Meanwhile, Back in London

Hi,
We’re back and I have been trying to get myself to write about Cyprus—it’s not that I’ve got the “If you can’t say anything nice. . .” problem, though I kind of do, it’s just that I wrote about it on the plane and in trying to explain my rather complicated reaction to the whole experience, I rambled on and on and still hadn’t really said anything in particular that had happened. So if I can ever muster up the energy I’ll tell you more about it—the complicated version that is, the short answer is that we had a great time and the ocean was beautiful. I learned that I don’t need to take a weeklong beach vacation ever again and that I’m not good at hot sweaty and dusty—ancient ruins are picturesque but I don’t have enough background to appreciate them and poor places make me sad—especially when contrasted with the empty feeling of people on holiday spending money at a resort when the town up the hill is run down and seems like it is years behind in terms of development and technology. So I guess I ‘m saying don’t let the pictures fool you, Paphos is sort of ramshackle and depressing, but at the same time, there were some really great things there too. The students were fun to travel with—we had a great time in that regard, and for them, going to church at the little branch there was a great experience (I couldn’t go—I was sick that day) and we had some great cheese and humus and ate a Meze—a sample dinner with lots of courses. It was amazing to be there at the place where the apostle Paul had been—and they even think they have the very pillar where he was whipped with 39 lashes. I think the absolute highlight for me was watching the sunset over the ocean—the sun gets low and the sky is beautiful and it casts that wonderful pink/gold light –that lasts about a half a hour then the sun gets really low and finally you can actually see it move down and down ‘til in the blink of an eye it’s gone—that quick. It was a challenge to try and take pictures – I couldn’t really ever catch the magic of it even though I think the pictures are beautiful and pretty cool. Anyway, see for yourself at Magleby.com—soon—I will post this then get to work on updating the web page, it takes awhile.

We leave for an overnight trip to Oxford tomorrow—looking forward to it. We have about 6 really great places we’re visiting including Blenheim Palace (birthplace of Winston Churchill and used for Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet,) and Rousham, the place where Mark found the inscription we used for Hal’s grave.

Thanks for checking in on us—

Bye

P.S. There’s a fun debate going on over at Kacy’s blog—Spiderman needs your help.

Go to http://kasm.blogspot.com/