Living in Cyprus - September 1998
6th September:
The Greek schools don’t return till next Monday but we
decided to start back ‘home-school’ this week, since we’ll be taking
some time off in October, when Richard's mother is coming to visit, and
also when my brother is coming for a week in September. A big advantage
of home education, of course, is being able to adapt the times to suit
the family, and to be flexible.
Cleo the cat continues thriving, growing and becoming more lively all the time. She’s basically black but her tummy has white on it too, so it almost looks grey, and she has flecks of white over her paws too. She’s very affectionate but loves biting toes! She’s starting to explore the outside world, under supervision so far although it won’t be long before she jumps out of windows and goes off on her own.
She likes ‘Arthur’s’ cat food in its various flavours, we couldn’t find kitten food after the first attempt but she’s happy with the regular adult food so that’s all right; however we’re still buying Lactol for her to drink as we think she’s only about 7 weeks old, and she won’t yet lap from a saucer. So she drinks from her bottle still, which looks very cute, but we’re beginning to wonder if she’ll ever learn to lap milk! While it’s this hot we have to make sure she has sufficient to drink, hence we continue with the bottles. Tim said that probably kittens usually learn from their mothers, so I should crouch down and lap from a saucer to show her what to do!
The pomegranates are just becoming ripe now; one tree had red ones (they start green) so we picked some and thought they were very tasty; however our landlady was here and told us those are the ‘sour’ ones - the nicer ones won’t be ready for another few weeks, apparently. We didn’t think they were particularly sour, so it will be interesting to see what ‘sweet’ ones taste like.
The citrus trees have small, green oranges and lemons on them so we haven’t picked any yet; however in the shops the lemons are green and look rather like the ones on our trees, so we might use one or two though I shan’t make lemonade again until they’re large and yellow once more. I expect that won’t be till after we’ve had some rain - not likely until early October, apparently. I do water the smaller trees and a few of the plants about once a week, but don’t like to do it so often with the severe water shortage. We’re allowed to use hose pipes for plants and trees, but not for cleaning cars or washing patios. If all the plants were allowed to die out, the island would become a desert very quickly so we’re encouraged to keep our trees and shrubs alive.
Timothy is going to start learning the guitar this term; a friend of Richard’s is going to teach him. He’s been wanting to for ages - woodwind instruments didn’t really appeal to him and he likes the idea of guitar because he can sing at the same time.
Yet another friend who’s an art teacher runs art classes on Saturday mornings for adults and older children, so the boys are going to try those, possibly with Richard as well. I don’t know if Tim will like them but they sound ideal for Daniel. We’ve also discovered a pottery studio not far away that does some kind of group tuition for children so we need to investigate that too... suddenly life is beginning to look as full as it did in the UK! But we’d want to do these things even if they were going to the local school since it doesn’t offer art or craft or music at all.
30th September:
We seem to have had a hectic couple of weeks; we had someone staying who was working with Richard for a week; while he was here we had 10 people to lunch on Saturday ten days ago, and then 30 people (colleagues plus some conference visitors) the day after - potluck style so I didn’t have to cook everything, but we still had to be organised and tidy!
This week my brother has been staying so Richard took a couple of days off and we were able to go on some drives a bit further afield than Larnaca. Yesterday we went to a little village in the mountains called Lefkara which is famous for lace-making. We didn't buy anything, to the disappointment of the various shop-owners, who were very persuasive in offering discounts and special offers!
For
Tim’s 10th birthday he had a small party: four friends came to watch a
video with him, and eat pizza and cake. They didn’t seem to eat as much
as friends in Birmingham used to, but made enough noise playing outside
later for about 20! Anyway he enjoyed himself which is the main thing.
Finally we had the first rain of the season this week, for about an hour. However since then it’s been hot and sunny again. I suppose it’s around 30C during the day, much more pleasant than it was in August as the humidity has dropped as well as the temperature. We’re still all living in tee-shirts and shorts and I think even Richard has only put on a sweatshirt once so far. However it may well rain again within the next week, and if it’s heavier and longer it may reduce the temperature by a few degrees afterwards.
Daniel does a lot of programming whenever he can. Tim started his guitar lessons last week and Daniel’s clarinet lessons resume this Friday; another colleague of Richard's has kindly taken over giving them piano lessons as well as their previous teacher retired at the end of April. They were a bit rusty after five months without lessons but were both eager to continue.
A ‘band’ has started playing regularly in our church now after the purchase of a drum set; A colleague of Richard’s plays the drums, and another colleague plays bass guitar. So they and Daniel and whoever is playing the piano meet to practise for an hour on Fridays and it sounds a lot livelier than it did when we first arrived. There seem to be more people in the church too - it’s a small building which seats maybe 80 reasonably comfortably in the pews; of course numbers go up and down as people come and go. But there must be over 80 people regularly now, and there are often seats extra put out at the back.