There’s nothing to remind one how spoiled/privileged/entitled your life has gotten than, after several weeks of having a mix of private tours and our own agenda, getting on a bus with no more than 50 other people for a full day big group tour*.

But that’s exactly how we choose to spend today, liking the anonymity of sitting in the back of the bus, and getting to another part of the island to do the Blue Lagoon, among other sights. The water, you will not be shocked, was startling blue and clear. It was also cold, with the morning temperature flirting with 60. (I know, it looks like it should be as sweltering as the Mediterranean is rumored to be. But people who spread such rumors vacation in summer, not late March.)

However, Kyla and I are pros. We Polar Bear on New Years and this was certainly warmer than a Pacific Northwest January. So after some posturing and pondering, we took the plunge. I have a strong memory of holding hands while we jumped, but Photo #2 begs to differ.

It was chilly, but I decided whenever I land in a place with a blue lagoon, I should skip the thinking and just jump. As Kyla points out, you won’t remember tomorrow how cold you were today. She is my favorite let’s-do-something-stupid adventure buddy.

Aphrodite, who rarely likes to wear arms, began her goddess of love career in Cyprus. If Aphrodite may have been born, bathed, or bred somewhere on this island, it is now a tourist sight. After we got off the boat, we got to see where Aphrodite bathed, where swear-to-gosh, splashing the water on my face would have given me eternal youth and beauty. But I was wearing make-up and didn’t want to ruin it. What I most appreciated about this spectacle is that it got me talking as if Aphrodite were real.

I like how the pool behind the kids is heart-shaped, an appropriate symbol of the goddess of love & lust. It is especially artistic how Dwayne took this picture in such a way to hide the fact that he had just bought them all heaps of gelato and the interest they are showing is in trying each other’s flavors, not giving homage to Aphrodite.

Our lunch on the beach included a full fish, which is clearly begging me to kiss it.

Our poor children had to endure a stop at the winery on our way back to Pathos. This is when the herd-tour idea comes apart. First, for 50 people, one must stop at a large winery. Second, this winery put out 40 bottles and told us to try a few. Luckily, Kindle came with me off the bus, so I found a sunny corner and read until we could move on. I believe the youngers just slept on the bus. France is next on our itinerary, so I’m not feeling too cheated by this wine-tasting fail.

Just to wrap up Cyprus, Dwayne and I did one more Cyprusty activity of note. Leaving the kids at home again, we drove out to a tavern that was known for its traditional dance and food. Mezzos is a multi-plate meal that comes with about 20 little plates, mostly of meat, plus heaps of dips and breads and olives. It’s a great way to make sure you can keep that bloated feeling for many days and ensure that your body has no room for veggies for at least that long. The traditional dancing was as much costume as talent, and the highlight was the balancing of 3, 4, 5, and eventually 8 glasses on top of the head and dance-marching around the stage. When we were only the second group in this large restaurant at 7pm, we were sure that it was too early in the season for the dancing. But nope. We are in Mediterranean Europe where the dinner hour is the rest of the world’s bedtime, so when the dancers came out after 9pm, all the tables were full and ready to party.

See you next in France!

*To wit, next time we do some semi-serious traveling without kids, we will book a private tour for ourselves and 2-3 other couples, so we can have the same small-group breathing space that we’ve had this year with some of our favorite people. (Warning: almost everyone we know is our favorite people.) Please, travel with us in 7-10 years! South Africa is high on my list, as are South Asia and Oceana.

[If my reader would like to get an alternative perspective of Cyprus, I invite you to read Wes’s musings on his week of torture. I was amused.]

Cyprus felt like coming home.  This is a little strange, because we’ve never been to Cyprus before, and although English is a prominent second language here, it is no more so than in Dubai, Kenya, Egypt or Jordan.  We’ve been immersed in the Arabic alphabet for a few weeks, and in Cyprus, everything is first written in Greek (which hurts my head, because I think I am just two shots and a sleepless night away from deciphering το ελληνικό αλφάβητο*), then in English.  But Cyprus, in spite of its weird political dispute and unacknowledged Turkish border, is in the EU, and we can navigate Europe.

To prove the point, we rented the car.  And to prove its point, Cyprus drives on the left.  So did we…eventually.

