New Holiday Experiences in Cyprus.
Meat Pies to Meze: Our Cypriot Adventure. Edition 2.
The poll.
In the first edition, I ended the post with a poll as I’m curious as to whether you are as mad as us and want to try uprooting your life and re-basing yourself overseas at some point to start new adventures, or..
Whether you just want to tune in to watch us flail around trying to make it all work (you cheeky sadists you)!
Well… the results are in.
I know there’s only 10 votes… I probably need to make the polls open for longer (apologies!).. but an overwhelming number of you (at least 9!!) are as mad as us (great to know).
A new approach to the intro with this second edition.
In the first edition I covered the first two weeks in Cyprus and in this edition, I’m covering the next two weeks. BUT…
I thought perhaps I’d start with a summary of highlights, and lowlights from those weeks. Why? Because I’ve learned in the past that this approach (sharing the top 5% of experiences, and the bottom 5% of experiences) tends to share the peaks and troughs in a way that’s more representative of real life and in so doing.. hopefully make this a slightly more authentic and vulnerable blog. It can’t all be rainbows and daffodils cause that just ain’t reality!
Highlights.
There were two big highlights in this period for me.
Being re-united with Seb after 3.5 months apart
We had planned to move to Cyprus in November 23 from Australia. Seb wanted to go to boarding school in the UK and we’d found a great one.. that was going to start in September though.
That meant we wouldn’t see him for 3.5 months, from the beginning of September until a week before Christmas when he had school holidays! We’ve had the odd week or two apart in the past, but 3.5 months not being able to hug my 15 year old boy was massive.
And yes.. he’s having a great time as you can see below.
And notwithstanding he probably doesn’t need to see us that often as he’s a super independent boy (always has been.. just like his Mum), it was still a brutal amount of time. You’ll note the massive relief on my face below in Larnaca when I finally got him back (I’m sure he got sick of the constant hugs pretty quickly!).
Lachy’s major change of plan…
In November Lachy got an early offer for Mechanical Engineering at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane to start his degree in February 2024 which he’d accepted, and we were thrilled for him.
The photo below is us up at 1am Cyprus time so we could be on the phone with him when he got his ATAR (that’s a happy face btw).
We (and he) knew it would be very hard to separate and have him move to a city where he hasn’t lived for a long time, into student accommodation during a period (over summer) where it’s a ghost-town and he’d have just left his friendship network behind on the Sunshine Coast.
Add to that… we’re a super close family and have spent the last 3 years living in each other’s pockets as both Lachy and Seb carried on in an online education model after COVID therefore studying from home - so we’ve spent a LOT of time together, and loved it! Most of the time anyway. There was a moment in early 2023 when Lachy flexed his independence muscle, moved out to live with his girlfriend, and yes, in Year 12, roll eyes, sigh heavily but he came home after 6 weeks having realised how much he preferred living with us! Phew, thank god!
To cut a long story short, Lachy has been getting setup and settled in Brisbane but also realised he was going to miss out on lots of travel experiences and proximity to his family, and after a month in Brisbane has withdrawn from his degree, booked a flight to Cyprus for the end of January and is currently applying to German universities to complete his degree there in English!
We couldn’t be more excited to have him here for 3 months in Cyprus with us, and to have him close by in Germany. We can get to see him far more frequently in Germany and easily than with him in Australia. Germany was actually the original plan but things went a bit off course when Lachy moved out earlier in the year…. I think he was just overwhelmed with Year 12, being in love and his parents buggering off to Europe. It was a LOT for an 18 year old to process. A lot for us all to process actually.
Lowlights.
The guilt. The insecurity. The “what have we done? what’s wrong with us? what are we doing to our family?” which had reared it’s ugly head at least weekly in the lead up to November when we left for Cyprus, came back with a vengeance at Christmas.
I mean….
how do you know whether in the process of creating potentially amazing experiences for each person in the family by basing yourself in Europe, you’re instead actually tearing your family fabric apart?
Well.. you don’t. You just don’t know. It’s a massive risk. And we have thought countless times “WTF are we actually doing? are we running away from something? why would we disrupt our comfortable, happy lives to this extent? Life was very comfortable, easy and happy on the Sunshine Coast.”.
We know we’re doing this for the love of adventure and for the potential growth for us all, but equally it could be terrible… and be a huge waste of time, money and effort to get here and try and make it work. And then have it all crumble! (hopefully it doesn’t)
And so on Christmas morning instead of all waking up together to unwrap presents…
We’d left our son 14,000 kms away, on his own, on the end of a phone with no family and no friends around him to spend Christmas with.
And whilst he had offers of places to go for Christmas (for which we’re truly thankful to you all who offered) he was working Christmas eve till the wee hours in his bartending job, and had Boxing Day shifts so decided to spend the day on his own.
