Absolutely beautiful day today! Bright sunshine, very warm. Very inappropriate for our big “do” tonight – the Foreign Residents Christmas Ball. TFR are a group representing all foreign residents in Northern Cyprus and they do a cracking job of offering advice and help, running charity events for local good causes and all sorts. Very welcoming group and they run some good events. We delay our departure every year to be able to go to this one. It’s a lot of fun and quite a lot is due to the German chairman, Horst, who injects a definite Germanic tint to the evening with special dishes and he also dresses up as St Nicolas. More about the ball later….
Indeed the day was so nice and warm that we sat outside by the pool reading and had lunch out there. The sun felt really good. We had to make the most of it.
We’ve been having some remedial work done on the pool pipes – 20 years old and we had a pipe burst earlier in the summer. As they are all of the same age, we decided it was wise to replace them in this quiet period rather than risk a domino effect next year in a busy time. We had to lower the pool a bit to enable John to work in the pool room. Anyway, the work is nearly all done and so yesterday afternoon we started re-filling the pool using a garden hose attached to an outside tap. Left it running overnight having checked there was no danger it would actually fill the pool in that time……. sigh…. we hadn’t noticed the village well/storage tank above us had been switched off for some days and our main house tank (20 tonnes) which runs amongst other things, the outside taps 🙂 had run a little bit lower than usual and wasn’t being refilled. So… woke up this morning to find the water level in the pool considerably higher but no water in the taps…… The pump that pumps water from the big tank up to the roof and then down to the house had thankfully switched itself off and no damage done. The well was back on and water was gushing into the house tank again. We had to wait a while for the tanks on the roof to be filled and safe to say we will not be filling the pool from the hose again….. We have grown used over the last years of the Turkish water system being constantly available. Duh!!!!! Lesson well learned.
So… tonight…. the very fabulous TFR Xmas Ball at the DenizKizi Hotel. Undoubtedly our favourite event of the year. It is a joy from start to end. We cabbed with Alan and Lesley and were welcomed by Horst dressed as Santa with a glass of fizz. It is a bit strange to see Xmas decs up….. there’s nothing else Xmasy about here at the moment. We had a massive table of 12 and we moved around a lot. Food was fine, drinks were flowing and generous… music was fantastic. I always associate this event with bouncing up and down to the Killers, “Are we humans?” and tonight was no different… Pamela and me bouncing, arms skyward, singing along….
What a great night….