First Impressions of Cyprus - Guest Blog by Jo Robertson

Introduction: Hi there! I’m Jo Robertson (from Australia), vacationing with the Jordan Five here in Cyprus. I met them on the UCG tour in Israel this year, and afterwards came to Amman and stayed with them for a few days. Two months later we decided that we should link up together again...in Cyprus!!

After waiting at the Larnaca airport for nearly 7 hours, it was nice to finally meet up with my ‘Amman friends’, as I call them. Their flight got in a lot later than mine, and I had decided to wait for them, as I didn’t have enough directions really to try and find this shared house they were renting for the week. After all the exchanges of hugs, we all troop outside to find this bus that’s supposed to take us to Kiti - a small town 7km from Larnaca. Zach found out the bus information, and we then trooped up to the roundabout to wait for the bus. The bus didn’t go the airport, but would circle around the roundabout, and it was our job to flag it down, as there was no bus stop to be seen anywhere. All we knew was it was green.

After half an hour... an hour... an hour-and-a-half of camping out on the side of the roundabout, I started to see green buses everywhere - even arguing that the blue ones had a hue of green to them. Finally, this grey bus with a green sticker on the windscreen comes into view. We didn’t care that the bus wasn’t actually green - it said ‘Kiti’ on it!! Proud of ourselves, we jump on the bus and head for our little resort town.

So we arrive in Kiti, with nothing more than the address for the place. But how hard can it be to find a street address in this peanut-sized town? Lewis and I end up going to the police station to get a map. We were shown where to go by a Greek policewoman who spoke broken English. The map was all in Greek, so we just tried to memorize the general direction. Lewis and I emerged from the Police Station, armed with directions such as, “After some street sounding like ‘Stephanos,’ turn right... “ Lewis hadn’t heard ‘Stephanos’ but thought the street ended in the word ‘Andy’. Then I thought she said something about a church, but were we supposed to turn right at the third street, or was it the second? The sun was beating down, and we had about 10 bags between us. After walking for about half an hour, we decided we were lost. The boys decided to go back to the police station and ask again. We had this bright idea to save backtracking - Zach would blow one note with my Irish tin whistle if we were heading in the wrong direction, and we would come join them with the bags. Otherwise, he’d just play a happy little tune and that meant to stay put. Sounded like a great idea at the time, but we hadn’t counted on not being able to hear a little whistle over the traffic. Finally the boys came back, and we strained to hear the whistle... They were practically within earshot before we heard this faint little happy tune, and we rejoiced. Not far to go now, and we’d be out of this heat....

An hour and a half later, after wandering in circles, the runner boys, Lewis and Zach, finally stumbled upon the right street. We show up, dusty, sweaty and tired, glad to see Tine who was already in the house. A test in patience that day, but smiles and hugs all around, glad to be together.