The attraction of Cyprus is that 1) it is a Mediterranean Island, 2) it has the sunniest clime in the area and is where Europeans go to burn to crisp, 3) its long history covers ancient, Greek, and medieval artifacts, and 4) Malta wouldn’t let us in**.  As everywhere else we’ve been so far, the weather this year was highly unusual.  It did break 70 F a few times, but we often found that our beloved puff jackets stayed on much of the time. Kyla dipped into the pool on the hottest day and dipped right back out.  But the unusual weather meant rain and snow well into March, and though we had no precipitation during our visit, the island was green and lush.

Our first full day was pretty low-key, but very cultural: We drove to a grocery store and shopped for the week.  Navigating groceries in another country is always one of my favorite things to do and we’re experienced enough at this point that we accept the fact that each piece of produce must go into a nonreusable plastic bag and be weighed and tagged by the produce manager before we can take it to checkout.  Because this is such an EU tourist destination, the grocery carried, in the least organized way possible, regular groceries for Brits, Francs, Spaniards, and even some Americans.  We were able to find taco seasoning and “minced beef”. 

Piper had been yearning to bake as soon as we could get a kitchen so most of Monday was spent getting her ingredients and time.  As good as the grocery store was, we couldn’t find chocolate chips, a clear violation of the food pyramid, so Piper hacked up chocolate bars.  We ate all her cowboy cookies before we made it to the beach, trying to gain back an appetite for dinner.

We asked each kid what they wanted to do that week, and Piper chose zoo (once she had homemade cookies in her system again), Kyla wanted a nature trail, and Wes, well, Wes finally decided he would settle for seeing a movie in a theater. 

The Paphos Zoo was fantastic. I love amphitheater shows, and this one used all the fun birds to do tricks—macaws, parrots, owls. Piper is a delightful zoo-devotee. After she used up her phone battery, she took another 180 pictures on Wes’s phone, then borrowed mine and shot 150 more pictures.  I will not subject you to them, but we did get to see a few of the animals we had seen in Kenya, albino wallabies, and a few marmosets that would have been snuck into Piper’s suitcase had we been able to manage the heist. I will agree with Wes on one point: the food at the zoo, from hamburger to hotdog to pasta, may have been the worst I’ve ever had, and that includes my own cooking. 

Today, I was too late to get us the mountain tour I wanted, but then I realized I had their itinerary and our own car. It was the perfect day (or as Wes likes to put it, the Worst Day of My Life), where we started by driving into the mountains and explored an old bridge. The girls and I did a short hike with lots of cute lizards.

We hiked out to a beautiful waterfall and ate just-purchased handmade chocolates and PB&J***.

Then we stumbled across the cutest village that satisfied the kids’ ice cream cravings and my I-must-walk-all-these-adorable-medieval-alleys-and-monasteries fix. A note: Cyprus has a few small cities, and a couple of generous towns, and over 3,000 villages.  Most are not quite as charming as Omodos.

From Cute Village, we did make it back to Paphos in time for Dwayne and the youngers to catch a showing of Turning Red while Kyla and I enjoyed the mall and coffee shop wifi.

From squeezing fresh OJ from the villa orange trees to pink sunsets on not-yet-warm beaches, Cyprus has hit the right notes for a rejuvenating sort of adventure. More exploring tomorrow.

*Literally, “the Greek alphabet,” written in Greek.

** Malta wouldn’t allow travelers who had visited Egypt in the last 15 days, for Covid reasons.  This is odd, because we didn’t need negative Covid tests to enter Jordan, and we had to prove vaccination status for every country we’ve been to so far.  But Egypt was on their “cooties” list.   

*** We even scraped enough creamy PB for Wes to have his preferred sandwich while the rest of us ate crunchy.  Did he appreciate this small gesture?  If you need me to answer this, you haven’t been paying attention. My poor son. I do need to be kinder, but while we were picnicking, he said, and I quote, “I don’t like anything.” Which I immediately decided needed to be translated into Latin and adopted as his personal motto.  So, ta-da, I give you non amo aliquid.

After leaving the Dead Sea, we drove to Madaba (MAUD-dah-bah, fun to say aloud) for our last nights in Jordan.  It is a jumping-off point for a few more sites of antiquity.

Mount Nebo is the site where Moses was allowed to look out and see the Promised Land after wandering for 40 years. (He should have demanded an upgrade.  Costa Rica, Whidbey Island, even California —all much better places to live, if one enjoys non-dead oceans and abundance.) He also might (not) be buried here. What Mt Nebo is also known for, though, is the mosaics in the church. Actually, this was one of the highlights of what was going to be the Ancient Mosaic Hall of Fame.  We had seen some in an ancient church in Petra, and Dwayne is already scheming how to incorporate a mosaic into his future chateau.

