Dear Friends and Family,

February, in my memory, is dreary. Gray clouds sag with rain and the weather is unendingly cold to the point that one cannot remember warmth, let alone summer. With perfect clarity, I recall February carrying the feeling that I existed in a series of inescapable boxes. I used to awake in a box (my bedroom), I drove a box (my car), I commuted in a box (a bus), and I rode an elevator high up into another box (work). Somewhat detached, I’d put in my time at work and then I’d reverse though that same series of boxes. Boxes. Boxes. Again. And again. Not even Valentines Day nor my birthday could bring life to February. I used to seek windows, longing for the world beyond, and rain would splatter against glass in negative reply.

Where I live now, in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, rain is a miracle. “Al Hamd’Allah,” Arabs say. My girls earnestly describe sagging gray days as “beautiful” and they beg me to prop open the door of our windowless classroom so that studying English doesn’t interfere with their ability to enjoy the weather. I agree to their pleas because I, too, love rain. I love the rush of wind and subsequent smack of drops against glass. I savor rain’s unpredictability. Where I live now, believe it or not, a sunny day is everyday dreary.

Anyway, no matter where I live, that dreary February feeling of living in boxes returns year after year; the distance between February and June feels intolerable. Luckily, this February, school breaks between semesters, giving us a welcome disruption of the ordinary, gifting us with a holiday. Unluckily, official notice of our holiday caused me uncharacteristic distress. It was a week before I was able to work through the realization that I needed leave the confines of Saudi Arabia, I had to really relax but also that I would feel better once I had worked through my options for the future. My original plan was to spend a few days in Jordan before returning to Sakaka – but in a startling example of life not going to plan, yesterday I landed in Cyprus.

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Cyprus… Cyprus… for those of you going through the same process that I myself went though a few days ago: Cyprus is, as my friends pointed out, a guitar-shaped island, west of Lebanon and south of Turkey. Statistically, Cyprus is the 3^rd largest island in the Mediterranean and the 81^st largest island in the world. Not to say that Cyprus is actually large: it is only 149 miles end to end, and, at its widest, 62 miles across.

Personally, I associate Cyprus with Greece and Greek mythology and, indeed, legend has it that beauties in the form of Aphrodite and Adonis were Cypriot-born, as was Pygmalion. But the history of Cyprus goes back further than that: waters wells in western Cyprus are estimated to be 9,000 to 10,500 years old. Perhaps more interestingly, remains of an 8-month-old cat buried with its human have been discovered and dated around the same time period, pre-dating Egyptian civilization and (thank you, www.wikipedia.org), “pushes back the earliest known feline-human association.”

Besides being old, Cyprus offers a geopolitically strategic location that a host of brand-name conquering civilizations took advantage of: the Phoenicians, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Umayyads, Venetians, Byzantines and Ottomans along with the modern day Brits, Turks and Greeks. Richard the Lionheart captured and used the island as a launching point during the Third Crusade; after he rescued his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, his sister Queen Joan of Sicily, and one Berengaria of Navarre from the clutches of the then-Cypriot-ruler, the Lionheart went so far as to declare himself the King of Cyprus (why not?) and married Berengaria in Limassol with no less than “great pomp and splendor.” (Naturally.)

Modern Cypriot history seems to stem from misrule and the resulting poverty brought on by the Ottoman empire, which caused uprisings from both majority Greek Orthodox Christian and the minority Turkish (Sunni) Muslim communities. Cyprus was eventually ceded by the Ottomans to the Brits, who subsequently built still-intact strategic military bases positioned to overlook shipping interests in the Suez Canal. Cyprus became a modern Republic in 1960 but became complicated by a Turkish invasion and occupation in 1974, causing issues that have yet to be resolved to this day. According to every source that I’ve read, the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, remains the only divided capital in the world.

Not that I could summarize any of this when I landed in Cyprus. Instead, all that I could have told you upon landing is that Larnaca is a small, European port city. And that even in February, grass grows green and red geraniums open to the sun. As our bus pulled away from scrupulously modern and clean international airport, evidence of Cyprus being one of the most advanced economies in the world soon became obvious. Perhaps one of the only countries to grow its economy in the economical doldrums of 2009, brightly painted billboards (“Deloitte: Winning is a state of mind.”) were positioned beside the major smooth Cyprian highway, which was occupied by modern cars, and marked by the occasional prosperous-looking, smoke-stacked factory. Although the total population of the island is far less than 1,000,000, there were big-box stores and everything that I could see from my bus window bore immediate testimony to the success of governmental economic policies, which apparently shifted the Cypriot economy from agriculture to light manufacturing + services some 20 years ago. Cyprus joined the EU in 2004.

Landing in Larnaca mostly allowed me to escape February’s dreariness. I desperately wanted to throw back my head, spin in circles, and cry with joy. My series of “boxes” had been banished and instead of longing for the world, I was lucky to once again amongst it.

Love,

Laura