Curious about what flying Emirates in first class is like? I was.

E-tickets are a beautiful thing. You book, you pay online, you get extra points for sitting behind your desk playing with your mouse, and then, lo and behold, a ticket, right there, in your in-box

Our tickets said business class, so I printed them on very nice thick paper. This is useless and eco-unfriendly since they will still go into the landfill. Moreover, with e-tickets, at check-in, nobody asks to see them. Pah. What happened to the golden age of travel?

At check in, the hostess asks if we would like Seat 2 J and K. I’m a whiz at this stuff, and I’ve checked my www.seatguru.com so I know that 2 is in First not in Business. Who am I to argue? Yes way Jose! Please. Of course, the trick is to be calm and polite, and not to look too excited. As if I fly like this every day.

Upon boarding, the crew bother to read the boarding pass and address us using our surnames. Nice touch. The cabin has much wider seats, and there is, lo and behold, a personal bar. Not a bar to stop you from going somewhere: a bar, as in bottles of drinks, next to each seat. There’s Conde Nast Traveller and the UAE version of Hello! (no boobs), Top Gear and all the reading material you’ll ever need.

I immediately get into the menus, which here are, of course, leather bound. We eat a chicken thingy: it's meant to be a satay but if that's a satay I'm married to a Sheik.

There’s champagne, and a wondrous selection of wine, so I have a flute of the first, a glass of white and then a glass of red. The Writer immediately settles into his ‘personal’ pod by erecting a wall between us, a real wall which goes up and down at the push of a button. If the person next to me were one of those fat businessmen who spends the entire flight trying to strike up a conversation and munching like he hasn’t eaten in days, then fine, the wall should go up. But we’re a couple. A married one at that. Bic-cavetta speci. TW doesn’t care. He is working, reviewing a book. He may as well hang a do-not-disturb sign on the separator. Pah.

He refuses food and drinks whenever one of the lovely trolley dollies asks, pretending to be above all this, but then he makes me order for him. This makes me seem as if I’m a real greedy sod, wanting double of everything.

Each pod comes with personal consoles. You basically control everything from it: the kind of massage you want (from your chair, sadly, not the trolley dolly), what channels you want to watch (I’m doing The Office and My Name is Earl; TW is on The Simpsons), and human beings who, in here, are constantly at our beck and call. The screens are gigantic. I want to scream with happiness it's so lush.

The differences between Business and First on are subtle but telling. For example, when I ask for pillows, I get a big one and the blanket really is soft and lined in satin. The ones in Business are a little grainy, and the ones in Economy very probably give you a body scrub.

They have noise-cancelling headphones by Bose which, in Business come in a sealed plastic bag, but in First arrive in a velveteen pouch: I find this ridiculous and sweet at the same time as the contents are exactly the same. The toilets have shaving kits, perfume, and toothpaste sets. I always do a little tour just to check. In Business, some upgraded passengers are using the same items in the loo as a takeaway.

This seat really does go down into a flat bed. The new consoles in the triple sevens (that's the big fat boeings) have pre-sets so, just by pressing one button, I’m trundling down for the ‘night’. I’m a very, very jittery flier: I think that every movement spells imminent doom, the height scares me (and at 30,000 feet, that’s kind of acceptable) and the fact that I’m not ‘driving’ brings out the control freak in me. Yet, for the first time ever, I actually manage to settle down and sleep, with some ‘sounds of the sea’ in my ears, the massage chair vibrating from top to toe, and a super-calm TW still reading and bonding with Bart ‘next door’.

When we land in Larnaca, I am, for the first time ever, actually disappointed the flight is over. If flying were always like this, I would single handedly destroy Malta’s eco-footprint.

The champagne headache

 

When we land in Larnaca, I am actually disappointed. How come I only get upgraded to First on short haul flights? Why couldn’t this have been a 9-hour Bangkok thing with fifteen hundred different courses thrown in? On that flight, i would have got a 'selection of cheeses with grapes, water crackers and fine port' thrown in after eating a cabin-worth of food. Why? Why? Why? The Writer hits me on the head to stop me from griping and drags me by the hair to the arrivals hall, caveman style.

We’re only carrying hand luggage, always a blessing, in any airport, and so whizz through. Emirates send a driver to pick you up when you buy a Business class ticket, but ours is nowhere to be seen. The airport is so quiet that we must be the only flight arriving. We can’t see the driver anywhere. When TW pops outside for his usual ‘arrival’ cigarette, we spot him, wearing a black trilby and matching waistcoat, standing outside, like a lone guitar player missing his instrument.

