Cyprus - Larnaka

Larnaka is a beach city with a bit of charm. There's a beach front strip with palm trees and old style street lights. In the beach side of the main drag, there are nice sized beaches, but the sand is all packed down and wet, with rocks mixed in. It's my least favorite kind of beach. There are lots of places set up offering a place to sit, for a price. It's sort of picturesque in that direction.

The city side of the main strip of Larnaka is a little busy and touristy. The most beautiful part was the Starbucks. However, F preferred the espresso at Hobo's Restaurant a few hundred meters away. Off the main drag is the real city of Larnaka. It's interesting enough to fill an afternoon, but we got up late, had breakfast, made our way to Larnaka and then at 1:00, everything shuts down until about 4:00. Proper planning might have remedied this, but I found it disappointing.

Still, we saw what we wanted to see and then made it back to sit on the beach. I listened to The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Of course it's Kitty Kelly, so it's a little sensationalistic. But if half of what's in there is true, that's one horrible set of people. I'm really glad I never flipped a lever for a Bush. The only problems with this book is that there is an incredible amount of detail, sometimes too much, and it's really long. I haven't even finished it yet. Still, it was nice to sit under the umbrella and do Sudoku puzzles and let the day go by.

The food was a little problem. In Tunisia, F and I opted for eating at the hotel. It was a mistake. There were enough restaurants around and it was cheap to eat. In Larnaka, I kept wishing we'd opted for the hotel food, although it was probably as one-note as the hotel food in Tunisia. Instead, we had to find a restaurant every night. But in the end, it wasn't that expensive, or that much trouble.

As far as any other bits of entertainment, there weren't any. Larnaka is a beach town. We were on this little touristy edge. There was no entertainment available other than pubs, drinking and walking along the beach or streets at night. So we did a lot of that and a lot of talking. It was a nice vacation, but I'm glad I don't have to go there again.