Jerash has some of “the best-preserved Greco-Roman ruins around”. If I hadn’t woken up with the worst cold in memory, and if it hadn’t been raining, and if my summer shoes hadn’t gotten irreparably soaked as soon as we walked through the gate…this would have been an enjoyable exploration.  An intact main gate, two wonderful theaters, a colonnade, churches, more mosaics, even an original butcher stone from the marketplace—if I had had warm feet and a clear head, this probably would have been a highlight. I might have even bought a toga and reenacted my former life as a goddess. 

But I did not have warm feet and a clear head, so by the time we returned to Madaba and visited St. George’s Church, I was not inclined to be inspired by the sixth-century mosaic map of Jerusalem and the Holy Lands that everyone has heard of but me.  The replicas of the map in the visitor center were much more impressive than the original on the church floor; even non-sick, non-wet Dwayne thought so.  But we came, we saw, we nodded seriously and soberly, and I bought new shoes and went back to bed.

We stayed another day beyond the tour’s end to accommodate our cheap flight’s schedule to Cyprus. I think we really just spent time eating. On our last official night, our guide arranged for us to have denise fish (also spelled danis on at least one billboard) because eating denise sounded necessary. We over-ordered, as the youngers were not eating fish voluntarily, no matter what it was called.

They were a little more receptive to the donuts the next day, even if they came with the price tag of a walk around town.

A few more rememberances of Jordan, starting with a map of where we explored.

I have struggled to get herbal tea in our last three countries, and usually had to choke down some awful caffenated Lipton whenever I ordered tea. I was excited to find mint tea on a menu in a beautiful restaurant. However, they just put fresh mint leaves…in Lipton tea.

Goodbye, Jordan! I’m not sure I’ll ever be back, but you showed me many wonderful things.

It had been over a month since we left, and Dwayne was getting shaggy.  Wes was definitely shaggy and was actually asking for a haircut.  We ended up in Madaba, Jordan, staying in the heart of this less-touristy town where there were 3 liquor stores and 4 barbershops on our street.  For 8 dinars (about $10), both Wes and Dwayne came back trimmed and shiny. True to his hygiene habits, Wes’s hair was a bit gross, so the barber put some product in that Wes would be forced to wash out—with shampoo, no less—back at the hotel. 

Side note: I think it is hilarious the barber smoked while doing Wes’s hair.  According to our guide, Jordan has the highest number of smokers per capita in the world. [Bing insists that currently, Jordan is a lowly #6.]  I could have sworn Egypt would be higher, but supposedly, Egyptians smoke everywhere but Jordanians usually smoke less inside touristy areas. (When we were sitting in the lobby of the fancy Pyramisa hotel in Cairo, I think I had more secondhand smoke in one afternoon than in my last 30 years of life.)  And smoking in Jordan takes dedication; one doesn’t have a few cigarettes a day and call themselves a smoker.  One needs to be able to quantify by packs per day.  Again, our guide tells stories that seem unbelievable. Jordanians spend a third of their income on cigarettes. (Please, in a country that makes such amazing baklava?!?) Faisel’s own father finally gave up smoking when our guide was a child, and with the extra money, bought his wife a washing machine, his kids a TV, before going on to furnish the entire house with “normal” appliances, like a toilet, fridge, and oven. Faisel was really poor growing up, but much less so when his father quit tobacco. 

Our tour guide knew a woman who ran a restaurant/cooking school for travelers. She actually received a grant from USAID for a full kitchen and has her picture with W and Laura Bush to celebrate the event.  Dwayne and I took the cooking class with Piper, which meant I drank wine, Dwayne took pictures, and Piper actually learned how to make a delicious main course that cooked up veggies and chicken before covering the pan with rice to simmer, and then flopping the entire pan upside down on a platter to serve.  Using chiles and cinnamon, the secret is definitely in the special seasonings, and most notable, all five of us loved it! Piper has packed the seasoning mix to make this dish for Grandma and Grandpa when we get home. 

Jordanians don’t just put one dish on the table: A little dish of olives, another of hummus, eggplant and roasted tomato dips, pita bread, fried bread, another salad, and then even more tiny little bowls that make you feel wasteful when so much is still left on the table and your stomach can only hold the two little cookies your hostess serves after the bill is paid. 

Favorite quote today—Piper: That was so much fun!

We hope we get to hear that again someday!