He whisks us off to The Hilton in Nicosia. Well, ‘whisks’ is a misnomer. This place is big, so it takes us 45 minutes to get from Larnaca to the capital. There really isn’t much traffic anywhere, but then, it is 7.30pm and everybody is probably gearing up for the weekend, having skived early off work, as we Maltese are prone to do.

It is useless writing that the streets do not have a single pot hole in them. The road that crosses the Sahara in the south of Tunisia doesn’t have a pot hole either. It seems that no matter where we go, it is only Malta’s walking and driving surface that’s afflicted with perpetual national acne.

The Hilton is a bit of a throwback, no doubt about that. The carpets need an, um, update, if that’s what ripping them off and throwing them away for the contemporary replacement is called. The reception staff’s English is not too hot, and our room is a bog standard, hotel chain one. But, as we find out later by comparing to other hotels in the city, it really is the only place to stay at. Everywhere else is worse, noisier, doesn’t have a bar, or doesn’t have a pool. Take it from someone who knows: if you're going to stay in Nicosia, save yourself the hassle, don't take any notice of Tripadvisor, and just book the Hilton.

The sheets are crisp and the room is spotless, which inspires us to peel off a few hours of airline sweat (what is it about travelling that necessitates a shower, no matter how short the flight?) into their bath, jump around on the bed a little to test it, smoke in the balcony just because we can, and set off for Zanettos.

The waiting boys at Zanettos are lovely (except for a few fat ones), the food is fabulous and it never stops coming, it is disgustingly cheap (around €14 for a 459 course meal), it is the real thing, and you shouldn’t eat a lot of the starters because otherwise you won’t be able to stuff down mains or dessert. No wonder I had to do my mathematics o-level four times. Years ago, not in Cyprus.

By now, a massive headache from all the champagne, white and red vintage wine I’d drunk on the flight had begun to kick in. Literally; it felt like Dave Beckham and Wayne Rooney were getting back together for old times’ sake inside my brain and dashing sprints across my temples. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a whiner, and felt horribly guilty about tearing TW away from what was turning into a very buzzy place, full of groups of Turks. TW apparently looks like some very famous Turkish rock star, and this has won him fan rampages in the past in Turkey. This time, he had to do without the adulation. We caught a taxi and headed back to the Hilton.

And if you think I’m going to tell you whether I cured my headache or not by getting the old blood circulation going, you’re very much mistaken.

The Hotel Breakfast and the Cabrio

The Writer is addicted to his morning alarms. So before go to bed, I plead with him not to wake up too early. For once, he gives in. Yet sunrise in Nicosia is impressively early, and we wake up in our Hilton bed with the light streaming in. Apparently, the weather here is ‘spring all the time’ according to a Maltese friend (of a friend) who moved here years ago. Perfect.

I have a surprise lined up for TW and he knows it. Yet, all thoughts of this are quickly put aside when he spies the Hilton breakfast. It is truly a feast: a whole table of pastries, including five different types of seed bread, charcuterie, eggs how you want them made fresh, and a massive ‘English’ display in heated cloches. I get my second taste of grilled halloumi, the cheese which is so typical of these areas, and which lends itself to direct heat. We eat and eat and eat like two pigs on holiday. Which, I suppose, we are.

The breakfast staff – mostly women – are really lovely, and fresh orange juice is offered along with tea and capuccini. This is a lovely touch. We sit outside, next to the aquamarine pool. If I were here on business, I think to myself, this is exactly the kind of breakfast I would love before the madness of the day kicks in: reading the American, British and Cypriot papers, and eating a week’s worth of cheese.

Inside, there are two hoodlum-looking men waiting for me at reception. I worry for a second that I did something illegal last night but then I remember: it’s TW’s surprise. We faff around with a wireless Visa machine for a few minutes (one of the old men has no idea how to use it and I end up charging myself) while TW is dispatched outside to smoke.

Hoodlums away, I walk out with the keys to a cabrio VW Beetle. The surprise was meant to be a BMW Z4, but no end of contacts managed to get me the car I wanted. So a gay automobile it will have to be for two days. At least it’s black. Oh, and the vase on the dashboard from the original design is there no longer.

We throw our bag in the back seat, lower the roof, and head for the road. ‘Just turn right, then left’ the reception people said. So, with me in the passenger seat, navigating without a map or GPS, and with TW proudly maneuvering the Beetle through the almost inexistent traffic, we set off for Limassol, where Roddy, their most famous chef, is set to give us a cookery workshop.

