Wednesday, the Hardest Working Day in the Cypriot Work Week

As Monday was a holiday here in Cyprus (commemorating a flood that I still need to learn the details of), this past week really threw me for a loop. After experiencing a half-closed Lefkara on Sunday, and arriving to a shut down neighborhood around our apartments, I woke up Monday to the continued illusion of a ghost town.

All I can say is that Cypriots apparently take their holidays very seriously.  Virtually all stores and restaurants remained closed for the majority of Monday, making it very difficult to buy groceries or any type of food for that matter.

To further throw off the rhythm of my week, the film shoot we had planned on for Tuesday was moved to Thursday.

So, since not very much happened on Monday or Tuesday (other than playing cards and reading), this blog will pick up on Wednesday.

One of my classmates has figured out the Cypriot work week and I like his explanation...

Sunday, which is typically the end of the weekend for Americans, seems to be the start of the end of the weekend for Cypriots.  It's almost as if they have two Saturdays and Monday is more like their Sunday: the day they start getting their mind readjusted to the thought of working.  So, while businesses are open on Monday, not a lot gets accomplished and sometimes they close early because they're just getting back into the swing of things.

By Tuesday, the work picks up a little bit and on Wednesday they work really hard.  But because they work so hard Wednesday, they decide to take half a day off.  On Thursday, everyone starts preparing for the weekend, so the level of work decreases.  As Friday rolls around, the weekend is beginning all over again and businesses might take a half day off work to start the weekend early.

Keep in mind that some of these businesses open as late as 11 AM during the week and and almost all businesses shut down for a siesta between 2 and 5 PM.  Everyone eats dinner around 9 PM at the earliest and that is an event that can last for three hours, easily.

Sometimes it seems as if store owners just decided they don't want to operate on any given day for any given reason.

All of the aforementioned is merely allegorical, but the truth remains that it's very difficult to figure out a steady routine here because it really does seem like an erratic schedule to a foreigner like me.  I suppose it doesn't help that, in America, many businesses are open 7 days a week and some for 24 hours a day.

Wednesday was a really productive day for me overall.  Especially compared to my lack of activity on Monday and Tuesday.

At 10:30 AM, my film group went over to the University of Nicosia (which is about a block and a half away from our apartments) to film an interview with Ioannis.  I think I mentioned Ioannis before.  He is the culinary teacher at the university who gave us a cooking lecture on Cypriot cuisine, so we thought he would be perfect to interview for our documentary about the Cypriot Meze.

Ioannis is originally from Pafos but received his culinary degrees in America before coming back to teach in Cyprus.  He is a really nice guy who has some very strong opinions about food (particularly the way Americans eat and what their food consists of).  I have to say that my opinion of food has changed too, even in the short time I've been here.

We were discussing homemade bread, because we had filmed at the bakery by this time, and he explained that Cypriot bread gets hard after a few days because it has so few ingredients in it.  While he was in America, he read the nutrition and ingredients on a bread label.  He counted 93 ingredients.

I'm sorry, but that's not normal.

He said American bread stays soft and edible for so long because of these 93 ingredients (preservatives and the like).  Cypriot bread, which is homemade, has the very basic ingredients (flour, yeast, egg, herbs, etc.) so it gets harder more quickly.

The thing that I've noticed about food here is that vegetables are an integral part of every meal. As they should be. Always.

Yes, there are some fast food restaurants (and yes, McDonald's has the most location of any fast food chain here).  But it seems that the majority of Cypriots would rather eat chicken, pork or lamb that is grilled with some type of vegetables.  Meals might be served with condiments (ketchup or mayonnaise mostly), but it's served on the side so that you have the option of using it or not.  It just feels like a much cleaner way of eating, and this change in my eating habit has made me feel so much better overall.

Anyway, after we interviewed Ioannis, we had a couple of free hours before we met Laura and Constantia (our Global Learning Semesters Coordinators) to interview them for our documentary as well.  We thought that these ladies would make great additions to the video because Constantia is a local Cypriot, born and raised, while Laura is a Texan who moved to Cyprus a few years ago and got married.  So we believe that both women would have interesting perspectives on the Cypriot Meze and the role that food plays in this culture.

A few hours later, we crawled into one of the fun taxi vans (which are in severe need of better shocks) that have been taking us to all of our filming locations and headed to the ANT1 television station.

As a journalism graduate student, I probably shouldn't admit that I'd never been inside a television studio before.  But I was really excited to see a working studio and to see how it might differ from the little bit I know of American television stations.

Overall, I learned that a television station is pretty much the same in Cyprus as it is in America.

ANT1 wasn't a very large building in the grand scheme of things, but they made great use of the space they had.  In the newsroom there were three different sets that were utilized for different shows with cameras and lighting that could easily be adjusted for each.  The control room was exactly as I expected, just a little smaller than I anticipated.  There was a wall of monitors so that the newscast could be monitored alongside other news programs and media packages.

I was at least proud of myself for recognizing the server room and knowing why the temperature was cooler in there than the rest of the building (thanks to my mentorship with Melissa Sykes at Scripps and my internship at NorthSouth).  For those of you who don't know about server rooms, they are simply rooms with massive server machines in them.  But these machines emit a lot of heat while they are running, so the temperature has to be kept fairly low so that the machines don't overheat.  Because crashed servers are bad.

The thing that I found the most interesting at ANT1 is that every news channel in Cyprus has someone at the anchor desk who delivers the news through sign language alongside the speaking anchor.  The signer is part of the news due to media regulations in Cyprus, much like we have closed captioning in America.  I just found it to be unique and interesting (though I admit the news might be delivered in a similar manner in other countries and I'm just unaware of it).

I called it a night fairly early on Wednesday because we had to visit a lady who makes cheese on Thursday morning at 7:30 am and, since I found out I was going to be on camera, I needed my beauty rest. :)


By the way, these photos are just fun photos from around Nicosia.  I love trying to be artistic with my photography here, even if it doesn't work so well. Hahaha :)