Category: Cyprus

I live in Cyprus for many years now. It is a beautiful little island in Mediterranean Sea. It features warm weather for most of the year, sea, very kind and hospital people, plenty of jobs in IT industry, good food and plenty of alcohol, stable currency, and more. It’s really a nice place to live if you can handle small towns and villages. It’s also a great place to raise the kids.

Not much happens here. It is a quiet and simple place. Yet, when something happens or when I write about it, I post it to Cyprus category.

WRC 2009 – FxPro Cyprus Rally : Open ceremony

Yesterday I attended the official opening ceremony of the WRC 2009 FxPro Cyprus Rally. It was a pretty big event with TV coverage, cars passing the podium, FxPro girls, and a concert of Sakis Rouvas – some kind of Eurovision star.

I didn’t take any good pictures, but the FxPro press center were kind enough to share. Click here to see more.

The surprise of the evening was that FxPro is not only sponsoring the Cyprus Rally, but also an FxPro Rally Team.

Disclaimer : FxPro is trade mark of EuroOrient Securities and Financial Services Ltd, the company that I work for.

WRC 2009 – FxPro Cyprus Rally : Shakedown

This year, World Rally Championship is back to Cyprus after a long break. I’ve been at the shakedown stage today and made quite a few pictures.

There are much less teams this year due to tough financial times, but those people who I wanted to see – Sebastian Loeb and Peter Solberg are here. Solberg represents his own team and drives Citroen instead of his usual Subaru Impreza. Subaru World Rally Team has a new car for this season, which is a hatchback. If I remember correctly, they are the last major team to switch to hatchbacks. Pity, as these small cars are not as impressive as the larger ones.

Tomorrow the special stages start. They are further away than in previous years, and further apart, but should be fun to watch. Tickets are 5 EUR per stage or 20 EUR (not completely sure) for the pass to all stages. Don’t forget to grab some warm clothes for the mountain stages as it is pretty called up there.

Pafos airport reborn

Famagusta Gazzette reported on November 16th:

The new Paphos International Airport will be fully operational from midnight tonight, marking the end of flights to the old terminal.

Hermes, which manages the airports in Cyprus, announced that the new building covers 18,500 square metres and has the capacity to serve about 2.7 million passengers per year.

It has 28 check in counters, three luggage conveyor belts, four security arches, a VIP lounge and specially equipped lounges for businesspeople, information systems for passengers and parking places with a capacity of 800 vehicles. It is estimated that around 1,800 people will be employed.

I’ve been to the upgraded airport a couple of month before it was officially launched and I have to say that I was really impressed. It’s bigger, cleaner, better organized and equipped, and feels like a real airport. The one that was there before was more like a village utility building for accidental landings.

It’ll be interesting to see how the flight schedules and distribution will change, especially with Larnaca airport undergoing upgrade as well.

WhiteSnake in Nicosia, Cyprus

The other day I went together with a few friends to the WhiteSnake rock band concert in Nicosia. It was the same venue and more or less the same setup as for the concert of the legendary Deep Purple back in 2005. Except that:

the sound was really crap this time
WhiteSnake is not Deep Purple by any means – much more commercial, less passionate
both video and photo cameras were not allowed, so no pictures
there was much more advertising for the event, and the place was crowded
there was a warm-up band, which actually performed better than WhiteSnake at certain times

A few things that I was thinking about during the concert:

we need more beers
“F*ck this” and “F*ck that” in between the songs doesn’t suit the romantic mood of many songs. Like, “Is this love?”
we need more beers
like we have SEO – Search Engine Optimization on the web, some over-commercialized bands probably have CCO – Concert Crowd Optimization. Pointing fingers to random people in the crowd, waving, shouting “Let’s make some f*cking noise!”, and other attempst to engage the audience strongly suggest that. Plus a few other things.
we need more beers
“Ozzy! Bring back Ozzy! Ozzy rocks!”
“Smoooooke on the water! Fire in the sky!”
we need more beers

Overall, I did have a good time with all the noise, beers, and fooling around. But I won’t be going to the next WhiteSnake event. One is just enough.

P.S.: If you want to see pictures, Flickr can help you out – thanks to small size of modern cameras and huge disregard to rules by rockers all over the world.

Medrano Circus in Limassol

Maxim and I went to the see the show of the famous Medrano Circus on Sunday. It was supposedely the last day of their tour, but gladly they decided to delay their departure and will be staying until Wednesday, October 29th.

Continue reading Medrano Circus in Limassol