The initial signs out of Nicosia, which is supposedly an hour away, say ‘Limassol’. We hit the A1, which the Cypriots joke is their only highway, and suddenly, they read ‘Lemessos’. ‘Are we on the right one?’ TW asks, never taking his hands off the wheel or his eyes off the road. ‘Um’ I reply ‘If Lemessos and Limassol are the same town, then we are’. I am completely unsure, and we realise that I have forgotten our Insight Guide to Cyprus at the Hilton. We also have no maps. At all.

It seems as if the adventure is starting a little earlier than we planned.

The Food Workshop in Limassol

So there we are: two Maltesers in a car. Never a good idea, anywhere. Cypriots, on the other hand, seem to be quite polite on the road. Not as fabulous as South Africans, who flash their hazards to thank you when you let them overtake, but close. The speed limit on the A1 is 120km. Thankfully. The Beetle cannot do an inch over that, no matter how The Writer pumps down the gas.

Cypriot radio is crap. I switch from one station to the other, living up to my ‘navigator’ status, but cannot find one single decent station. Ideally, I would have brought a cd we once titled The Sex Album. [It is full of road music, and started as one of those ‘couple’ jokes, but a mechanic at the garage had a good look through my collection and thought he’d find something wild if he played it. When I went to collect the car, it was there, playing, like the soundtrack from a slasher movie. I wonder what he made of it. He still gives me lewd looks.]

If anybody can do signage worse than the Maltese, it’s the Cypriots. Theirs tells you to turn, for example, ten metres before you should. So, if you don’t, you have to drive for a few hundred kilometres before you can go back. And if you do, you cause a twenty car pile up. TW thought I was a hopeless navigator, but, with the threat of divorce, now accepts it wasn’t me.

The signs, when they’re there, continue to read ‘Lemessos’. An hour, and a few mad roadworks, later, TW and I are none the wiser. I call Chef Roddy. He is incredibly enthusiastic and already seems to have forgiven us for turning up late, Maltese style. He stays with us on the phone while we drive into the city, get lost again due to some rally, and finally find the old centre. At the carpark, three old men, parkers perhaps, or just time wasters, show us the way to the ticket machine. Everything is very organised, not in a Swiss way, but the way it would be if Malta ever got its act together and got rid of the bloody parkers once and for all.

We dash into the old market where Roddy and a few ‘foreigners’ are doing the round of the stands. We apologise profusely but nobody seems to care. They’re too busy looking at the fresh fish and grabbing phallic vegetables to ‘test’.

I immediately sneak away to a stand at the far end and buy what they tell me is dehydrated grape juice and which to me looks like an uncut version of Turkish delight. They are sore about the Turks here, so the stuff in boxes is called Cypriot Delight. Food is always a good reflection of politics and here, it just slaps you in the face.

I go crazy at the stand and buy salted dry ham and packets of fresh halloumi, too many of these grape thingies, and well, by the time I’m ready, everybody’s ready to leave and I look like the typical Maltese abroad, only carrying food, rather than cheap flip flops. Roddy orders sausages in a mad dash, but leaves without them.

We drive off to his workshop, following what seems to be a cavalcade of Mercedes. Hmmm, not exactly poor are they here? In fact, the Merc and especially, the BMW, seem to be the car of choice for practically everyone. The Beetle is really like a little bug by comparison. Our roof may be down, but everybody else’s is bigger and better.

Roddy’s workshop is fabulous: a range for him to cook on, and a huge preparation space for us to butt in and prepare on his behalf. Everybody is talking like crazy, and that includes him. He explains that he wasn’t happy with the fish at the market because it was mostly frozen and defrosted, and this reminds me of Marsaxlokk. The Cypriots and the Maltese seem to share DNA, even when it comes to food cheating.

In a few hours, I have jotted down ten recipes, eaten like a pig because Roddy’s fare is for us to indulge in, got myself an education in modern meze making, and drunk what is probably an entire bottle of Greek rose wine. This tastes much finer than I would have thought.

We keep escaping for fags outside. At some point a Lebanese woman comes up to me and asks ‘Are they real?’ I wonder whether she is referring to the cigarettes. Do they look like those candy ones? But no, she is pointing at my boobs. ‘Seriously. Are they real or are they done?’ ‘Um, they’re real’ I mutter. TW comes out to smoke. ‘Go away!’ I hiss. ‘We’re having a woman’s thing’

He is relieved and the Lebanese, Leila, turns back to my flesh, which had been enjoying a holiday outing, although not in its entirety. ‘Seriously. I want to have mine done. But everybody’s look so fake. Yours, well, they managed to make them look so natural!’. I’m glad to be carrying the fleshy flag for my country, and tell her that ‘They’re natural all right’, pushing them forward somewhat and glad to have finally discovered my true bra size at Rigby & Peller this year. I give Transforma and the Maltese medical industry a free ad and let her know we have excellent surgeons.

