Monday, December 1/2025

Don’t know what it is about this spot on our way down to the little supermarket, but we can always hear - but not see - song birds chirping like crazy as we approach. Fewer flowers to be seen in December - the jasmine is pretty well gone - but there’s no point at which we’re not treated to floral displays.

The  Cyprus Mail reports the lighting of public Christmas trees and decorations. That’s a major cultural difference between North and South. The North, being mainly Muslim, doesn’t celebrate Christmas, although many expat groups do, of course. Interesting that the South observes it when it does. Traditionally the Orthodox Churches followed the Julian calendar, and the Russian and various other Orthodox Churches still do. One of the many Orthodox areas of dissent has led to the churches in Cyprus and a number of other countries adopting a “modified” Julian calendar, which allows Christmas to be celebrated on December 25 but leaves the calculation for Easter to the original Julian formula. 

The strangest thing for Canadians in the South was the hybrid nature of the observance. Don’t know whether this is the same in other warm climates that we haven’t experienced, but it definitely feels odd walking through supermarkets in December listening to someone singing “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”. 

Sunday, November 30/2025

Love looking at the sea every morning, and as the colour changes throughout the day. Have found a site that shows 144 different shades of blue, complete with names (useful) as well as Hex, RGB, and CMYK codes (well beyond my blogging requirements). Think this morning’s sea is Beau Blue, a faint blue grey, although there are other possibilities. Sometimes the demarcation between sea and sky completely disappears and other times the sea is a dark, vibrant blue - or even multicoloured. 

Another day of contrasts. Wake to strong winds. Chairs still on the terrace, although I think the wind would have to lift them a good two metres to do anything other than shuffle them about. Intermittent spots of rain but wouldn’t amount to more than a splat in a gauge. East of us, on the Karpaz peninsula, there are reports of hail, though.

Saturday, November 29/2025

Saturday is market day, though for various reasons we have not gone for the last couple of weeks.  Christmassy things for sale - cards and decorations. We will take out a few things we’ve saved as we travel, but not yet. It’s still November!

Do buy an Ian Rankin novel from the animal rescue booth. Goes into the read aloud pile. We’ve probably read almost all of his as we’ve travelled. And watched Rankin develop as a novelist. The only crime writer we read together.

Are about to leave the market when we spot, almost hidden, a carton with a half dozen free range eggs. Well, actually hidden, it seems. Toni’s husband, whose free range hens they came from, tells us Toni had set them aside for us, the last carton. Forty-five Turkish lira ($1.36 CAD, £.80). One of the true bargains in this country.

J has set up on the terrace with the hot glue gun in order to repair the soles of our shoes and sandals. 

Friday, November 28/2025

Temperatures still reliably in the twenties. Pleasant breeze as we walk down to the Blue Song. Whitecaps in evidence. Commonly known in British English as white horses. And apparently in French as moutons - fair enough.

Beverley busy as usual. Actually busier, as she’s drawing up seating arrangements for next week’s Christmas dinner theatre put on by Kyrenia Amateur Dramatic Society. Happily I am reminded when J asks if it’s next week. Somehow December still feels like distant future - as opposed to Monday. Temperature is deceptive, and this despite twenty one Christmases in Cyprus - beginning in 2000 minus two in Canada and one in England.

Sun setting behind the mountain at quarter to five as we walk home. Just over three weeks until the winter solstice, and of course we’re living on the north slope of a mountain. Much later sunset on the south side.

Thursday, November 27/2025

Baba Ganoush

Unsettled weather leads to peasant style cooking as well as reading. So yesterday the remaining eggs went into, or more accurately onto, a tomato and pepper sauce. Basically a Middle East shakshuka, where the eggs poach on top. Next time will go for menemen, the Turkish equivalent in which the eggs are scrambled into the sauce, in a breakfast classic.

And today J makes humus and I make baba ganoush, the tahini, garlic and lemon serving for both dips. And we finish with J’s lovely pot of borsch. 

