Saturday is bright and sunny. High of 26 C.
We started the day with Turkish coffee and I had the Aryan drink on the side (yoghurt drink)
I think the place yesterday had better coffee - that was their specialty though. We bought a honey drenched kind of churro circular sweet from a street vendor. Good. Halka Tatslisi. Turkish street food. We had these in Ephesus too.
We are trying to check out the bus to Famagusta for Monday. So we asked a guy on the left hand side of the gate if the big buses parked there went to Famagusta. So he pointed to the small buses on the other side. We eventually found the right bus and the helper there spoke good English. Every hour on the hour from 7 am - 160 TL.
The Kyrenia Gate is the only gate from the old wall of Nicosia that is on the North side of the city, as the other two gates, Famagusta Gate and Paphos Gate, are both in South Nicosia. It is also the best preserved gate. Built 500 years ago. Throughout the centuries the Venetians, the Ottomans and the British have walked through this gate now tourist information but we have been here twice and nobody is there.
Back to our room - the one positive is that it's close and I guess another is the AC works.
Nobody comes in to take out the garbage or replenish the towels. We are using the bath towels as blankets as the beds have no top sheet but there's a blanket folded at the bottom. We are unsure if the blankets are washed between guests so we don't use them. I noticed this morning the toilet has a built in bidet, makes sense since Turk's don't typically use toilet paper with a squat toilet, they have a jug of water nearby.
After a time we ventured out so now I have a 70 tl ($3 Cdn) Effes beer. Best, possibly only deal in town.
By and by (it's around noon), two guys with instruments set up. Bosanova jazz, really talented dudes, playing from the adjacent coffee shop. We moved over there for a better view. They were from Turkey but played South American style music, the one sang and played a drum he was sitting on and the other was a great guitar player.
We had found a money changer that was fair yesterday so went back and changed 20 E to TL. We should be good for now.
Mahkemeler Binas Law Courts building in Nicosia.
For supper we had lahmacun (kind of thin bread smeared with a ground meat topping, sliced tomatoes and parsley on the side) and a chicken Donaire with peppers on the side, We picked up dessert at a bakery.
Cyprus Area: 3,572 sq mi (9,251 sq km). Population: (2024 est.) 1,336,000 (whole island). The Turks occupy roughly one third and represent 20 % of the population. Nicosia is the capital. city and is the last divided capital in the world.
In England the Romani are called travellers. Apparently Roma or Romani are more politically correct terms for gypsies. Personally I like the word traveller better than tourist applied to me. The Romani are believed to have come from northern India in maybe the 11 Century. The Vikings liked to travel also and some came to Turkey proper and were hired on as the sultans guard for a time. The links between Cyprus and Scandinavia date back to the 12th century, when the Vikings served as part of a Byzantine guard in the coastal city of Paphos in the southwest of Cyprus. (Vikings became part of the emperor’s Varangian Guard from the 10th to 14th centuries.)
This featured blog entry was written by CherylGypsyRose from the blog Europe on a Budget 2024.
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