Tales from the Coffeeshop
TODAY we are celebrating the first anniversary of the People’s Republic of Kyproulla which was established when Comrade Christofias and his Bolsheviks swept to power, triumphantly defeating the forces of reaction in presidential elections.
WHEN crossings between the north and south of the island opened in 2003, the parents of many high-attaining Turkish Cypriot students raced to enroll their children at Nicosia’s renowned English School on the Greek Cypriot side.
WITH children from all sorts of backgrounds in need of short-term and sometimes long-term care, the demand for more foster families is increasing.
There are currently 195 foster families registered with the Social Welfare Services island-wide, a slight increase (3.2 per cent) since 2005.
Maro Christou, 45, and her husband fostered 14-year-old Xenia 12 years ago and even though they haven’t fostered any other children since, their success story was too heart-warming to overlook.
The Christou family took Xenia (not their real names) in when she was just 23 months old.
MARCH is usually the cruellest month for Paphos restaurateurs, a time when cash flow is at its lowest. This year it’s even worse with regular patrons from the British expat community staying home, conserving their euros after losing 23 per cent plus in the value of their sterling pensions due to poor exchange rates.
There aren’t many things that make me spring out of bed early on a Sunday morning. But that’s just what I did last weekend. The reason? An eagerly awaited day trip to the Troodos Mountains to mess around in the snow with fiancé and friends.
But by the time I got there how wished I had stayed in bed.
THE hundreds of millions of euros earmarked for a motorway linking Paphos to Polis could be better spent on building clinics or upgrading Paphos’ transit system, a former minister and one-time advocate of the project has said.
The parlous state of the island’s tourism and the financial problems of Cyprus Airways (CY) could both be vastly improved at a stroke by a simple new plan. It would probably pay for the insane new motorway and those six planned golf courses.
What are we, the people who live in Cyprus, doing to preserve our wonderful countryside, our wildlife, our wonderful villages – the reason why we all want to live here?
Politicians really don’t care – they are only concerned with their own status, their own pockets and those that will benefit from this dreadful Polis-Paphos motorway.
I am trying to contact my friend Lola Louca who I worked with in BMH Dhekelia in 1961. She lived in Xylotymbos near Dhekelia.
I corresponded with her for a few years after leaving Cyprus but we lost contact after the invasion in the 1970s.
She had family in London so it is possible she moved there.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
