Letter from Cyprus

Slowly working my way closer to Istanbul, city by city. now it is 2pm, 4 hours to go until i can relax (at the house where I'll stay tonight, can't arrive before 6pm). the sun here in nicosia is brutal. met this nigerian guy and his nigerian friends and they took the bus with me to nicosia (the capital of Cyprus and coincidentally, my homeland. Oh, also they drive on the left hand side here, legacy of the Brits.). he was really nice, helped me with my bag, and since i was really tired, he helped me get to a park where i slept a little more on a park bench. feel a little better. he said he would come back after his meeting with someone, but it started getting sunny and i got hot. so i walked out and ran into a little sri lankan store! (actually, I didn't run into it, but coolly approached it). i took a picture and walked in, and started chatting the guys up in my awful sinhala. but they were cool. the guy asked if i had had lunch, and i said no, and started hoping for offers of nice curry and string hoppers, but he didn't say anything more on the subject. maybe he was just interested to know if i had eaten. haha. in any case, he was really impressed by my bag, he thought it was really heavy, though he had gigantic muscles, more greek-like that sri-lankan like. and there are so many different people here in nicosia, not at all like larnaca, which we could compare to manhattan in terms of touristy, and nicosia would be brooklyn. it would be nice to live here for awhile. i saw a sign in the park announcing a handsome european man was looking for a pretty filipina. well some things never change. one of the first things tony, the nigerian, told me was that it was nice living in larnaca (he lives there, but studies in nicosia) but that people say "strange things". i pressed further: "like racist comments?" "Yeah." melting pots are always so volatile. Like the one time in Puerto Matilde (Magdalena Medio) when a pressure cooker full of beans blew up and tore a hole through the aluminum roofing bought with money from the European Union.
The bus ride, through my sleepy eyes, was nice, the countryside is hilly to mountainous and, at least in this part, arid and sort of sandy, but with those pretty thin trees that make me visualize a greek countryside. Tonight after showering and relaxing, hoping to get a tour of the city and maybe check out the wall, since it is the 30th anniversary of the Turkish invasion today. I imagine it will be something like the Berlin Wall. There were two Greek Cypriot nationalists handing out flyers in Greek over in Larnaca, and I asked them to explain it to me, but either they really couldn't speak English, or they refused to. Oh well. I should probably ditch the flyer before entering Turkish Cyprus.
Other than that, there are a lot of really gorgeous people here. Seen a few bronzed Greek gods and goddesses like in the movies. Some fake looking ones, too. I was reading in my in-flight magazine that Cyprus was one of the premier destinations for plastic surgery. Maybe I will get my lips thinned out... is that called labiaplasty?

love, nico

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