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.

Deja Vu

I’ve mentioned the professional level of Cyprus television in a very recent post, and here I am, got hit with a deja vu. It’s Friday night, and I am at home, after taking a long walk, trying to avoid all pubs and restaurants. Watching Capital channel, which has a 1984 classic – “Starman” with Jeff Bridges.

About 40 minutes into the film, it suddenly restarts. No advertising, no breaking news. Just starts showing from the very beginning all over again. Instant rewind to the opening credits. It’s been going now for at least 15 minutes…

I am not going to watch it once again. Especially when there are no guarantees that they won’t rewind it again a couple of times.

Off to bed.

Cyprus road tax online. IT gone wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, Vladimir mentioned in his blog that he managed to pay road tax online. I have to agree, this is a technological breakthrough in functionality offered by Cyprus government’s websites.

While paying the tax is now possible, the website is still very confusing. It provided practically no information or instructions on what to do. Now the site looks a bit different though. Notice that ‘Here’ icon that blinks as fast as your computer can render it?

So many people wanted to do it online, and so many failed. Some of them even posted comments on Vladimir’s blog, providing their information (ID numbers and car registration numbers) in hopes that it would somehow work.

Technology gone wrong…

P.S.: As sad as it is, it’s also very funny. Hilarious even.

Citizenship update

I went to Nicosia today to check upon my Cyprus citizenship case. It appears that it arrived to the final destination only yesterday (“Coinsedence? I think not!”). The kind lady, to who I spoke, will have to prepare the final report for the ministry and the minister to base the final decision upon. (How many times did I use the word “final” here?) The report preparation should take less than a week. Then – who knows?

I managed to get her name and phone number to get in contact directly, so, hopefully, I won’t have to travel back and forth between Limassol and Nicosia.

Waiting…

All good things come to an end

Martin has closed doors of his DVD club. It wasn’t a surprise as things were slowing down a lot lately.

People’s perspective on movies has changed a lot. With all the piracy going on, people want to rent DVDs at the same time as movies are in the cinema. This alone pretty much means that you can’t be legid. You either have to cheat. Or break the though. Or both. Or you have to work really really hard (like finding new angles on the whole entertainment thing), which arent’ worth it anyway.

DVD prices are outragous. Check Amazon, for example. The DVDs are $15 USD on average. That’s about 6 CYP. With regular DVD rental prices at 1 CYP, it meas that each DVD has to be rented at least to 6 people to cover its own cost. Then some more to pay the office bills and then some to earn something for the owner.

But DVDs are also an extremely fragile media. After 6 people have watched the disk, it is all scratched and bent, so it needs to be replaced. Which is how much? Oh, yeah, right…

As much as I am saddenned by the news, I do understand the reasons behind the decision.