Lauren Tabbron shares her favourite things to do in Manchester
Jess Astbury regales tales of festivities in warmer climates.
So when I told them that I was planning to stay at my friend’s villa in Cyprus for a week one summer (I know; who owns villas in Cyprus?!), they didn’t bat an eyelid. It was the summer after GCSE’s and my god, did it take an aeon to arrive. My mum dropped me off at Gatwick without a second glance apart from a last ‘Don’t have too much gin!’ warning. (My mum has brought me up on, appropriately, ‘mother’s ruin’ and it is generally my drink of choice).
And so the holiday began! I met my friends – two guys and three girls – in the airport. We were all so excited to be FREE, finally, after what seemed like an endless stream of exams. We navigated terminals like we’d been doing it forever, and touched down in Cyprus with screams of excitement. We caught a taxi from the airport to the villa and immediately got busy settling in and unpacking. We were rotating double beds and sofas as there weren’t quite enough to go round so there were initial squabbles over who was to share with whom. We dipped toes in the pool, checked the larders, and then we headed out to explore the town.
The location was beautiful, but about an hour’s bus drive away from the major cities like Paphos. It was a small town, but known for being a nice tourist area as it had lots of beaches, and consequentially was packed with cocktail bars and cheap, tacky Cypriot ‘discos’. (No hardcore clubbing on the Continent for us, then!) It was laidback, cheap and gorgeously sunny: exactly what we needed for a first-time holiday alone.
The first night we arrived after the shops’ closing time, so after a quick search through cupboards in the house we came across a couple of bottles without labels filled with a clear liquid that smelt like petrol. The boys – naturally, being gentlemen – had first taste to check that it wasn’t poison, and we ended up playing poker, getting absolutely smashed on said nameless alcohol, and ending the night by skinny-dipping in the pool (much to the infinite delight and pleasure of the neighbours, no doubt).
The rest of the holiday passed in pretty much the same way: constant, unnecessary drinking. We invented a routine punctuated with what drinks we were having, which we found hilariously entertaining: get up, have a morning Screwdriver instead of just orange juice. Breakfast. 11am gin. Wine with lunch. 4pm, afternoon tea (the one episode of civilised behaviour throughout the day). 4.30pm, ouzo. Aperitifs before dinner. Wine with dinner. Go out for cocktails. Come back and play drinking games. Get up the next morning and start all over again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Add a bit of swimming, sunbathing, reading and flirting with various waiters at one of the beach cafés and you have the holiday in a nutshell.
Going ‘clubbing’ consisted of going to one of the bars with a dancefloor at the end of the night after crawling through every cocktail bar on the street. One night we ended up doing tequila shots with another bunch of tourists and, well, anyone who’s been to Willow knows what happens when tequila shots get involved. Someone starts poledancing. In this case, it was one of my friends, who got up on the bar, Coyote Ugly-style, and started using one of the poles placed there for that very reason. Absolutely creasing with laughter, we yelled at her to come down, but before we knew it, she was joined by some of the girls in the other group of tourists. Soon everyone got involved, in a very happy and very drunken way. It was an incredibly fun night, although very very tacky.
It was a good holiday with which we could let our hair down, but there was never really any chance of it getting more mental than that. I think our parents knew that stranded in this little Cypriot town, we could only go so wild. And if I found out, latterly, that my parents had been watching me? I think my mum would have smiled and said, ‘I expected nothing less’.
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