Athens in a flash

Tourcaster, a group whose ‘casts we can’t get enough of, offers a free 25-minute overview of the Greek capital. The audio tour covers the city’s history, some main attractions, and top nightlife spots.

Indie Athens

Sure, this podcast is still Greek to us, but it’s less talk and more music—stuff from local bands, to be precise. Aneksartho Mhlo’s rock dispatch provides a perfect playlist to get you in an Athens frame of mind.

Learn Greek

The Hellenic American Union, based in Athens, offers a series of short podcasts that incorporate basic vocabulary and easy exercises so you’ll remember your plate from your please. Consider the series a perfect tool for those of you who like to ask for help, fight about grades, or talk about superstitions in Greek!

Hidden Athens

This podcast from amatuertraveler.com features author and travel guru Alf Meier as he discusses both Athens’ standard tourist sites and the city’s lesser-known gems, including those breathtaking beaches.

Greek Gourmet

Chef Sam Sotiropoulos focuses his delectable podcast on cheese—a mainstay of the Greek cuisine, but touches on other Greek dishes as well.  Yum!

Do you have suggestions for any other cool Athens-related podcasts? Leave a comment below!

The post Athens tip: Five free podcasts appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Editor’s Note: This week, the blog will be tagging along with fellow Cheapo Alex Christodoulides as she visits family in Cyprus.

NICOSIA, Cyprus—Nicosia has about a dozen churches of various styles and ages scattered through the walled part of the city, ranging from the Byzantine Chrysaliniotissa Church near the Green Line and the Famagusta Gate to the airy 19th-century Phaneromeni Church. Ayios Ioannis cathedral sounds larger than it is and has been through more change than its simple name suggests. Some, like Stavros tou Missirikou Church, have survived so many masters of Cyprus that their outward appearance would seem to indicate an identity crisis.

Chrysaliniotissa Church

Chrysaliniotissa Church keeps a low profile, literally, with its solid, reliable barrel vaults. Although it’s on a street that bears its name, it’s pretty unobtrusive if you arrive there from a back road – no sky-high bell tower makes it easy to spot miles away.

Inside is a respite from the heat and glare, thanks to thick stone walls. The iconostasis here is unusually wide, making for a shallow but broad seating area. Take a look at the Virgin Mary and Christ icons, where worshippers often leave offerings in silver or wax to symbolize requests or thanks for prayers answered.

Ayios Ioannis cathedral

The oft-reinvented Ayios Ioannis sits inside a complex that includes the Archbishopric and the Byzantine Museum and Art Galleries. So small it seems you could stretch your arms and almost touch both walls, the church was built in 1662 on the site of a 14th-century Benedictine chapel dedicated to St. John the Evangelist which subsequently became a Greek Orthodox church honoring St. John the Theologian.

The single-aisle building’s lavishly painted walls and ceiling depict scenes from the Bible and the major saints of the Orthodox Church, with the throng of faces clearing for a huge Pantokrator above the elaborate iconostasis. Shooting photos and video is not allowed inside the church, and a sign at the door says tour groups get five minutes to take it all in, but on quiet days the caretaker will let you take a seat to admire as long as you like.

Stavros tou Missirikou Church

Stavros tou Missirikou Church was built in the 16th century as a medieval Orthodox house of worship, but was converted into a mosque in 1571 when the Ottomans took over the island. The church has some Byzantine, Gothic and Italian Renaissance architectural elements, and a minaret added to one side of the building documents its time as a mosque, which is a lot to cram into a building that seats maybe 30 people. No longer used for ecclesiastical services, the church often houses exhibits.

Phaneromeni Church

Nearby is Phaneromeni Church, the largest in the walled city. Its tall, unadorned white walls seem to direct the worshippers’ gaze to the massive icons near the entrances and the intricately carved, painted and gilded iconostasis.

Phaneromeni Church is another where the faithful have left a collection of wax items hooked on the iconostasis rail to symbolize prayers made or answered. A constant trickle of worshippers drops by to kiss the icons of favorite saints or offer a quick prayer for an urgent request as a benevolent-looking Pantokrator gazes down on them from on high.

About the author: Alex Christodoulides is one of those push-me-pull-you creatures known as a dual citizen. When not at home in New York City (where she is a freelance writer) or in Cyprus (where she is a freeloader taking advantage of her relatives’ hospitality), she is probably dreaming of a trip to someplace where vaccinations are required and Fodor’s fears to tread.

The post Cyprus Journal: Church visits in Nicosia appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Sure, the language spoken in Cyprus is Greek, but the accent is distinctive and so is the food. For one thing, Cyprus recently made its mark in the Guinness Book of World Records with a 41-meter sausage, dedicated in a big ceremony complete with traditional costumes in a town up in the Troodos Mountains.

Adventures in Cypriot Cuisine

The easiest way to get a handle on Cypriot cuisine – and a way to kill several hours trying to put away what looks like not much food – is to order meze, a selection of anywhere from a dozen to 20 hot and cold traditional dishes that most sit-down restaurants offer with little to no variety in the lineup.