(Brief debate with spell check. It wants me to write borscht. The ‘t’ doesn’t exist in the Polish pronunciation of the word. Brought to North America via the Yiddish. But ok, admit I’m spelling the Polish word with English phonetics. Actual Polish is barszcz. Which spell check considers too strange to argue with).

Minor query. Why do recipes claiming to be hundreds of years old begin with “in a food processor…”?

Wednesday, November 26/2025

 Winter is our reading season, not that we don’t read during the rest of the year. In the early years we wrecked suitcases carrying books for the winter - always too few and having to meet a number of criteria. No hard covers (too heavy). No books that we wanted to keep, as we had to trade as we went. Only books of interest to both of us. 

Often we were in countries where English language books were difficult to find, which meant our tastes became, of necessity, more eclectic, as we acquired books that had been left in hotel lobbies or reposed in the tiny “foreign” section of second hand book shops in non-English countries. We still occasionally see a reference to a book - most recently Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel Scoop (1938) - and realise that we read it, years ago, mostly because it was there.

The enormous change for us came with the introduction of e-books. We knew they existed, but our first sight of one came in St Stephen’s Green, Dublin,  famous for its role in the Easter 1916 Irish Uprising. We shared a park bench with a man who was using a book reader. He said he loved “real” books but was travelling with ten books on the reader. We were sold.

Not only could we travel with as many books as we wished but we were no longer limited to daytime reading in a world of hotels lit by badly placed 40 watt light bulbs. (And yes, J has been known to replace them with higher wattage). 

Meanwhile “real” books have become much easier to find in non English speaking countries. (Though there always were surprising exceptions, like the overflowing second hand book shop in Antalya, Türkiye in 2001 where the multilingual proprietor assumed that we must be as familiar with the work of Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul as he was). Charity shops became a good source where there were expat communities. Here the animals rescue people have an excellent booth at the weekly market.

And so we have books. Hard cover, soft cover, e-books. More than we’ll probably finish but happy choices. Real books to read outside in the sunlight and e-books for the iPads at night. And, as we’ve always done, several designated for the old Victorian custom of reading aloud so we can share the enjoyment and discuss them, although we do other reading separately as well. Currently the shared books are: 

* commentator/journalist John Simpson’s Unreliable Sources, surveying trends and biases in twentieth century reporting 

* Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s highly engaging memoir of his parents, Rory and Ita, most of it in their own words, as they experienced life in Ireland from the 1930’s to the 1970’s

* Peter Oborne’s recently released (last month, another advantage to ebooks is the immediate availability) book  Complicit, a “fearless and forensic” examination of Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza.

Tuesday, November 25/2025

Courtesy philenews

Crazy weather. Intermittent heavy rain showers here. Some thunder. Reports of a Tornado hitting on the town of Avgorou near the  northeast coast of the Republic of Cyprus (South). Also reports from the South of damage caused by lightning strikes.

And, with no necessary relationship, a 3.1 magnitude earthquake this morning in the Paphos area. South coast. Not particularly unusual. 

AccuWeather about as helpful as usual. Look it up as the first heavy rainfall begins and am assured that there will be no rain for the next sixty minutes. Presume longer term forecasts similarly unreliable.

Monday, November 24/2025

 Early morning air soft and slightly misty. Lovely breeze. If we were in Canada and the air felt like this I’d expect rain soon. In London we’ve learned that it might well rain but it might equally well not. The damp slightly overcast bit is no indication one way or the other.

Looking north, toward the sea, there is also a muted haze. You can still see the demarcation where the sea meets the sky but they’re both blue greys. The azure saved for sunnier weather.

And the forecast? The theory is that there will be showers tonight and into tomorrow. So go to the shop to collect bread and yoghurt in case it’s wet in the morning but not betting the pension on it. And, as for AccuWeather’s thunderstorm warning, the accu bit has always been a bit of a misnomer.

Sunday, November 23/2025

 The North Cyprus reservoir. At the west side of the island. I took the photograph seven or eight years ago. The reservoir as beautiful as it looks but much larger as only a wide angle lens would have done it justice. 

