Month: November 2009

We found these mushrooms on our walk.

On arriving back home we had a very long power cut which meant that Mal and I spent a lot of time doing the gardening. Mal made more room for fruit trees in the front garden.

Another morning being woken up the hunters who were again far too close. We went off to the beach with Rosie. We had a lazy day and in the afternoon watched Chelsea win again.

After we had taken Rosie I popped to the shops to buy Cyprus Today. Mal has written a precis of the main stories in www.northcyprusfreepress.com(as he always does Wednesdays and Saturdays).  I must say I don’t quite understand the front page ‘Owners celebrate property success’. It sounds as though they are going to contribute more towards the next auction! There really are some things I don’t understand here, for instance WHY  more people haven’t signed Pauline Read’s petition.

SIGN PETITION

She is a very determined lady who is prepared to fight this all the way, where on earth is all the support? Perhaps a lot of ex pats here are so wealthy they can afford to lose their money or are all the people without their deeds living in cloud cuckoo land, believing they can’t possibly have a mortgage on their property. Mal and I have had our deeds prior to commencing building BUT we have still signed.

We went for a long walk in the mountains with Rosie and somewhere we acquired Freddy 2. We also collected a big bag of pine comes for the log burner. The weather is lovely during the day but once the sun drops behind the mountains it gets quite chilly in the house and so we have been having the log burner ticking over. It is so cosy. Of course Rosie lies right next to it. She also wants to assist when Mal lights it.

We did some serious thinking about Christmas shopping on the internet only to discover that some of the things are already out of stock!

In the eveing we watched the rest of the Benidorm series and then the first episode of the new Gavin and Stacey. That is so funny.

We took Rosie out and then headed off to the tax office to renew the car tax which runs out at the end of the month. On checking my documents, I noticed that the emissions test paper was blank, the ink had just dissapeared. All that was left was the garages name at the bottom. I had taken a photcopy when I originally had the test done along with the MOT. For anyone who can’t keep up with the changing rules, the emissions test is every three years now, not the once a year that they changed it to for a short time. We decided that it was better to go today when the staff should all be happy prior to Bayram, rather than when they return from their break!! Mal took the documents in and left the photocopy in the car. They accepted the blank emmissions test paper. Our theory worked, the girl just had a quick glance at the paperwork and asked Mal for 54tl (!!) and handed him the tax disc.  At today’s rate that is approximately £22, not bad for a years car tax. That is half the price we paid last year.  I think that there must be an island wide shortage of ink as we could barely read anything on the tax disc and once it gets in the sun, it will all dissapear instantly.

We then went into Mr Pound. For anyone who is interested they have plenty of Christmas things in there now, including wrapping paper, ribbon, Christmas stockings and much more.

Next into Ileli’s to replenish our stock of Woody’s sausages (Torin was rather partial to them and ate the lot!) They didn’t have any but they said they would order some straight away. Out of all the supermarkets, I find Ileli’s the most obliging and helpful.

Rain was forecast but there wasn’t any!  I bought Cyprus Today and was horrified that Jacky Wilson’s pet boxer dog was shot by a hunter. He was jumping up at a hunter, being friendly and was shot in his leg. Poor Benson may lose his front leg. Naturally Jacky Wilson is distraught. Pertev is treating Benson. “Police are investigating the incident”. Shameful.

In the evening, some of our ‘pizza gang'(also known as ‘the coven’ by one of our members!) went to the Green Valley restaurant as they have started their winter menus, with different offers on each night. Wednesday nights menu is 15tl and well worth it. We had a table by a roaring log fire and it was quite busy in there. We started with a meze and then a choice of chicken and mushroom pie or steak and kidney pie with vegetables, chips and gravy, followed by a large Turkish pudding, coffee and brandy all in the price. Excellent value. We had a really good evening.

When I arrived home Mal had discovered that both this diary and his online newspaper were both in the midst of a DDoS attack, where many computers access the website at the same time so it either slows down or stops completely.  Because Mal used to teach network security, he knew what to do and when he blocked the computers he thought were in the attack, it stopped and the sites were back to normal. Cyprus 44 (forum) has also had a DdoS attack this week and was brought down for 2 days.

We were all up early to get Torin to Ercan for his Pegasus 8.15 flight. I hate airport goodbyes and this was the same as always!!  I’ll say no more.

We took Rosie with us and stopped to give her a run in 5 finger mountains on the way back. It seemed a lovely walk until we came upon loads of rubbish, it must be everywhere.

I started trying to track Torin’s flight but it was all very vague saying that it was still sitting at Istanbul. When he did arrive at Stansted he rang me and said they were waiting on the runway at Istanbul for 2 hours, he arrived back two hours late, with his lift luckily still waiting for him, BUT when he rang he had been standing by the luggage carousels and they hadn’t even put up which one it was 45 minutes later. He travels all over the world with his work (and hates flying I hasten to add) and he said he can honestly say the flights through Ercan are the worst he has been on and he will never do it again. He did say that last time when they had a long delay and came through Larnaca,  now he says Larnaca or nothing. He also added there was no leg room and he is quite tall. Oh dear! What a shame at the end of a good holiday. Pegasus and CTA should really try and improve or we will have no tourists here. It seems whenever we have visitors there are problems with their flights. This isn’t a one off.

A friend sent me this link about South Cyprus, I thought it was so funny, I would put it in here, for goodness sake if their court cases take as long as ours I wonder if they will still be alive!  http://www.cyprusweekly.com.cy/main/92,1,283,0,3908-.aspx