Wanderlust: Chasing Intrigue: Cyprus

My dearest friends and family. I am EXHAUSTED. But, having said that, I am also extremely aware of the need for Spring Break updates! So, in order to both allow myself to breathe and simultaneously provide a wonderful procrastination tool for myself, I will be splitting up my spring break into a few different blog posts. How? I haven't decided. I guess we'll just see how things go=]

So, to start off this magnificent journey, I give you....

CYPRUS.

Oh Cyprus, how beautiful you are. After being stuck in traffic for 2 HOURS we finally got to Cairo International Airport and were headed to Cyprus! We flew into Larnaca and hopped in a taxi to head to our lovely seaside hostel. But, actually communicating where we wanted to go turned out to be somewhat of an issue at first considering we jumped right into Arabic without a second thought. Transitioning from one foreign country to another is hard. Lesson learned.

Views from the Hostel=]

That night we wandered around Larnaca and down to the main strip of restaurants and shops. Very cute, got some delicious Greek food and then wandered by a dock for a bit before heading back to our awesome hostel for the evening.

The next morning we headed to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. Unfortunately, we didn't have much of a plan of what to do in Nicosia when we got there other than wander around.

Us: So what is there to do in Nicosia?
Taxi Driver: Nothing! Nicosia is capital. Only for shopping.
Us: .... (laughter)

Ahh well, story of our lives. We wandered around the Greek side a bit, hit up a small archaeological museum and then finally hit the border crossing over to Lefkosa, the Turkish side of Cyprus. The capital of Cyprus happens to be the only officially divided capital in the entire world. The southern portion belongs to the legitimate country of Cyprus which is majority Greek while the northern portion belongs to the unrecognized (by everyone except Turkey of course) Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

attempting to figure out what to do and maybe where we are....

THE BORDER

The old marketplace

Kyrenia Gate

After Nicosia, we grabbed a taxi to Girne which is a small seaside town where we were planning on catching a ferry to Turkey. It was BEAUTIFUL.

That evening the boys and I just walked around Girne and generally enjoyed the atmosphere of the place. It's a harbor right by the Mediterranean and simply stunning both by night and day. After that, the gents were going to rent a car and drive around Cyprus for a few days, while Andrew and I just chilled in Girne until our flight that evening. WAIT. Back it up. I forgot to tell you all! So originally we were planning on getting that ferry to Turkey?? Yeah, well...that didn't quite work out. We went to find out where to catch it and the woman told us that it didn't even start running until MAY. This was a bit of a mushkila. Luckily we were able to find a pretty cheap flight straight to Antalya for the next evening. So Andrew and I got to stay one extra day in Cyprus and still have the same amount of time in Antalya! شكرا يارب! Anyways, we enjoyed our full extra day by checking out Kyrenia castle, which is directly on the Harbor, Bellapais Abbey and St. Hilarion Castle.