Well everywhere has its good and bad side, but I can honestly say that in my experience the nice things outweigh the bad in Cyprus.
There are plenty of nasty people, as everywhere, but honesty in normal everyday things is more so here than most other places. For example, if I was to leave a purse full of money on the counter of a shop or post office in the UK for an hour, I would have no hope of it still being there when I went back, but in Cyprus I would be very surprised if it was not still there and with no money missing. Having said that, I am quite aware that I may be shafted in business, especially as I am a woman, and there still is a macho superiority thing here as far as women are concerned, anywhere except in the home or the cabaret.
To give you a true example: On boarding a ferry with a camper van. The paperwork is all in order, the woman driver gets out, goes to the table where the 'official ' is sitting. He hardly looks up, but waves her away mumbling, the paperwork is not in order, go and correct it.
She takes it back to the camping van, gob smacked. Her partner, who has seen what just transpired, takes the papers without doing anything to them, across to the same man at the desk and hands them to him, he looks up, sees it is a man, stamps them in the relevant places and hands them back - job done. Had the woman tried again, she would have been sent from place to place and messed about for as long as it amused him to do so.
Speaking of being sent from office to office... it is standard procedure here for you to spend days, if not weeks being sent from bureaucrat to bureaucrat, just to end up where you began , in an effort to get anything which involves licences or government done.
Another example:
We bought a new truck from the main agents in Nicosia, we needed one quickly as we were building a house, and thought that if we bought it from the main Mitsubishi agent, we had a better chance of getting a decent deal with some kind of comeback.
Well, after a couple of months we were driving to Limassol from Larnaca when the car gave up and died. We phoned our mechanic, who came out and towed the car to the garage. The pronouncement was, we needed a new engine! OK, we told him, put one in. He informed us that we should get a licence to do so, so knowing how these things go, the next morning I phoned the ministry of transport, spoke to a woman and asked what the procedure was. She told me that once we had put in the new engine, we needed to take the vehicle to the inspector in Larnaca so that he could record the new engine number on the log book. Sounded pretty straight forward.
Not so.... The van had an MOT, but we knew that we needed to get a new one, so we booked it in to an approved garage in Larnaca, but on the morning of the appointment, my son needed a ride to Nicosia and so my husband took him up in the morning, intending to get back in time for the appointment that afternoon. Silly boy was stopped in Nicosia for speeding, and instead of just taking the ticket, explained to the police why he was in a hurry. Well that did it, they arrested him for not getting a licence to change the engine! So both my boys spent the next 5 hours in the police station while the police ' investigated'. I received a phone call and immediately phoned the ministry of transport with my trusty phone tape switched on, I spoke to a woman, who's name I recorded, and told her the situation. She said that the police obviously didn't know their jobs and that they should phone her, as we were doing it the right way round. None of this carried any weight at all. We ended up in court, where we were fined £400 for not getting a licence before changing the engine. We were warned that if we fought the case, the taped evidence was inadmissible and that we would be fined a lot more. The moral of this tale ... as with anything official here ... get it in writing BEFORE you do whatever it is you are trying to do. Having said that, it is very unlikely that anyone will actually put anything in writing for you, as no one likes to take responsibility for anything. A very common example was the importation of cars from the UK. The number of people I have known, who have brought their ' duty free' cars to Cyprus, only to find that they were given the wrong information before they set out, is unbelievable.
|
To enlarge the Cypriot hunter just click
on his nose An intrepid Cypriot hunter. In season (and out) we put on the full army regalia and set out to shoot anything that moves, we often get relatives by mistake, but also manage to shoot plenty of sparrows, swans, hare, rabbit, owls and any other small creatures that move. The most popular hunting spots are the nature reserves, clearly marked with signs that the hunters can read which say ' No
Shooting '. You will find hundreds of spent cartridges by these signs which the hunters take cover behind. See more about the wildlife in Cyprus here. |