The source of the water is Turkey and it is supplied through a 107 km undersea pipeline able to carry 75 million cubic metres annually. It’s still barely enough, partly due to desertification with climate change and partly because people everywhere simply use much more water than their ancestors did - even those without swimming pools.

The quality of the water is marginally adequate. No problem for brushing teeth but should be boiled for drinking water. So most people choose between filters or using bottled water for drinking. Happily, Mehmet, the nice man who delivers our gas cylinders when needed, also delivers nineteen litre bottles of water. Also, happily, we don’t need to establish a regular amount or schedule. I just send him a WhatsApp message asking for a bottle of water the next day and he cheerfully obliges. Should be here tomorrow. A small manual pump fits in the mouth of the bottle so no stand required. A hundred lira a delivery ($3.30 CAD, £1.80). Lasts us about a week.

Saturday, November 22/2025

 Two thirds of the way from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice but no one seems to have informed the flowers or whoever is in charge of the temperature. Seventeen degrees when we wake up at about seven o’clock and a predicted high of 27.

We take the dolmuș over to see Doğan as we have some papers to collect. He’s busy, as always, this time involved in the formation of a new political party. Interestingly no current members of parliament are permitted to apply. No doubt we will eventually hear more, hindered somewhat by our inability to read Turkish and follow the party’s fortunes in the local press.

Everywhere we go there are flowers. Pass this trumpetbush on the way to Doğan’s office, round the corner and up the hill from Dima. Dima is a useful stopping spot on a dolmuș trip. Not nearly as useful as it once was, though. Once upon a time it had reliably good specials on wine. Now no better than our local grocery store and not as good as Șokmar. Suppose it’s good to know that going farther doesn’t mean better deals - just farther to carry them.

Friday, November 21/2025

 Still eating our own oranges. They have grown a little but still suffering from a year of drought. Sweet, though. But we have, as the saying goes, picked most of the low hanging fruit already, and the lovely ripe oranges we can see at the top of the tree are mostly out of reach. And would be even if we were to acquire a stepladder.

So J has devised an orange picking tool. It’s on the end of a broomstick - a plastic bottle cut to pluck and collect one orange at a time. And yes, it works.

Thursday, November 20/2025

Courtesy KıbrısOnAir

Typical North Cyprus arrest story. Well, not entirely typical, because the person arrested in this case is a teacher who stole the money she had been collecting from students for gym fees. That has to be unusual in any venue. Because it’s wrong, because most teachers care about their students, and also, of course, because the odds of getting away with it must have been non-existent.

Not unusual to show photographs of the arrest. Face obscured to protect the guilty. As in other jurisdictions it seems to be important to report the perpetrator’s age and not only when he or she seems to be unusually old or young to have committed the crime - as in car theft by a nine year old or ninety-nine year old. 

What is unusual, although standard operating procedure here, is to provide the initials of the accused. In this case “a 37-year-old teacher, identified by her initials E.S.” Presumably everybody in the relevant Nicosia school - and their friends and relations - already know her name and much more. It hides her identity only from the likes of us who are far removed from the situation. 

Is interesting to know that “the suspect had 7,280 Turkish Lira in her possession, which was taken as evidence”. Not an enormous sum ($241.71 CAD, £131.56) and considerably less than the 25,000 lira she is said to have stolen from the students. But how on earth would it constitute evidence? Had the students marked the notes before handing them in? Endless speculation.

Wednesday, November 19/2025

 Bougainvillea thriving on the mountain side of the flat. Always almost as delighted by its name as by its appearance, and with only minimal embarrassment quote from my own blog of 2018:

Bougainvillea should have a special meaning for Canadians, as it was named in honour of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who was an aide-de-camp to Montcalm but, luckier than Montcalm, survived the battle for Quebec and accompanied the Chevalier de Lévis to St Helen’s Island off Montreal for the last stand of France in Canada. But bougainvillea obviously comes from a warmer climate. It was in fact discovered (in Brazil?) and named for Bougainville during a trip to circumnavigate the globe. Not that this was by any means the end of Bougainville’s adventures. After South Sea exploration he found himself with France on the side of the rebels in the American Revolution, and took part in the Battle of Chesapeake.

