Η πόλις εάλω

I feel like writing in English now. Been reading a lot of English, been speaking a lot less Greek lately, the brain has made the jump.

Yes,I know the title is in Greek. Hush now and read.

It must have been an hour since take-off and I must have been sleeping for the half of it when I woke up to the Bill Nighy in front of me saying to the Emma Thompson behind me "we are going down. Landing. God knows where".
I started looking around the cabin for clues. Why on Earth are we landing? Technical fault was my first guess. The plane had arrived late in Pafos and we took off shortly after. Were all checks in a rush? I looked outside. We were clearly descending as we were not over clouds as one would expect. Looking at the water and land formations.underneath and doing the calculations I already had a suspicion as to where we were. Crap.

I asked the Judi Dench next to me. "We are landing. A lady is sick." Well, that was good news. Not for the sick expat, for me. It meant she would get off it and us would get on with it. As we were coming down I was trying to figure out landmarks, bays and coastlines familiar from the GCSE Atlas. It could be Athens. I mean the airport we would land to was clearly near the sea but it couldn't be any seaside airport as a few minutes later I would see land out of both sides of the aircraft and water in between. And yet I hoped. Greek islands maybe. Or still Athens, with Evia? i hadn't landed in Athens for six years now and had no memory of its looks from this angle and height.
And it started becoming clearer. Neon lights and tourist resort features. Oh please don't let this be Ercan. I imagine landing in Ercan would require descending initiation off Kyrenia. I was overthinking. And then short skyscrapers/high buildings appeared clearly. One would be enough to exclude any Greek island, a handful to exclude Kyrenia, this many to exclude any Greek city and any non-major city this side of the world. Hello Istanbul.

Mosques were standing out now too, a food court too. Would I see Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque maybe? And the Greek-Cypriot inside of me was fully alert now. Anything Turkey related was evil, fear-worthy and of no good in any case. So, what if this is not a medical emergency? What if it's.just a way to take us off route and bring us here for some reason? What if Maskoforou was on board? What if he would crash the aircraft into Erdogan's palace? He would be a hero and we would be heroic collateral damage. A huge monument of his figure would be erected in the united Nicosia. The rest of us would be somehow resembled symbolically. Doves maybe. His house would.become a museum and the entrance fees would repay the mortgage in no time.

And so we land. The patient is at the rear of the cabin while I'm fortunately at the front. Paramedics got on the plane and this is now taking longer than I thought. I just thought they would pick her up and go. I hear a Maggie Smith saying it is a grandmother (really Maggie?) travelling with her husband and grandchild who is sick. In the meantime I go for a wee. Many thought of the same and we are now queuing up. Air-stewardess standing by the door (paramedics and airport staff keep coming in and out). Passengers ask her stuff and apparently she has no idea (how long will this take, what happens in such occasions etc, how long had we flown for, she didn't even know where we were until after landing. Really?) She kind of gracefully avoids to have to admit her ignorance by being funny. You know how they say chubby girls many times make the conscious decision to be the funny girl? That.

To cut the long story short, we finally took off maybe an hour later. They left the old lady behind and grandfather with child kept on travelling. Odd. I hope they didn't see the Midnight Express. While on land, the Judi next to me was trying to contact her family to let them know of the delay. I saw through the corner of my eye she was failing to send a text message. I have both my phones turned on (had a rough technology month leaving me with two old devices with connectivity issues) and while UK numbers got signal, Cypriot didn't. Could it be the device? Yes. Yet I suggested to her that it could be a politics thing. She was indeed an expat living in Cyprus for twelve years. Anyway, she bought it and I honestly thought I was right, I still don't know if I was by the way. But all I know is that sometime later she was also trying to send an email. Failed again. Because she still had airplane mode on. Hopefully she turned it off now.

And our journey went on. And the expats got their tea off the funny stewardess. With a biscuit to dunk. Where dunking is "lowering the biscuit into the tea and letting it soak in there and trying to calculate the exact moment before the biscuit dissolves, when you whip it up into your mouth and enjoy the blissful union of biscuits and tea combined. It's more relaxing than it sounds". God, I love that movie.

PS: No, i wasn't flying with the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel cast. Just a bunch of expats spending the pension pots in Cyprus. God save the Queen and the Commonwealth.