First will be the dips, served with pita bread: among them tahini, made from ground sesame seeds and lemon juice, and taramosalata, made from fish roe and thickened with either a lemon-potato mixture or mayonnaise. Grilled halloumi cheese is always on the list somewhere, squeaking as you chew. There will also be meat dishes, leaning heavily on pork. Souvlaki will be among them, but so will hiromeri, a type of cured ham; loukanika, a pork sausage that is often grilled; and lountza, another ham-ish offering. For the pescatarians, there is fish meze, but vegetarians may have a hard time finding an acceptable version of the full menu.

Vegetarians will find that souvlaki joints don’t need to be off limits, since most offer grilled halloumi in place of the meat. Cypriots also eat a lot of veggies and legumes, and many restaurants offer a bean or lentil dish of the day.

Any serious restaurant in Cyprus will let you pick your fish when ordering.

A Cheapo-friendly pick in Nicosia

An inexpensive local favorite in Nicosia for vegetarian and carnivore-friendly homestyle cooking is Mattheos Restaurant, tucked unobtrusively in a corner of Plateia 28 Octobriou alongside the tiny Stavros tou Missirikou Church with its easy-to-spot minaret.

Coffee and dessert

To wake up after a big meal, there’s always coffee. There is not much love lost between Cyprus and Turkey, so locals call the brew Greek coffee or just order it by their preferred sweetness – glyko (sweet), metrio (one sugar) or sketo (black). For those who prefer their caffeine with milk, Italian-style coffee is very popular here, as is Nescafe, which is served hot, chilled or as a frothy iced frappe.

Most of Cyprus’ offerings to the sweet tooth will be familiar, but there are a few things that are typical to the island. Soujouko looks like a length of tan garden hose, but it’s made from dipping strings of almonds into thickened grape juice. Loukoumades are fried dough blobs served hot out of the oil and drizzled with honey, and are usually sold at small stands starting in the late afternoon, or at festivals. Shamishi is the same fried dough filled with a sort of cream made with semolina and flavored with mastic, which has a flavor slightly reminiscent of rosewater.

As you might expect in a hot climate, Cyprus produces its own ice cream. Three big companies, Papafilippou, Erakles and Pahit-Ice, have stores all over the country and a presence in the freezer cases at supermarkets.

Tomorrow: Heading to church

About the author: Alex Christodoulides is one of those push-me-pull-you creatures known as a dual citizen. When not at home in New York City (where she is a freelance writer) or in Cyprus (where she is a freeloader taking advantage of her relatives’ hospitality), she is probably dreaming of a trip to someplace where vaccinations are required and Fodor’s fears to tread.

The post Cyprus Journal: Adventures in eating appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Cyprus is on a modernizing rampage, wrestling on one side with its fairly recent history of colonial domination by the British, and on another side with its newly acquired European Union membership, in its quest to keep its identity. Souvlaki and meze (a selection of traditional dishes) are still the preferred eats, but alongside the longstanding British pubs advertising televised football matches are slick, shiny new cafes that charge patrons steep prices to be seen sipping Nescafe.

Just landed in Cyprus

As a half-native, I seem to be on a five-year cycle for visits to Cyprus, so each time I arrive something new in the landscape startles me.

One time I found a very updated airport instead of the one-story box (sans air conditioning or duty free, both of which are now present) that I remembered from my youth. Another time it was the arrival of fast food chains alongside the souvlaki joints, with the delivery scooters of the British Goody’s, McDonald’s and Burger King zipping through the traffic. Last time it was the enormous Starbucks at a major intersection in the capital city, Nicosia, which has fierce competition from more than a dozen cafes elsewhere in town. This time it’s the mall – the first enclosed North American-style shopping palace in the capital – right next to an IKEA store.

As one of the newest European Union members, Cyprus switched in 2008 to the euro from its old currency, the pound, which makes the monetary aspect of traveling here seamless. Most Cypriots speak at least a little English (along with the pubs and driving on the left, it’s another remnant of British colonialism here), and likely at least one other language, which should help travelers struggling to read signs in Greek.

Cyprus off-season

Skip the summertime crush, when temperatures pass 100º Fahrenheit and the beaches fill with hordes of northern Europeans on all-inclusive tours. Coming in the off-season between, say, mid-September and May when the hotel prices drop is one way to make a Cyprus visit Cheapo-friendly. Either end of this window will still offer plenty of warm-but-not-sweltering days in which you can hit the beach and have more of it to yourself.

The most popular beach areas are near Paphos, Limassol, Ayia Napa and Protaras/Paralimni. For an idea of costs, the Cyprus Tourism Organization lists hotel prices island-wide and contact info on their website, www.visitcyprus.com.

My trip to Cyprus

My mission this visit, however, has been to skip the beach, check out some of the Nicosia churches I’ve managed to miss during previous trips, see family, and have my coffee grounds read (which some relatives dutifully inform me is a dated parlor game for old ladies).

On these counts, two weeks into my visit, I am somewhat heavier thanks to my relatives. I’ve seen roughly a church a week, because their opening hours coincide with family lunches. And my great aunt tells me my coffee grounds show I will be taking a long journey. Probably right back to New York, whence I came.

Tomorrow: Dining in Cyprus.