Actually that’s a pretty condensed view of his accomplishments. An astonishing man. 

Not only sunny and warm, but a nice breeze, so a good day for washing - and drying - sheets. Laundry usually dries very quickly here.

A quarter to six when the power goes off. Meal mostly made. Curry sauce still warm but other bits need reheating. First question is how widespread is the outage. Definitely our building and the place next door. There are lights on higher up the hill from us but seem to be some missing lower down. As we’re assessing the streetlight beside our place goes out. So pour a glass of wine and consider the merits of finishing the meal on the gas stove by somewhat inadequate lamp light versus settling for something simplified. When the lights come back on.

Finish the meal with no further electrical interruptions and look to see how the neighbourhood is faring. Seems our immediate neighbours have power but from us down to the sea is all in darkness. Looks like those who had lights when ours first failed have lost them.

Amongst the many charms of blogger is the program’s refusal to provide the chosen font sizes when asked nicely. Even when a passage is retyped it may or may not comply. Meanwhile am considering a second career writing ransom notes.

 

Tuesday, November 18/2025

J kindly spends quite a long time cutting the seeds out of seeded raisins. They just looked like large black raisins when I bought them, it never having occurred to me to wonder what happened to excess seeded grapes in a harvest. Excess grapes? There’s always wine to be made.

Having said which, the large, dark seeded grapes at the local store are much nicer than the smaller seedless ones. Enough so that I’m quite willing to cut them up and remove the seeds to mix them, along with orange segments, in the morning’s sheep’s yoghurt. Full disclosure - also add banana, carob syrup, and a little honey.

Cutting the seeds out of the raisins much more labour intensive though. Why do they exist at all? Possible that some people like the seeds. They’re nasty and bitter but it’s difficult to find any food item that nobody likes. Apparently they’re nutritious as well. Can well believe the posts claiming that grapes with seeds are nutritionally superior to those bred to be seedless. Their flesh that is. Am willing to forego any additional food value in the seeds. (And perfectly happy to know that apple seeds are toxic). 

Photo not mine - but similar.

Monday, November 16/2025

 

Sourdough bread not on the list but when we get to the store it is still hot. Actually added to the case while we are shopping, so don’t even attempt to resist. Do wish people would make whole grain sourdough bread, but assume I will just have to add it to my own list of skills to be acquired.

Normally the grain products we eat are whole grain and one of the first words I learn in any country we stay in is the local term for whole wheat. In Turkish it’s tam buğday - which isn’t pronounced like an Anglo would expect, but I’m nobody to be giving Turkish lessons. In Italy whole grain is integrale, which appears on the packets of Italian brown rice sold in the Republic of Cyprus (South). There in shops, you ask for “village” - yes, the English word, but widely understood and understood to mean whole grain when referring to pasta or bread, though suspect the understanding falls somewhat short of a guarantee. More an acknowledgment that traditionally Cypriot villages didn’t use refined flour.

Know no Thai at all and never did our own cooking in Thailand but we did discover a little restaurant in Chiang Mai that had good brown rice. Catered to latter day western hippies, though, as Thai people take as poor a view of brown rice as most Asians and consider it suitable fare for prisoners. The restaurant was excellent though, and we did run into a couple of other Canadians there.

Sunday, November 16/2025

 Next door’s cat. And we only know she’s next door’s because we were across the hall in their flat the other day and saw her underneath the table looking quite at home. Which explains why she feels comfortable co-opting cushioned chairs on our patio, which from her point of view is only another patio attached to her building, walls not being much barrier to cats.

Better than the cushion on a wicker chair, though, is her happy place - well camouflaged in the bracken beside the orange tree. Really well camouflaged. I’ve often failed to spot her and when I took this picture of her curled up I initially couldn’t see her in the original photo. Photograph top right is a cropped section of the photo on the left with contrast enhanced.

