When shall we three meet again? 4 August, 2010

The last week in Cyprus held a special excitement for Anisa.

Wild eyed and innocent

She was looking forward very much to playing a witch in the abbreviated version of Macbeth staged by the school as part of the end-of-year drama.

She had mastered her lines (no “hubble bubble, boil and trouble,” though) and spent several lessons learning how to cackle.

Come the night, she was painted up in vivid green, and had allowed her hair to go au naturel – a fine and ragged mop, dusted grey.

Astonishingly, as I took photographs using a long lens and flash, nature added a little extra twist. The red-eye in the photographs is entirely real and not embellished in post-production. (You may need to click on the one on the right to enlarge it, to see the effect.)

Dressed to kill

Whether the whole experience will pique her interest in Shakespeare remains to be seen. It could as easily provoke the kids to learn to love Chemistry, as the staff managed to secure some dry ice with which they made the cardboard cauldron smoke … and lightly burn the kids who came too close to it. Such an experience is always going to have a powerful effect!

More pictures tomorrow from the end-of-school drama, including Kira doing her favourite thing … singing.

Fiery eyes

Dressed-up 20 February, 2010

Kira (left) and Anisa, dressed to impress

The girls head for school for the annual school Valentine’s fund-raiser.

Six wheels and three school places 2 September, 2009

What a day! People keep telling us that things move slowly in the Mediterranean culture, but today was worth a couple of weeks of activity.

It began with registration for the children at the American Academy.  We accompanied each child to their class, signed on the dotted line to agree that we’d allow the teachers to hang the kids by their thumbs from the ceiling if they behave badly, and chose whether to buy or rent piles of schoolbooks for the year. The school has a chaotic, friendly, homely feel to it. Although Joel is signed up for Year 9, they had him listed as Year 8, a jolly discrepancy that we’ll have to sort out in the next couple of days. There is, apparently, a curious feature of the Cypriot school system, whereby the year a child attends is worked out on a January to December year, while the year actually begins in September.  In a twist that I can’t yet explain, that seems to make both Joel and Kira (birthdays in February) somewhat younger than most others in their class, but no-one seems to think it’s a problem. Except Jane, who has chosen this to worry obsessively about.

After the school registration I went to work, test drove the car that a mechanic friend has picked out for us, and agreed to buy it.  It’s a bright blue Honda HR-V, a kind of cut-down version of the CR-V that we had in Kenya, 2WD instead of 4WD, 1.6 litre, petrol engine, automatic. It is said to have a great fuel consumption in the city.  The mechanic friend, Chris, is going to tidy it up for us over the next week, and we should have it on the road next Monday.

Not content with this breakthrough, in the afternoon I bought a motorbike. It’s a Hyosung Exceed, a 4-stroke 125cc Korean beasty with small wheels, like a scooter, and therefore a low centre of gravity that I find congenial.  Just two minutes on the road and I was nipping in and out among the cars and racing to the front of queues at traffic lights, just like the hundreds of other moped riders you encounter every day in Cyprus’s busy capital.

I rode home on the bike, and when I arrived the Marshlings heard the noise and rushed from the landlord’s pool to the front of the house, dripping in their swimming costumes and laughing uproariously at the surprising sight. They all seem to think this new-model biker dad is a good development.  Jane is less sure, and convinced she’ll be attending my bedside in hospital in no time.