Hello all, welcome again for blog #6! Today was a long day of adventure. I tried to keep it to one paragraph, but there was too much information for only a single one to be enough, so I broke it into three smaller paragraphs for easier reading (also so I can add many photos!). First up, we visited Aphrodite’s Rock, a small rocky beach area. The rock formations creating this beach were 200 million years old, originally formed by the shifting of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates. One of the first things I noticed when we stepped onto the beach was how blue the water was. The more shallow water had a slightly green tint to it compared to the deeper waters. There were also a few giant rocks that appeared to be floating on the water’s surface. The biggest was right along the coastline. Within the high crevasses of this rock were piles of stones from the beach, which I can only presume were thrown up there by previous visitors. The second thing I noticed was the small colorful pebbles that began to fill up my shoes after taking a few steps onto the beach. 

The second place we visited was the Tomb of Kings, which was in active use from the 1st century BC until the 1st century AD. There was an open sky light area that looked down into the tombs. Inside were many different rooms, which were used to store the bodies. Usually, people would leave personal items like perfumes or coins with the bodies before the tomb was sealed. There would also be wells connected to the tombs for the spirits to use as a passage to the underworld. 

After these sites, we had a break at the Paphos Harbor for lunch, where I had some delicious fish. Then we headed towards the final stop, a house of mosaics. This house, originally a shrine during the Hellenistic period, was turned into the residence of government officials during the Roman period. It had a mix of Greek (using pebbles) and Roman (using square-cut rocks) style mosaics on the floors of each room. These mosaics depicted a range of stories and images of human representations of the four seasons. One of the stories even inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet storyline!