Probably a good thing for us that she likes it there. Should deter rats, who are happy to hollow out fallen oranges, and possibly discourage snakes as well.

Saturday, November 15/2025

Convenient to have exchanged Canadian currency for Turkish lira. We only lose once on the exchange fee - currency exchanges, whether at banks or on the high street are, after all, in business to make a profit. And any pounds sterling or euros in our possession have already been exchanged. On the other hand Overinflated Turkish currency takes up a lot of wallet space for its actual purchasing value. The photo is of a thousand fifteen Turkish lira. Equivalent to $33.63 CAD or £18.22. Not a huge sum to take to the supermarket. 

Could have been worse, and once was. The “new” Turkish lira was created in 2005, dropping six zeros from the old Turkish lira to create the new Turkish lira. Faint memories of the old days when it was easy to feel like a millionaire. And not only in Türkiye, of course. Those with long memories recall 1993 when Mexico created the new peso, worth a thousand old Mexican pesos. And then there was Poland in 1995 when ten thousand old Polish złoty were replaced by one new złoty. 

So not expecting a second change any time soon. Though we still get coins in change, worth less than a penny for a 25 lira coin.

Today should be - in fact is - a public holiday. Republic Day, celebrating the birth of the country. And if we lived in Nicosia it might be a little higher in our consciousness. There is an official parade there. But mostly it’s sliding by unnoticed because it falls on a Saturday this year when banks and government offices are closed anyway. Don’t think there’s a holiday on Monday to make up. 

Friday, November 14/2025

Hibiscus flowers seem to be appearing one at a time, unlike the extravagant bougainvillea. But lovely. Between the hibiscus and the bougainvillea is oleander. Attractive enough when in bloom but not something we would have chosen to plant. Not only toxic if consumed but should not be touched without gloves and after trimming you really can’t dispose of the branches by burning because the smoke from the fire would be toxic. Probably not instant death, but not encouraging.

Did rain heavily, if briefly, during the night. Bit late for any further development of the oranges but must have been appreciated by the flowering shrubs.

Thursday, November 13/2020

 J has been squeezing our oranges in order to make juice. Photo is not photoshopped and it occurs to us that if we were to see juice that colour in a bottle at the supermarket we would assume that it contained dyes as well as chemicals. But here we have it. Just straight juice from the oranges on the tree on the patio.

Another earthquake this morning in the Paphos area, this one 4.6 magnitude. 

Thunder storm warnings followed by strong winds, and thunder and lightning. But sound and fury signifying nothing. A couple of dozen drops of rain, though we could use more. A correspondent on the east side of the island reports hail which seems to have interested her dogs, but that’s about it.

Wednesday, November 12/2025

It is earthquake territory but having said that we have to admit that we didn’t feel the largest earthquake of these let alone the others in the series. Didn’t sleep through it either. It was about 11:30 in the morning when J was squeezing oranges for juice and I was reading aloud to him. Other people in our area, as well as the rest of the island did feel it however. Probably about 100 km away as the crow flies. 

Assume that it’s a good thing we didn’t, as in a tribute to the quality of construction of our building, erected after the new earthquake code.

A local has kindly put on line a check list of what to take if one is required to evacuate suddenly. Begins with passports. Not a bad idea as there are an amazing number of things that it’s impossible to do without same. Like pay a bill or buy a sim. Even so, would be inclined to rank money, shoes, and house key higher. Credit cards, phone, iPad. Guess everything but the shoes would go in a handbag.

Reminds us of an earthquake twelve years ago when we were staying in Larnaca. A quake we could feel.  A hundred and twenty-seven miles northwest of us and 5.8 magnitude. The dilemma then was whether to walk down five flights of stairs, prudently avoiding the lift, and stand outside in a thunderstorm or remain ensconced in our flat, whiskeys in hand, appreciating the view of the storm. Whiskeys and the view won, and we’re still here.