Backgammon and a Promise

Apologies are essentially meaningless, because I know that in them I will end up making promises that I will have every intention of keeping, but then you'll wait a week and know that I am a liar.

So, I'm sorry for the lack of posts and the breaking of promises. I'll try to post something small each day. So there is my apology and my promise.

Now we're in Cyprus, and our iternirant days are over. In Turkey, we stayed in a hotel for 2 days at the most. Now we'll be at the Petrou Bros Hotel for the remaining days of our trip. The culture in Cyprus is markedly different than the culture in Turkey, from
my very limited experiences in both. Virtually all of the people we interacted with in Turkey were ethnically Turkish, and their main language was Turkish. Yesterday, Ethan, Josh, and I found an amazing bakery across the street from our hotel. We went to buy our bread, and Ethan tried out his Cypriot Greek by saying "thank you" in Greek. I followed suit when I purchased my bread, and then the worker said, "that is not my language." Turns out that she is Romanian. We also learned from Bill, one of the faculty working on the dig that is being headed by Dr. Moore from IUP, that most of the owners of the Mini-Marts are Russian. Larnaka, the capital of Cyprus, has a large immigrant population.

The other story for this post comes from today's experience. We visited Famagusta, the home of a thick Venetian fortress and looming Gothic cathedral. After that Ethan Josh and I tried to find someplace to eat. All the places we saw would have cost us over 10 Euros, and all of them were touristy. We walked a bit further on and saw a kid playing with a backgammon set (I should mention that we were in Northern Cyprus, which is occupied by Turkey, and all of the people we interacted with were Turkish). There was a small shop there with a modest menu. I order a sandwhich, which turns out to have three types of meat, feta cheese and tomotoes and cucumbers on it. As we wait for the order to come, we play backgammon. We started playing on the boat, and now several of us on the trip have sets and we often play. Backgammon has become the unofficial game of the trip. We continue to play as we eat our food. An old, scrubby Turkish man comes out to enjoy a beer. Ethane offers to play him in a
game, and he accepts. The owner of the
shop comes out to tell us that this guy is a "champion. It seems like he barely thinks before he moves, but he has more strategy than any of us. When Ethan makes a move that is not a good as it could be, the man flips Ethan's pieces around for a better postion. It turns out his name is Ahmet, his surname translates into "black eagle," and he served as a surgeon in the Turkish army. He also played competitively in backgammon tournaments. We took pictures with him. This is why we're on the trip.