Hello! Today, we travelled westward to the seaside city of Paphos! This was a super cool adventure for the entire day, definitely being one of my favorite days of the trip so far. To start, we ended our long bus ride at a classic tourist site: Aphrodite’s rock. According to ancient Greek mythology, Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess of love and fertility, emerged from the sea foam by this particular bolder off the coast. Though the beach was entirely made of large rocks, we had a great time posing for photos and skipping flat rocks as far as we could throw. Our next stop was the tombs of ancient Cypriot kings! We took a bunch of photos in underground tombs, with classic doric stone pillars holding up these underground rooms. There were lots of rooms small enough that required us to crawl through in order to get in, making it very claustrophobic. However, despite that, I crawled into a tomb and laid down to take photos as if I was a buried king. I absolutely loved this cultural visit, it was so surreal to see such ancient and important structures up as close as possible. Our next destination was the marina of Paphos, where we started with a free time and lunch. A bunch of students and I sat down at a restaurant right by the harbor to get some delicious food. We then went to a tour of ancient mosaics, with extremely impressive patterns and designs, all created from small cubic cuts of natural rocks and glass. These mosaics were created in extreme detail, which were very impressive to view. They were mostly from the Roman era, which is impressive in and of itself for surviving until 2025, but one of them was from the ancient Greek era, making it much, much older. After the tour, I explored the ruins of an ancient Greek mansion, where there were still broken mosaics to walk through in what used to be the hallways. This was such a cool experience, seeing ancient ruins and artwork, and I anticipate remembering these excursions for the rest of my life.