I'm in Larnaca! (Which I have finally learned to spell, eight months after this trip was initially discussed.) At some point I'll settle down (or crash into the need for more sleep), but at the moment, it's just too thrilling to be less than 1000 feet from the Mediterranean Sea:

From larnaca day 1

Basically, back in February, my de facto big sister started talking about visiting friends in Cyprus sooner rather than later. "Sooner" became "the off-season later this year," and somewhere in there I decided to make it a six-week sabbatical, the better to squeeze in attending Simchat Torah in Paris and a couple of tennis tournaments.

There will be some telecommuting later, and I brought a mess of drafts to work on, but for the moment, there are chocolate-covered orange peels from Glykopeirasmoi (Sweet Temptations, a candy shop on Filiou Zannetou), there's looking out at the people walking around and stretching out on the sun-chairs (in spite of a local friend emphatically telling us that it's too cold for that -- normal Cypriots apparently wait until it's 30 C [mid 80s F] before they consider it warm enough for the beach), and there are photos to organize. Here are the albums I've organized since my last post:

the weekly market in Ferney-Voltaire

first night in Lausanne

Sunday in Lausanne

gears and wheels in Lausanne (mainly for my sweetie)

[CERN, Paris, and Athens TK]

first day in Larnaca

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In other news, I am a contributor to the latest language carnival, on signs.

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From Florence Teets's She's Going Abroad, chapter 5 ("Sleeping"):

Any traveler will agree that having a room with bath, in a grand hotel, with a maid to press frocks, and a boy to run errands, is a comfort at the end of a long day's sightseeing, but no experienced adventurer would allow the lack of these amenities to spoil her enjoyment of climbing an Alp, looking at a Mediterranean sunset, or hearing a Vienna symphony. ... If you want to see the world and not the inside of hotels, if you want a clean room but can manage without a private bath, Europe has thousands of middle-class, average hotels, small but adequate inns and taverns. Indeed, the intermediate hotel is advised for the woman traveling alone, for the young woman interested in meeting young men, for the less particular woman whose purse is limited but whose curiosity in life is always growing.