Limassol

Guest of the year: CVN-69

CVN-69

Cyprus has become a nuclear nation for the last few days. But don’t get too worried just yet. There aren no known nuclear terrorists around here, no nuclear weapons, and we aren’t building any nuclear power stations.

We have a guest. The Guest, I better say. Here are a few quotes from the Wikipedia page to get you introduced:

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVAN-69/CVN-69), nicknamed “Ike”, is the second of 10 Nimitz-class supercarriers in the United States Navy.

She was laid down as hull number 599 on 15 August 1970 at Newport News shipyard at a cost of $679 million, launched 11 October 1975 after christening by Mamie Doud-Eisenhower, and commissioned 18 October 1977

stayed on station off the coast of Iran for over 8 months, and was at sea for a total of 254 days

At one point, she spent 152 days (or 5 ½ months) at sea without a port call, a new record.

The ship is not that far from the coast. She is best viewed from Molos promenade. If you want to make pictures, make sure to check time (sun) and weather (mist, sun). I’ve made two attempts today, but both not very successful. I’ll try to make some more pictures tomorrow. All images will be posted to this Flickr set.

For the last couple of days I wasn reading a lot about this beauty. It is one piece of technology, I’ll tell you that. If I were to describe it in one word – “magnificent” is my choice. Truly. Any characteristic I checked about it – from the number of carried aircfats and the crew size to nuclear reactors and strategic potential – makes me go WOW! If you’re not amazed by the technology, try the money side of the story. Building costs, maintenance costs, repairs – you’ll have to count all zeros carefully.

Beautiful, beautiful gadget.

P.S.: This post is a part of a group blogging effort.

The winter is coming, the winter is coming!

I remember trying to pull the bed sheet from Olga all night today. When I woke up I felt chilly and wasn’t in the mood to get out of bed. When I stepped on the floor, I realized that it was than chilly – very refreshing. I was extra fast putting my clothes on too.

When I stepped outside, I immediately felt the urge to stick my hands into pockets of my jacket. Steam was coming out of my mouth. And I had no will to go to work.

While walking towards the car I was wondering if that’s really so cold or if that’s just me dramatizing on weather. As soon as that thought came to my mind, I heard a loud bang. It was a sparrow. He probably decided that life wasn’t worth living no more with temperatures that low and crashed into the office window at full speed. He dropped dead and made me feel sad.

Morning just wasn’t working out.

I started the car and checked the outside temperature. 9 degrees Celsius! (If you think that’s not cold, try boosting the relative humidity in your area to something above 60%.) No wonder I felt cold…

On the way to the bakery to get some breakfast I saw a couple of Philippino guys. They were even cold to look at. It was like they were wearing all clothes that they had, and then some more, borrowed from a friend. One of them had two hats. Poor guy was freezing his brains out I guess.

I came to the office about 20 minutes before the start of my morning shift (The start of the shift is at 7:00am), so I had enough time to enjoy the hot and sweet cup of coffee with still warm and fresh mushroom pie from the bakery.

Morning turned for the better…

That’s what I call raining

We are experiencing some of the heaviest rains today. One of them caught me on the road from the office to home. I was driving 20 km/h and couldn’t see nothing. The best I could do was to see the lights of another car about ten meters in front of me. It got a little bit easier towards the second half of my journey, but I faced another problem – loads of water on the road. At one time I stopped at the traffic light and saw this small van FLOATING from the street across mine. The guy was trying to steer, but there was no chance. He was lucky that he was floating on the green light.

With all the danger and confusion of this weather, I still like it so much that I wouldn’t change it for hot summer days. Thunders and lighnings are the greatest bonus ever.

Weird consumer behavior

For years now Limassol is inhabbited with crowds of Russian people. There are so many of us that many locals somewhat speak the language, many restaurants offer menus in Russian, as well as shops have “special” price lists.

One of the sides of the strong Russian community is a number of “Russian” shops. These are rather small shops that sell all sorts of goods that many Russian people miss. Mostly those are books by suicidal novelists and food items like caviar, pelmeni, and vodka.

For years, both Olga and I were going to visit one of this shops just to see if there was anything that we’d like to buy. We always knew practically the complist price list, because so many of our friends shop in these places regularly and tell us all about them. But we never got our act together. Either we were to lazy, or didn’t care much – I am not sure.

Our shopping routine was almost rock solid for all this years. A weekly trip to Woolworth Ermes covered almost all our food needs. Nearby bakery supplied us with fresh bread. And when we felt like and adventure we would sneak into the enemy’s camp go shopping to either Chris Cash & Carry or Orphanides.

Guess what have changed last week? You’ll never do, as we were surprised ourselves. Our best and favourite supermarket Ermes opened a small section with products for that Russian market. Some of the products are imported directly from Russia – cereals, beer, bread. Others bought from European countries that have so many Russians that it is economically feasable to produce those goods – canned mushrooms, tomatos, and meat.

When we discovered this Russian shelf near the butcher’s section were were laughing out loud. They say that if gnome won’t come to the mountain, the mountain will come to gnome. True indeed.

Now we have even fewer reasons to go shopping at another supermarket. Not only we have everything we need in Ermes, but we surely have more.

P.S.: Russian beer sucks big time. Canned (salted or marinated) mushrooms imported from Germany are pretty good. Canned (salted) tomatos are superb! Just in case you were wondering.

Kakomalis. Singing party No.5

It’s that time of the year again, when crowds of Russian people gather together in Kakomalis picnic place and do all sorts of cool stuff. Playing games, cooking barbeque, shooting lots of pictures, singing songs, dancing, and drinking lots of vodka.

While usually I rush to Kakomalis early after noon, today I only managed to get there by about 7:30pm. Still, I didn’t miss much. Most of the music part was still ahead.

This time was the 5th song festival. Each time it is different fromt he last and so it was today. First of all, the stage was at a different place. It was high up on the hill, so all the tables and people were reorganized quite a bit. Secondly, three core musicians (Albert, Doors, and Vladimir Kardash) had to leave early due to their own reasons, so the “pro” part of the concert was somewhat smaller. There was a new rising star though – Pasha. He was excellent. And multilingual too. And he didn’t limit himself to the usual Russsian and English. He went a few more, including the Turkish language. Truely, the music knows no borders.

Fewer people attended this time and most of them left earlier. I suspect mostly because it was rather cold – about +10C. Women and children are known to get frosty in such temperatures pretty quickly. Not to mention a few hours stay outside.

The party ended around midnight. Overall it was good, but I wanted more. That’s why I continued at one of my favourite kitchens down in Limassol.