Life in Cyprus - April 2004
April 4th:
It's been another busy weekend for the boys - the inter-church youth group had a 'sleepover' on Friday night, with the boys in our church hall and girls in St Helena's Anglican church over the road. There's a new youth leader who is excellent at organising games and the general social side for the local youth. In the past when there have been sleepovers they've ended after breakfast, but this time they went to the beach and played some games. Some of them went swimming. So Dan and Tim didn't get back till about noon. Still, they said they did get about five hours sleep.
Then in the afternoon Daniel went to Nicosia with some of the drama group who were helping in another production with the Nicosia teenage group, and in the evening Tim (after an hour's nap in the afternoon) went with some others from the youth group to someone's home for yet more games. Both of them arrived back about 10.30, which wasn't too bad except that of course they had to be up early to be at church for 8.30 this morning, and they hadn't had much sleep on Friday night.
Daniel then spent this afternoon helping with the younger children's productions at the theatre group. By the evening both boys were extremely tired.
We haven't had any rain since the end of February, so I've had to water all our trees thoroughly each week. As somebody said, perhaps we had our entire year's quota of rain in the first two months. I managed to find some little plug plants of tomatoes and courgettes, much to Tim's delight, and have been watering those daily - they seem to grow almost visibly day by day though I don't know if they'll survive and fruit when it starts to get really warm.
I've also experimented with some bougainvillea cuttings, some of which seem to be taking, and loads of geranium cuttings/ We have a huge geranium in the front bit of garden which was getting straggly and droopy, so I decided to prune it radically a few days ago to make it bush out rather than grow upwards However, so many of the bits I pruned looked healthy that I decided I might as well try making cuttings since I had plenty of cutting compost and some hormone rooting powder that we got for the bougainvillea cuttings. They've survived so far, which is encouraging.
April 21st:
We had my brother and his wife for a ten-day visit over Easter, which was fun for us all. They arrived on Good Friday at the start of our hectic weekend with Tim playing at several services and other events - all of which went very well. Richard took a few days off as he's been travelling a lot recently and needed a bit of a break.
One
morning we drove to Lefkara, the traditional town part-way up the
mountains where traditional Cyprus 'lace' and silver are made. We
watched some demonstrations and our visitors bought some tablecloths
and other items after studying the various options and comparing prices.
The
weather continued to stay dry for the whole time my brother and his
wife were here, and it was reasonably warm. So on one day we
took a picnic to our favourite beach at Kiti, which was almost deserted
despite it being the Easter holidays. It was a bit breezy so we were
glad of our fleeces!
April 29th:
On Wednesday we went to an excellent concert at the municipal theatre; Dan's clarinet teacher's son is studying in the UK and is part of a clarinet quartet who came out here to give a concert. They played quite a variety of music - most impressive, although I wasn't too keen on some of the more modern pieces.
Larnaka does seem to be having more and more concerts - the Cyprus State Orchestra apparently plays here once a month, and there was a festival of 10 concerts in April, with the clarinet quartet being the last one. Unfortunately we didn't know the details until Daniel heard about the quartet from his teacher (and got a couple of free tickets) but I gather this is an annual event so we'll try and find out more next year.