Holiday: Cyprus 2014

Oh how much I needed this 2 week holiday! I really needed to step away from work for a bit and just enjoy some days off where I didn’t have to worry about meetings, labs and preparing experiments. And I was missing my family and wanted to be with them for a bit during the summer.

If you’re planning a holiday in Cyprus, best time of the year to go is between June and July. The months of August and September are a bit too hot and humid for some people to bear.

So yes 🙂 had a lot of fun with my parents and our adopted dog Nana. We even had a bit of an adventure…

One night, about 4-5 days before I was to fly back to the UK, my mom and I were ambushed with cuteness by a tiny black dog who scampered up to us, tail waging so hard the momentum taking her little butt along with it.

So immediately we start looking around to see if her human family are close by. She didn’t have a collar on but we still checked and asked some of the people sitting outside a cafe and restaurant if they’d seen her before or heard if anyone was looking for a missing dog. No luck there. I sat on the curb of the road with her, making sure she didn’t run into traffic and get hurt.

We both knew we already have Nana and that it would be impossible to keep this little one with us as well…Nana is more than enough :P. But we couldn’t leave her alone roaming so close to a main and busy road.

We took turns carrying her the 3km back home. She was obviously scared and didn’t know where we were taking her. As soon as we got inside the flat we made a B line for the bathroom. We gave her a good wash twice, dried her off and put her on the floor in the bathroom to relax and take in her surroundings. She was very quiet and even after about 2-3 hours looked scared of everything around her. We decided to keep her in the bathroom for the night so that she wouldn’t be overwhelmed with Nana’s excited behaviour. We tried to introduce Nana to the little dog but first impressions weren’t good – the little dog didn’t seem to like Nana and would bare her teeth and growl at her. So we thought that was enough excitement for one night, left the little one in the bathroom to rest once we provided some bedding, food and water, and decided that was enough excitement for one day.

Next day we spent the whole morning trying to get two completely different dogs to, if not like, at least tolerate each other. After we passed the awkward stages of growls and teeth baring, it looked like both dogs would get along alright.

Look they didn’t kill each other! *phew* 🙂

 

And after a couple more hours, they started looking more comfortable being in each other’s presence.

 

 

 

 

After some time, we decided to give this little one a name as we couldn’t carry on calling her “dog” – which reminded me of Dog Meat from Fallout 3. Everyone: meet Zoey!

 

 

 

 

 

Zoey still needs a home though. We have advertised her on Facebook on a page called Rescue A Dog From Cyprus and PAWS (Protecting Animals Without Shelter). We cannot afford to have two dogs in our small two bedroom apartment in Cyprus. So I’m asking for your help to spread the word! 🙂