Inside, where I float, still glowing from the alcohol and the virtual boob job, the knives are at it like crazy. Cypriot vegetables are very similar to ours. They even have kohl rabi, our gidra, and Roddy – giggling and bossing us about very ineffectually - is showing us a very simple, very scrumptious recipe for it. I write everything down like crazy and TW tells everyone I’m his assistant.

[If you think of going to Cyprus, don’t miss these food workshops. E-mail Roddy on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ]

 

Wife Swapping

So we leave Limassol, cool Cyprus city, and head for somewhere. The idea had been to go to this little village where a few farmers were waiting to show me the stuff they make: wine, cheese, the lot. By the time we tore ourselves away from Roddy’s kitchen, I was, to put it mildly, tipsy. There was no way I would be able to get there on time for the lady farmer to talk to me and then rush to her daughter’s wedding. We cancel.

Thankfully, The Writer takes his driving duties very seriously and he whisks us both off to Paphos, on the recommendation of a fellow trainee who said that there was a ‘great fish restaurant’ there. Sometimes, when we’re away, I cannot believe my capacity for pigging out. We had just spent hours cooking and eating and here I was planning dinner. Or rather, thinking about what I was going to eat.

We lower the roof on the Beetle and set off on the open road, promising everyone we would Facebook them, and knowing full well that we would never meet or communicate with any one of them ever again. That’s the way overseas ‘friendships’ work out.

When we get to Paphos, the roof doesn’t want to close properly, and the windows don’t want to come up. We take a look round and panic and not because of the possible car jack. Paphos is full of Brits in shorts, white socks and sandals. The restaurants look like absolute crap with patrons to match. A sign saying ‘sandy beach’ leads us to an open-air ‘restaurant’. It’s like a huge Bugibba, cleaner, but so boring it’s beyond belief. We decide it’s worth risking the bleeding non-closing car, especially when the guy we get through to from the rental company says ‘no English sorry’ and hangs up.

We walk along the promenade which is huge, silly and totally bland. It’s the Cypriot equivalent of Torremolinos, so no wonder all of England’s finest have descended upon it. The menus read like all English-attracting menus do: roast beef (I kid ye not), shrimp cocktails (for the sophisticates), spaghetti Bolognese, kebabs and beer. Oh, there’s lots of Chardonnay of course, just in case a couple of footballer’s wives descend.

A ‘beautiful’ couple, her a hefty size 16 wearing size 8 spandex way up half her bum, and new tits, and he who doesn’t get out of the gym, ever, parade up and down, showing off their tattoos and thinking of the next blot of ink. That is, if they can string a brain cell between them. You can tell that in a couple of hours they’ll be sloshed and planning a wife swap in some bar.

We arrive at the restaurant we were booked in and take a look at their ‘fresh fish’. The animals’ eyes look like their guts tried to gauge them back in and the scales are as dull as the water in the quay. The touts, which come which each outlet, try and ‘entice’ us in. Touts are always a bad sign.

We scarper up to the next one and order a beer and some water, for which we pay €10. The lit-up castle in the background is pretty, but hell, how long can you look at a bleeding castle for? We take inane ‘we were here’ photos with the iphone and contemplate. And we read, which makes us stand out more than if we had to take all our clothes off. Where the hell are we going to eat?

‘Let’s go back to Roddy’ I say to TW in one of my amazing light-bulb moments. ‘Are you sure’ he asks, already getting up to leave ‘He has a six week waiting list’. ‘Oh yeah’ I say. ‘We’ll turn up at 9.30pm and sit on the pavement if needs be until he feeds us’. Every ‘fully-booked’ restaurant churns people out at some point.

Lord thank you for my marrying a patient man. He happily gets into the, by now, rattling Beetle, and whizzes off to our favourite Cypriot chef. The waiting list is no joke or PR blurb: Little Plates is buzzing like a bumblebee on fire. The staff are off their feet and the only table available is a tiny one outside. That’s always the mark of a great restaurant.

Roddy comes up to us, kisses us profusely, and gets himself and us a glass each. I have no idea what ‘cheers’ in Cypriot is, but we did lots of it. And finally, after a ridiculous journey to neverland, we get to try modern mezes. We eat so much we feel like we’ll never eat again, but secretly, I’m already planning tomorrow’s breakfast.

We’re hours away from Nicosia, and the journey back seems ever so long, but food like this is worth the hours I have to spend singing in the car so that I keep my navigator status and don’t go to sleep.