Today, our first location was the famous Aphrodite’s rock. Aphrodite’s rock has great significance in Greek mythology, as the name would suggest. It is said to be the exact birth place of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. The rock is special geologically too because it is a different color than the other surrounding ones. Aphrodite’s rock is almost a grayish-black while all the other surrounding rocks are a regular tan. Aphrodite’s rock is stand alone out in the water off of a beach in the Pafos region. Interestingly, Aphrodite’s rock is not the only stand alone rock out on the water in the nearby area. There are multiple others just like it, but all give off the appearance that they were once together and fell from a greater mass. Aphrodite’s rock is special because as far as appearances go, it just does not fit into the surroundings.

Our second location was the city Pafos, not to be confused with the Pafos region as a whole. As anthropology tells us, Pafos was the capital city of the Cyprus back in Greek and Roman times. In Pafos, we visited The house of Dionysus, a rich wine merchant’s house, which left behind many mosaics, dated to the Hellenistic era, under Ptolemite rule. As a part of Ancient Greece, the mosaics exhibit incredible detail by using different colored pebbles, and sometimes glass if no pebbles could found of the desired color. A feature that all of the mosaics have, and is a common theme in Ancient Greek work are fractal shapes, a Hellenistic theme. One mosaic displays narcissus, a self obsessed man who stared into water all day to see his reflection, but one day fell in, and this self obsession is what we now know as narcissism, named after him. Another mosaic depicts an Ancient Greek monster with a human head and torso with five dogs coming out at the torso, with a long draconic tail. Another one simply detailed many common symbols used throughout the history of civilization, from Mesopotamia to Ancient Greek, with origins around the world.

Once we were on our own time, a group of us walked around the port in search of somewhere to eat lunch. What we found was a row of waterfront restaurants which all look the exact same but with different styles of tables and chairs, and similar layouts. I mention this because it seems to me that all of these restaurants were owned by the same entity, and split into different restaurants in order to drive up competition, a common tactic in the sales world. The menus advertised looked quite similar, the employees of the different shops all wore the same uniforms, and the same computer systems and even layout of the computer systems were all the same. Another notable observation was that each restaurant had Jamaican servers. Cyprus is a location with little civilian diversity, with almost entirely all Greeks and Turkish. Jamaicans in Cyprus is just very rare and inexplicable how each restaurant, in a row, has Jamaican servers, my inference being from a hiring company, similar to how cruise ships gather their crew. After we ate, we walked along the waterfront and looked in different tourist stores and restaurants, and it is remarkable how similar items are sold by the different shops and restaurants.