On Why I Hate Family Holidays

Yes, I said it. I really really don't like spending time with my family. Holidays are the worst time of all because my parents seem to view it as an opportunity to tell me exactly what they hate about me (which is a copious amount of stuff), occasionally alphabetically to liven things up a little bit. This does not a recipe for a good holiday make.

My grandparents live in Cyprus, which is where we are right now. In the course of about half an hour of TV watching they went on at length about all the things which they dislike as and when they appear on the screen. People who do such things are either insane, stupid, irresponsible or foreign (since they're Cypriots that in itself is a deficiency). These things include: piercings (umm...), tattoos (er...), weirdly coloured hair (ummm....), people who aren't christian (no really...), people who wear too much black, anything counter-culture at all (er...). So basically what they dislike is me - the only thing that I've got going for me is that I'm white and I'm not a foreigner. Oh dear. Basically anything that happened after the 50s is a bad thing. Cripes, scary stuff.

So while I'm hiding my proclivities, irony has it that so do my parents, both of whom smoke. Since my grandparents don't like smoking (in a country where babies are born clutching a box of Marlboro's and a lighter) and are willing to go on a half-hour rant about it at the drop of a hat, my parents have apparently regressed thirty years to being teenagers again. The dog gets taken for about seven walks a day, complete with a leash, a knitted dog-jersey which my grandmother made when she was bored apparently (mon dieu!) and a huge cloud of nicotine-laced smoke while my parents puff away desperately one their death sticks like coke-heads.

I seem to have forgotten how much of a hole Cyprus is. The entire place is basically a narrow-minded village which consists of two types of people - very straight-laced or complete alcoholics. However both groups tend to be of the mindset of my grandparents (i.e. conservative) so at least they've got something to talk about with each like how the countries gone down the drain since all the damn Albanians/Lithuanians/Hungarians/British/Greeks/Africans/people from the Vatican starting coming over.

The place is a gold-mine for stereotypes. An absolute gold-mine.

I could really go on about this for pages and pages. So I think I'll update on my adventures in the lands of the Cypriots for the next two weeks - apparently tomorrow we're going to the purported beach where Aphrodite was born from the foam (from her grandad's testicles - coz we're ghetto like that yo) with my dad's cousin Sylvia the "Basket-case" because she can't cook or clean. Oy vey

I love my family. I really do, I mean you can't make this stuff up. I'd just prefer to love them from afar.