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.

Trip to Troodos mountains

Today I went on a trip to Troodos mountains. Olga wasn’t feeling good enough for travelling, so I went with Lev and Hazard. There was a small get-together planned by few people from the Russian Cyprus Forum. People came from Limassol and Nicosia and maybe from somewhere else, I don’t know. Usually I know pretty much everyone on the “parties” like this. Not today though. There were plenty of new faces.

I, of course, planned and used the trip as an amazing photo opportunity. It is the first time this year that I went to see snow in the mountains and it has all the chances of being the last time too. I have made a whole lot of pictures. Overall I did exceptionally good. Usually I screw things up and than try to make excuses about bad light and everything. This time I have managed to avoid that path. I shot just a little over 100 frames and more than 80 turned out OK.

Hazard was filming everything and he even promised to make a movie in about 10 days or so. I wonder how this will come out. He was filming plenty of events in the last couple of years, but noone has ever saw anything except for a couple of raw clips. He was always planning to make them into a movie, but never found time to actually do it. Today he promised to do so, which is a completely different story.

While I am on the camera and digital equipment subject I want to express my astonishment regarding the way many people treat the sensitive appliences. When we came to Troodos and were walking up the road to meet the rest of the people, we got ourselves in the middle of snowball fight. Everyone was throwing snowballs at everyone. Camera or not. I tried a couple of times to warn people that digital cameras don’t work with snow/water inside, but noone would listten. Strange. And I almost had written that off to alcohol and similar reasons. Olga explained it to me though. She said that most people she knows do not realize that water can damage electronics. Even she didn’t know that until I told her some time ago. Well, she knew that water can damage electronics, but she didn’t know that photocameras and camcorders are not waterproof. Go figure…

Anyway, I had a lot of fun in Troodos. After the snowball fights everyone went to the taverna, where we split because it was way too crowded over there. While everyone stayed at Gabriella’s place, Lev, Hazard and I went to Foini, which was like 15 minutes of extra driving. Steak, wine, and beer and the trip back home… Great time!

Cleaning up

I was cold, hungry, and sleepy. Yet I had to wait until someone will change me in the NOC. So I went outside on the parking, started my car to warm up, looked around and saw this guy. He was cleaning up everything – parking, fences, security booth. I was watching him and thinking if I should make a picture or not. He was cleaning. I was thinking. He was cleaning. I was thinking. Finally, I decided that I spend too much time thinking about it and that I should grab the camera and make the shot or forget all about him. I wasn’t sure that I won’t blame myself afterwords if I will let it go, so I grabbed my camera and made a picture.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-02-05_POTD

Limassol night

Today I was playing with camera stabilization. Not only it was placed on the part of the building, but the shutter was released with the timer to avoid the shake from hands. The resulting picture looks pretty good, so I guess it worked.

Due to a couple of really harsh lights that were spoiling the shot, I had to edit the image in Gimp. That 3-block building slightly to the left of the center is actually a 1 block one.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-01-25_POTD

Monitoring earthquakes

I am crossposting this from Hazard’s stuff…

There are many organizations out there that monitor seismic activity and share their data in real time. One of them is European-Mediterranean Seismological Center. Another – U.S. Geological Survey.

Few minutes ago there was an earthquake of a 6.1 magnitude here. I felt it since I am on the 5th floor, in the NOC. Hazard felt it since he is living on the 4th floor. EMSC data is here. USGS data is here. Also, it is interesting to see that there were few small earthquakes in the area (Greece and islands, Turkey).

Wet Limassol

Things look very interesting today morning. It was raining heavily over night, so everything is wet and freshly washed. The sky is cloudy, but clouds are not too thick to stop the daylight. Everything that hasn’t been painted recently looks very dissaturated. Everything else looks oversaturated. I have tried to show this contrast on few images, but I don’t think I have succeded.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-01-23_POTD