h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's 2.07am in the morning. It'll be around 3.00am by the time I finish this post, I'm sure. I'm sitting here under my newly-built pergola with the laptop on wireless-broadband and power-coupled to the new outside socket I installed today. (For an hour I was *totally* free from cables, but then the battery started to die.)

It's cooled to around 30 deg C now - still quite warm, but the religious quaffing of Strongbow is cooling me down. I can hear the crickets and the cicadas singing and the full moon is the strongest and brightest I have ever seen.

Petunia (our stray cat) has been to visit twice tonight. She's been lavishly fed on ham and chicken for the past few nights. Tonight saw her fed on a Kite-Kat pouch. She never complained. After the second one, much, about being hungry.

I'm sweating and I'm in shorts. I'm also smoking a small cigar. This place is just so peaceful and tranquil. I'm sure it'll never see a smoking ban.

I had reservations about leaving Portugal. I was sure that Cyprus wouldn't offer me the beauty and the serenity that we had there. How wrong I was.

All the difficulties that *I* suffered there, like the language and the culture, have just melted away. The Cypriots are kind, loving, people - with families at heart. They are *extremely* mad though.

In short, I'm happy. Blissfully happy. And I wouldn't trade any of it for the world.

I'm also gloating, and loving my life, my wife and everything that I do.

Unfortunately, there is no room at the inn. I've fully booked it.

I think we've found a happy man...


Good for you. We won't mind the gloating. Much.

I'm hunting deep doo doos

he he he he he

That's brilliant, DDD

I have odd memories of Cyprus which are hard to explain. I'm always more of a traveller than a tourist, if that makes sense, and in most countries I've managed to properly befriend at least a few of the locals (I've written that sentence a few times in various ways, and so far it makes sense in none of them; I'm just going to have to stick with this version). I've always managed to communicate that I was to learn and be immersed rather than just see, and I've had a great rapport with people as a result. I like to think that I've given as much as I've taken on the road.

In Cyprus, I could never quite manage that. I could see that the people were friendly and that they had a very strong sense of family and an innate way of welcoming people, but at the same time there was a very clear line between tourists and locals. Perhaps it was well-developed sense of privacy, but even when hitching with a couple of guys and their chickens I didn't managed to move the conversation beyond the mundanities of the weather and a brief outline of our lives. It's probably my biggest regret from my 'proper' travelling days, and I'm glad you've found the real heart of the people

Thank you for thinking to share that, DDD. You and your missus are worthy of such happiness

(Tell D I waved from our plane this morning as we flew over you )

Rich, I had to come back to this one - mostly because I now feel what you say is partly true.

We were welcomed with open arms when we first arrived here - I honestly believed it was the Cypriot nature, but I now feel it was partly because of the money we were willing to spend and the (potential) way we splashed it about.

As we've settled here and our spending has naturally decreased, I've noticed a remarkable reduction in the calls of "My Friend" and "Mr. Steve". I have to say that my attitude toward the Cypriot people has changed a little, but not by that much.

They are still very family orientated. They love my sister-in-law's 2-year-old to death - giving her Sluggsy and FiFi (two finches, of which one the cat ate, but she was told he'd flown away) and looking in sheds and barns when she went missing, but was found exploring.

I've left my shed open unintentionally for the last few days. It contains a fairly high value of tools and kit that we've ordered for the next house project. It was never touched, despite there being a number of builders and tradesmen delivering or working here over the last few months. This country is wonderfully safe and almost crime-free.

But, yeah. The Cypriots seem willing talk about *our* lives, *our* future, *our* kids (which we've yet to produce) and the weather. I'm not sure if they do it from politeness or frustration. Then they talk about the Brits, and the economy and how hard it is for *them* to make any money here. But they never talk frankly about themselves, no matter how hard we try to engage within the family units.

I see a very secular population. I can see why, and I try hard to understand and accept why it has happened. It's a different culture, for sure, but it doesn't make it any easier for me to get my little head around.

I hope and pray that I will find an in-road to the Cypriot culture and attitude. I'd like to be immersed and accepted within the local population, but at the moment I find myself constrained a lot by the resident Brits, their habits and attitudes.

I'm still blissfully happy with my life , my wife and my future. But if I can find a way of fully integrating within the place I now class as home, then, then, I will be entirely fulfilled.

Cheers!

I really hope you break it down. We lived in Tenerife for a while, and I was up for a job in a locals' cafe for ages, but never got it. They loved the idea that an Englishman wanted to learn all about their coffee and culture I never got it, though, and we were trapped in expat hell - a horribly insular community full of self-important people who felt they were a law unto themselves. They got offended if someone talked to them in a car park in Spanish, for example. Most expats never even try to integrate themselves, and the locals eventually respond by treating the expat community as simply long-term tourists. Certainly if you try to live in Spain, this is the attitude you'll get - you'll be overcharged for living like an Englishman abraod, even if you want to live like a Spaniard at home.

I've travelled quite widely, and I know it takes time to break down the tourist-local boundaries to the point where you become more or less equal. It can take days, weeks or months, and you can get a sense of it by the time you're there even if you never begin to actually level things. I loved Cyprus, but it's the one place where I felt I could never even begin to close that gap. Maybe customs come from the language, and the language is tough - I found that understanding idiomatic expressions in Spanish, for example, broke down a lot of boundaries; but they're quite easy expressions in a Romance language. Learning Greek, with a different alphabet and grammar, is presumably far more difficult, and therefore it's much tougher to begin to understand the culture.