But that didn’t make us feel any better. Are we terrible parents? Who knows… I don’t think so… but we felt awful not having him in Cyprus with us, and we missed him like crazy. We did FaceTime Lachy for about 2.5 hours and also dialled in Grandma and other family members, so it was kind of like we were together.
Some tears later (seems like a running theme!), it dawned on me how much respect I have for families who still manage to come together every year no matter how busy their lives get, or how far apart they live… to share, laugh, joke and love each other at Christmas. It takes real effort, money, time and commitment to each other. Respect to you if you’ve built that with your family.
I sincerely hope for that for us… that’s the last one we ever do apart!
Week 3 in Paphos
(above) Making new friends - two tables of nomads and expats getting to know each other with a lovely dinner at Agora Restaurant (thanks for organising Marzena and Valentine).
This makes me laugh.. I don’t know why, but I love how Brits in any country including their own… make the most of any bit of sunshine. They just lap it up! I took this photo when we were walking along and being passed by Cypriots in full tracksuits with beanies. I should have tried to get the juxtaposition in one photo!
A Week’s Holiday in Larnaca
Larnaca is a decent size city, bigger than Paphos (where we live) and its a port-town with long beaches, a great old town full of awesome bars and restaurants and a busy airport. We’ve been there before, but not with a week to muck around and explore.
Cracker of an AirBnB choice at Finikoudes Beach Anna Steele! #NailedIt.
We had a great time exploring things to do locally from lots of eating and drinking, go-carts, video gaming, and there was even an Olympic Shooting Range!
Larnaca was beautiful, all lit up for Christmas. Much more Christmas spirit than I expected. I don’t know why.. but my expectations were low so I was delighted by how festive the city felt.
Special Cypriot Moments
These uniquely Mediterranean experiences made us smile in Larnaca;
the Salt and Pepper Museum (haha.. love it… so random)
Loukoumades (fried Greek honey puffs which were SUPER yum and very gluten, dairy and sugar unfriendly!), and
the pink flamingos that travel from North Italy, Turley, Sardinia and Iran salt lakes to warm their feet in the warmer Cypriot waters each winter.
Here’s something you won’t find every day in Australia, an escalator just for your shopping trolley to accommodate the tighter layouts in multi-level supermarkets. Very cool. Best remember to take your kiddies out before it goes up though.
Plane spotting
If you don’t know already… Seb is a plane spotter. An avgeek. A future pilot. He’s obsessed about aviation. And really good at the photography side of things. Here’s a couple of his shots from the Gold Coast Airshow before we left Australia.
If you want to see more you can follow Seb here on Instagram.
But since we have a plane spotter in the family.. it means we often build our holidays around…. well…. umm… airports!
Yep. You heard me. When we went to Sydney for a trip for Seb to experience Sydney, we stayed in Brighton-Le-Sands by the airport. Why? So we could be as close as possible to the spots to take plane photos from!
The things we do for love as parents hey?!
This is Seb above spotting at Larnaca… which is a cool place for spotters as it gets all sorts of interesting aircraft from around the world including lots of unique military aircraft you wouldn’t see elsewhere.
Whilst we were there, we saw this Antonov parked up on the apron. Look at me with my plane lingo :-)
Antonov’s are famous because the Antonov An-225 is the world record holder as the heaviest aircraft ever built. It has 6 engines and 32 wheels, no other plane has come close to it’s cargo-carrying capacity. This one above (which is not the An-225 before a passionate spotter corrects me.. I know!) is the baby brother or sister (an An-124), yet still close to the size of the massive A380 (it’s 21m tall vs 24m tall for the A380). See.. hang around avgeeks too long and you become one! Dear lord. Help me.
A Cypriot Christmas - back in Paphos
We got back to Paphos on Christmas Eve with an unwell Seb (arrived from the UK with a chest infection/Bronchitis and still hasn’t shaken it more than a week later) and sadly had to cancel Christmas afternoon and Christmas Eve plans (sorry Winnie and Leandros!) but were determined to make the most of Christmas Day.
After an early multi-hour video con with Lachy, we enjoyed a lunch at a beautiful 5-star Hotel (the Annabelle) with Anna, Seb and I. We stayed outside (even though it was actually super hot in the sun) to keep Seb’s germs away from the other guests.
The lunch was beautiful and it was a great way to celebrate Christmas in a new country, notwithstanding my comments at the top about how it felt to have a Christmas without Lachy.
Until next time…
Well that’s it for this edition. I think in the next edition I’ll focus on the “why Cyprus” question which is probably everybody’s #1 question for us.
Why indeed!?
Well.. tune in for the next edition and you’ll find out :)
Thanks for spending your precious time with us.
You write so beautifully Sean. It’s great to see you all in the photos and hear about the highs and lows… vulnerable and honest and real indeed!!