Bank Holiday...

It is a Bank Holiday here in Cyprus - the 15th August is a religious holiday and most of the island (save for the tourist areas) seems to grind to a halt.  The 15th of August sees the celebration of the assumption of the Virgin Mary which commemorates the belief that when Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, died, her body was not subjected to the usual process of physical decay but was "assumed" into heaven and reunited there with her soul.  This holiday has been celebrated since the fourth century and is the Christianisation of an earlier harvest festival in honour of the goddess Isis of the Sea.  With the coming of Christianity church leaders decided that the easiest way to handle this pagan holiday was to change it to a Christian one - a case of "if you can't beat 'em - join 'em!"

After of period of fasting this is broken with traditional barbeques of souvla being held everywhere, and I do mean everywhere because it is not unusual to see someone spark up the coals on the forecourt of a petrol station - slightly worrying the first time we encountered it but now we just take it as read!

This morning we finally got round to saying "Hello" to Andrew and his family who are staying next door but one.  The final member, son Connor arrives on Sunday so we are delaying going out together until everyone is here and we will ask Di and Rob to join us when we do.

A big big big big THANK-YOU!!! to George and Pam (I am guessing Pam was the shopper) for the wonderful gifts which included my favourite Montezuma's chocolate and a bottle of Pink Gin - we also had some gin flavoured M&S chocolates and I had a fabulous Per Una scarf which will come in very useful .  It is great to see people in and enjoying 11b and we hope it wont be too long before we are sharing a cuppa with George and Pam.

We have Nicky and Mark coming tomorrow for one of their regular trips and because the weather last night was cool and damp we had packed all the cushions and covers away.  I took the opportunity to give the outside dining area a tidy and found one of the vine hawk moth caterpillars on the next stage of it's transformation - it had made it to chrysalis stage and I took a quick photograph before placing it somewhere in the garden where it could continue its journey - this can take anything from 5 to 21 days apparently.

We were invited to join in with the Souvla tradition by our neighbours Lakis and Argy (and Kia).  They had said goodbye to their visitor Costas this morning as he was flying back to the UK this morning.

I am not entirely sure how many people Argy was catering for but there was enough meat to feed an army.  The 'boys' did the male-bonding thing over the μπαρμπεκιου which is literally the word barbeque spelt phonetically with greek letters (obviously they didn't have these cooking devices in ancient times!!).

We enjoyed lamb, keftedes, pastourma, loukanika and halloumi, fabulous roast potatoes that no-one cooks quite like Argy and pilafi and salad and dips and olives and pitta and indigestion!!!  Joking aside it was lovely to be included in their celebration of this very special day.

We sat outside but had to succumb to long trousers and jumpers because it got windy and chilly - such a difference from last week.  Still hopefully it means more comfortable sleeping conditions.