Finally! Today is our trip to Paphos. A lot of picture online showed how clear the waters are here, so i’m looking forward to seeing them today. We first visited the Tomb of the Kings. These ancient tombs weee built by excavating large areas of stone and building a tomb underground to house the dead. It was incredible to see how massive these tombs were and how delicately the ancient Cypriots were able to carve many of the columns and stairs into the tombs. We learned that these tombs were actually constructed to burry an entire family linage in order to keep them together in the afterlife. This was interesting to see how they valued family and staying together even after death. Despite this, when there were large bouts of plague, the tombs were less carefully constructed and large pits were constructed within the tombs to fit multiple bodies at once because it was cheaper and quicker. This was a sad fact, but it was strange to see how tradition could be broken during the most difficult times for theses people. 

Our lunch took place a the Paphos harbor, where almost everything being served was freshly caught sea food. With many of the people here making a living on being a fisherman or woman, it was no surprise that there was a large variety of food to choose from. Something I found compelling was that many of the restaurants had people outside trying to get people to come and site down. It was like they were almost trying to lure you into their restaurant and have you sit down for something to eat, a practice that I rarely ever see in the states. There was even one man who somehow became friendly with a pink pelican, and was using this to crack some jokes to get people to enter.

The second and final cultural visit of the day took place at the mosaics at the Paphos harbor. This was a site with around a dozen mosaics that had been excavated from different time periods within the history of Cyprus. It was interesting to see the more Greek designs, that were more simplistic in nature with some elaborate depictions of people or animals, to the more complex, geometric patterns of later periods. I though it was also extremely impressive that the colors on many of the stones had survived hundreds of years. Since almost all of the stones were carved from real rock and not dyed in any way, nearly all the mosaics were the same color they would have been when they were originally constructed, even without much of any renovation. Being able to appreciate this art as it was when it was originally made was an incredible site to witness.