't even like the beach so I am eager to try to find a way to see this place that lies beyond the tourists even if I have to do it on foot. I will find something cool and interesting on this island, trust me on that.

... unlike here where it's all out in the open.

But back to my point...Billa provides a shopping experience I have never before seen in a supermarket. Just when I think I have seen it all, I find one of those travel experiences in some Bulgarian grocery store underground next to the subway station. All right there grouped together next to the registers (manned by dour matrons) where we would keep the tic tacs and magazines were mints ...

Sunday, July 5th, 2009
This began one of the longest driving
days of the entire trip. If you get the chance look at a map of
Cyprus. We left Nicosia and headed to Agia Napa. En route we
stopped at a fishing village and several famous beaches. From there
we headed to Larnaka where following conflicting signs to the
Larnaca, Cyprus lantian1979

Saturday, July 4th,
2009—Nicosia
The drive up to the capitol city of
Nicosia was uneventful and our attempts at locating the hotel were
good but we ultimately had to park and find tourist information to
assist. Even after that we had a bit of trouble but thanks to a good
navigator we found the hotel, checked in and headed back into the
walled city for lunch. After lunch, we just started to wander around
and we took pictures of the winding ...

... pool anyway? I've given up on Turkish coffee. It's lousy, far inferior to its counterparts in Georgia and Armenia. Maybe that's why everybody drinks Nescafe... at $2 a pop! You don't want to know the price of real fresh-squeezed espresso... no, you don't. My room's killer, though. I wish I had my laptop, or my wife. At least I can get the laptop fixed... for a price... hopefully in my next stop, Istanbul.

... is certainly a great place to vacation in the early fall. Late October and early November was still quite warm to our standards, but the tourist season was over for Eurpeans so it was a good place to vacation as it was moderately priced.

... entering. I walked through a roomy interior of maroon carpeting. It was scantily decorated and virtually seat-less. The place killed sound, preserving silence. Bits of strange, silver furniture - one no doubt showing the direction to Mecca - were dressed in bright-orange and yellow and green. I'd always suspected there should be some similarities between Islamism and its geographic neighbors, Hinduism and Buddhism. The open room and bright colors were ...

... me thinking, Islam doesn't really promote itself as a friendly religion, either convert or be closed !!! Around the corner was even more evidence of this. The Cathedral in the centre had been converted into a Mosque when the Ottomans had invaded. In some respect, I feel there had been an improvement, instead of *********es, I was now walking on soft lush carpet. Actually, from the outside, if you took away the minaret, it would actually pass as a church ...

... However as we were driving up into the mountains, and through the low level clouds, we saw a little snow here and there and thought we were lucky as all the snow obviously hadn't melted as we had been told. However it must have snowed last night, because as we drove higher we could see more and more snow lying alongside the road. When we reached as high as we could drive in the slippery conditions, we got out of the car to a winter wonderland, and just then it started to snow again ...