Lost in Nicosia 3/31/08

Monday morning I woke up somehow feeling extreamly ill. My nose was stuffed up and running, I had a cough and a sore throat. My head, sinuses and whole body ached from conjestion. The good news was that the night before (or I should say that morning) at about 12:30am my backpack arrived at Andrea's door. I took it completely apart and made sure that everything was there, and low and behold it was all together. Thank God for that! I pulled out all my clothes, and Andrea washed them for me. I finally charged my phone, and my laptop. Things were ok again.

I got up from bed, and now that I had my backpack, I took some airborn and other medications my doctor had given me to boost my ammune system. Andrea had already gone to work, but she left me the number to Cyprus Airways so that I could book my flight for tomorrow morning, which I did promptly. I looked out the window and noticed that it was raining, and not only just raining, pouring like I hadn't seen since Scotland. Cyprus was going through a drought when I got there, but somehow I brought with me rain from Scrotland, which was great for them, but it meant I wouldn't be going to the coast that day like I'd planned. Instead I sorted out my laundry, and repacked my backpack. After a bit, I decided I didn't want to stay in the apartment all day, so I grabbed a map of Nicosia and figured I could at least walk into Old City for a little while. So I did that. I followed the road Andrea lived on all the way up to the old city and walked around there for a little while and headed back. However, getting back seemed a whole lot more of an issue. I tried to follow the one road back the same way I came, but apparently there are a whole lot of streets that split off to different areas from that road, and if you're not on the same side of the road you came up on, it'll lead you off to God knows where. I accidently missed the road I supposed to be on, and walked for an hour before I realized I was lost. I checked my map, but quickly realized that the names on the map were not at all the names on the streets. I found out later it was because a couple years ago, Nicosia went through a big helenization where the street signs were written in Greek and the litteral translated phonetic Greek, the maps I had were in English. So I was lost in a huge city, while it rained spirratically, and I was painfully irritated that I couldn't figure out where I was on the map. I wandered around for 4 hours, tired and thirsty before I finally found someone who could tell me where I was. Somehow I ended up on the way outskirts of the city, miles from where I needed to be. This nice old man drove me to one of the main roads closer to where I needed to be, and directed me to just walk down the road and eventually I'd get back to where it was familiar. Finally about 30 minutes later, I made it back to Andrea's apartment, and collapsed on the couch.

I took a nap, until Andrea got home from work, and then she took me to a bar her and Jenn used to go a lot called Plato's, where I had some more of that wonderful Cypriot beer (its called KEO), and felt a lot better.