Seattle to Nicosia, the Long Way

Hmmm...well I'm here in Cyprus...it's hard to figure out what to say.

I really like Nicosia, but haven't seen much yet. I arrived with the majority of the program participants on Friday afternoon. We have spent most of the time since in our little suburban neighborhood, a couple of miles out from the city center and old town. We took a short little tour of downtown on Saturday, but didn't see very much. When we got to the Green Line, the border between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot territories, our guide was giving us some background on the conflict, and she kept shushing the Greek Cypriot soldiers nearby, who would periodically whisper to each other. It was hilarious to see these young men in uniform holding machine-guns look bashful at a dirty look from our tiny little tour guide.

My apartment is exactly one block from the university! There are six different buildings housing us EIGHTY-ONE Americans (it kind of sucks to be in such a massive group, I'm still processing), and mine (Hostel One, though it is an apartment building, not an actual hostel) is the one that is closest to Intercollege and the one that everyone has to meet in front of for group events. It may not be the fanciest, but I really like it. My flatmates are quite nice. There are two cousins from Boston sharing a room, and my roommate is a girl from Virginia Tech. What is super weird is that she is in the same major, Hospitality and Tourism, as my roommate from Va Tech on the Moscow trip was. And they know each other! This girl is the only Tech student on the Cyprus program, and there just happens to be this coincidence. Crazy.

The neighborhood we are in is called Makedonitissa. Were you to find a detailed Nicosia map, we would likely not be on it, so far to the left we are. There is an arterial one street over, which houses many little convenience-store type places, a bunch of huge fancy furniture warehouses, the oh-so-splendid Gyromania (I'm sorry Continental, I still love you, but the chicken souvlaki at Gyromania is really really good), "Green Valley" - a great fruit and vegetable grocery store, a pub called "Trends," and Papafilipou's - an ice cream shop-cum-arcade complete with air hockey, pool, lots of video games, and yes, bumper cars! Papafilipou's is seriously two blocks from the Hostel, and it's creepy to pass every day. Okay, I did play my roommate at air hockey last night, it was way fun.

At the apartment we have a pretty large balcony with a big plastic table and chairs; it is just a perfect place to sit at night and relax. And as we are quite close to the buffer zone, we have an almost unobscured view of the embarrassment of all Greek Cypriots: the massive Turkish Cypriot flag painted into the mountains behind Turkish Cypriot Nicosia, adorned with flashing Christmas lights at night. Wow, it is quite a sight. I'll post some pictures once I get around to taking them.

I'm running out of battery power, so I'll have to talk about today (first day of school!) tomorrow. I had really fantastic time in New York. I'll admit, I sort of wanted to be unimpressed and not find it that interesting. The first night, I walked a terribly long way from my hostel down the Upper West Side and Broadway toward Times Square. I think Times Square must be the most ridiculously stupid place on the planet. A bunch of idiots getting all overexcited about being advertised to from so many shiny directions at once. I was entirely confused about why it's a destination.

But then the next day was absolutely beautiful, and in the morning I walked around in Central Park, and I just fell in love. Everyone I spoke with was really friendly, and I didn't feel like it was a place that was all that different from any other city - it just has more Barnes and Nobles! The best part was that Kristi drove up from Maryland with her dog; we drove all over Manhattan then spent several hours drinking beer at a lovely outdoor cafe by a little pond in Central Park. It was serenely fantastic.

The second best part was my taxi driver on the way into the city from JFK. He had a conversation on his cell in Russian, but I was too nervous to ask him a question in Russian, so I waited until we were discussing the weather to say: "Oh, it's been very mild in Seattle, are you Russian?" He laughed and asked if I thought so because of his accent. I said no, I heard you speaking Russian earlier. He laughed again, and said yes, he was Russian. But turns out he's actually from Uzbekistan, though when he left they were still part of the Soviet Union. I asked him several questions about his homeland that displayed my obvious interest in the region, prompting him to laugh yet again and say: "You know very well history of Uzbekistan!" Hardly, but the comment totally made my night.

Worst part was on the metro heading back to JFK. I was scrunched up against someone, and despite having zero weight or pressure on my right leg, the crazy limb kept falling asleep, then waking, causing me to somewhat spastically try to restrain myself from reacting too intensely to the pins and needles, then falling asleep again. I spent the last half hour of the ride terrified that I would be unable to remove myself from the metrocar when we reached my stop. Luckily I could, though awkwardly.
London was fine. I slept A LOT. The middle-aged guy in my room making unfathomably loud noises in his sleep was not fine. I left the room and spent the wee hours drinking wine with Texan college students; not a bad way to spend some time.