Day 19: Larnaca, Cyprus - PORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some old church in some old town square.

If my flight is a microcosm of Cyprus, then this country is composed of men with an average age of 68. Luckily the flight was 50 minutes long, so I did not have to endure very many stories about big fish that got away in 1955. 

I landed in Larnaca, a little town in the southeast corner of Cyprus. Greeting me was Lydia, Carine's cousin, who's married to a Cypriot. This means I was able to stay in a house! With my own room! And a big bed! OK, that last part was false. I slept in her 8 year old son's bed (he's in Holland, mind out of the gutter), but it was awesome after being in the hostel trail for almost 3 weeks. 

I went into town so Lydia could run a few errands. I'm becoming really good at finding seaside resort cities. Larnaca seems to host a lot of European tourists. It's easy to tell because they're pale [and red], and are the only ones patroning the loads of Irish pubs littering the beach side. The locals patron the McDonalds, Starbucks, and Pizza Huts. I took advantage of the situation and had a beer in the first country I've visited that isn't heavily religious. 

Old castle like structure.

After the socially acceptable beer, I wandered around and that's when I saw it. I hadn't seen it in who knows how long and had missed it terribly, pining for it like the Lolita of my soul. Pork. Holy shit, it was pork! I had been in two Muslim countries, a Jewish country, and would soon be in another Muslim country. It never occurred to me before I left that the Arabs and Jews actually have a very significant commonality despite hating each other -- they both disapprove of the magical pig animal. But now I have a three day window of opportunity in a country that's only half Muslim. In the other half I can eat the pig! And there, on the menu, was pork souvlaki. 

I devoured that thing like it was heaven itself. Then I flossed and ate everything I picked out from in between my teeth. I've never had a better meal in my life.

Until 6 hours later. Lydia and I met up with her husband, who had just returned from a hunting meeting. We went to a restaurant and he asked me if I was very hungry. I responded that I was only a little hungry. He said in that case he would only order a little bit. I believe what he meant was only order a small portion of literally everything on the menu. By the end of the meal we had three layers of plates on our table and delicious morsels of food left on every single one, including lots of pig pig pig. 

Beach and stuff.

We sat around, drinking wine and digesting. The topics of conversation were fishing for tuna and island life, two topics in which I can unexpectedly hold my own. Slow. Relaxed. Easy. That was this day, and that's Cyprus. I really need to live on an island later in life. It's my destiny.