Day 0 – Arrival: Halloumi at Midnight

We landed in Larnaca at an hour typically reserved for regrets and infomercials. Did we go straight to the hotel and sleep like sensible adults? Absolutely not. Within twenty minutes of touching down, we had tracked down a 24/7 Zorbas bakery and were shoveling halloumopita into our faces on a street corner, grease-stained and triumphant. This was, we would come to learn, the correct way to begin any trip to Cyprus. Full credit to the island for having its priorities straight: you may not have a reunified capital, but at least the pastry situation is sorted around the clock.

Sunday – The Day We Accidentally Became Time Travelers

We crossed the Ledra checkpoint into North Cyprus at an hour that felt appropriately dramatic. One minute you’re sipping coffee in the EU; the next you’re in a different country that most of the world officially pretends doesn’t exist. The border guards on both sides have clearly perfected the art of looking mildly inconvenienced by your existence, which is a skill we respect.

Our first stop was Ancient Salamis, a sprawling Roman city where marble columns stand heroically against a turquoise sea, as if posing for a screensaver. It was beautiful, genuinely humbling, and also completely ignored by the seagulls who were using a 2,000-year-old column as a toilet. History is not always dignified.

Ancient Salamis: Where marble columns have stood for 2,000 years (seagulls included)

Then came Varosha Ghost Town, and here’s where the trip took a turn into something genuinely surreal. Once the “French Riviera of Cyprus” — a sparkling resort playground for the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Brigitte Bardot — Varosha was abandoned practically overnight during the 1974 Turkish invasion. The residents fled so quickly they left everything behind. Fifty years later, high-rise hotels are slowly being consumed by vegetation, shops still have sun-faded merchandise in the windows, and the whole place has the unsettling energy of a civilization that pressed pause and never came back.

After a restorative snack stop at Petek Pastanesi in Famagusta Old Town (truly the unsung hero of this trip), we drove toward St. Hilarion Castle — a dizzying mountain fortress that looks like someone built a Disney castle and then forgot to maintain it for 700 years. We arrived just after the last entry. The gates were closed. We stood outside and stared up at it like defeated children looking through a toy shop window. It was still, annoyingly, spectacular from the outside.

St. Hilarion Castle: A Disney castle that time forgot (and we arrived too late to enter)

We pivoted to the coast like the emotionally resilient travelers we are, visiting Kyrenia Castle (a genuinely imposing Venetian fortress that did not close before we arrived, which felt like a personal victory) and ending the day with dinner at the horseshoe-shaped Kyrenia Harbour. The lights of the old town reflected perfectly in the water. It was the kind of scene that makes you put your phone away and just… look. We did not put our phones away. We took approximately 300 photos.

Monday – Culture, Coastline, and a Rental Car We Were Too Afraid to Park

South Nicosia in the morning is a genuinely lovely place for a walk, provided you don’t mind navigating a city that has medieval Venetian walls, a modernist central square, and a geopolitical border all within ten minutes of each other. Faneromeni Church was peaceful and beautiful. Eleftheria Square was sleek and confident. The Venetian walls were, as always, completely unimpressed by us.

We picked up a rental car, which from this point forward will be referred to as “the anxiety machine,” and drove to Limassol Marina for lunch. The yachts were enormous. The prices were significant. We ate outdoors, watched wealthy people board boats, and felt like we were extras in someone else’s lifestyle.

Properly fortified, we headed to Kourion Archaeological Site, which features an ancient theater perched on a dramatic cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. Sitting in those stone seats while the sea glitters thousands of feet below, you understand why the Greeks thought this was an appropriate backdrop for tragedy. Everything here feels like a backdrop for tragedy, in the best possible way.

Kourion: Where ancient Greek tragedy meets spectacular Mediterranean views

We then attempted a visit to the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates, an ancient woodland temple dedicated to a god of the forests. The Mediterranean sun, apparently also a theater kid, chose this exact moment to vanish — replaced by rain and hail. We did a very brisk archaeological power-walk, muttered something about “getting the vibe,” and retreated back to the anxiety machine.

The redemption came at Aphrodite’s Rock (Petra tou Romiou), the legendary birthplace of the goddess of love herself. After going through a slightly unglamorous pedestrian tunnel beneath the road, we emerged onto a pebbled beach and actually climbed the iconic sea stack. The views were extraordinary. According to legend, swimming around the rock three times counter-clockwise grants eternal beauty and youth. The choppy, cold sea made a compelling counter-argument. We declined. We are aging normally.

Tuesday – Tombs, Taverns, and a Shipwreck That Didn’t Get the Memo

Kato Paphos Archaeological Park is one of those places that makes you realize just how staggeringly old human civilization is. Extraordinary Roman mosaics — vivid, intricate, absurdly well-preserved — just… sitting in the open air, protected by little more than a roof and the honor system. We stared at them for a long time.

Paphos Archaeological Park: Roman mosaics so vivid you forget they’re 2,000 years old

The Tombs of the Kings followed: enormous underground burial complexes carved directly from the rock, complete with open atriums and columned chambers. Not actually for kings (classic misleading ancient branding), but impressive enough that you immediately forgive the false advertising.

Lunch was kleftiko at The Muse Restaurant, reached via a narrow spiral road up the hillside that deserves its own paragraph. Halfway up, we came face-to-face with a car coming down. Two vehicles. One lane. No room. The other driver stared at us with the calm, patient expression of someone who has done this a thousand times. We had done it zero times. What followed was a slow, sweaty, multi-point reverse down the hill to a slightly wider patch of tarmac while making the kinds of sounds that no one should make out loud in a car. The locals apparently treat this as a perfectly normal Tuesday. We aged visibly. The kleftiko — slow-roasted lamb that falls apart at the mere suggestion of a fork — was absolutely worth it. We ate in a manner that would have been deeply concerning to anyone watching.

Then we drove to the Edro III Shipwreck — a cargo ship that ran aground in 2011 and has since just… stayed there, dramatically wedged into the rocks near the Pegeia sea caves, rusting with tremendous commitment. It’s one of those sights that shouldn’t be beautiful but absolutely is. The sea caves nearby were also stunning, though harder to photograph because they kept being full of sea.

Wednesday – The Day a Pile of Rocks Humbled Us

We drove to Choirokoitia, a UNESCO World Heritage Neolithic settlement dating back over 9,000 years, making it one of the oldest settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean. We are genuinely embarrassed to report that it looked, to our culturally under-qualified eyes, like a pile of rocks. An important pile of rocks, a pile of rocks representing the dawn of settled human civilization on this island — but a pile of rocks nonetheless. We nodded thoughtfully for longer than was probably necessary and moved on.

Our spirits were restored at the Golden Donkey Farm, where we met several donkeys who were neither golden nor particularly fazed by our presence, but were charming nonetheless. This was followed by lunch at Tasties Café in Lefkara, a mountain village world-famous for its intricate handmade lace. The village is the kind of pretty that makes you wonder why you live anywhere else. The answer is the airport.

In the golden late afternoon we reached Cape Greco, a dramatic stretch of coastline where the cliffs drop into brilliant blue water. We made it to the Love Bridge, a naturally formed limestone arch reaching out over the sea, just in time for the light to turn absurdly golden. We soaked it in. We soaked in it a bit too long.

This is how we arrived at the Hala Sultan Tekke mosque approximately four minutes after it closed. The mosque sits on the edge of a salt lake, its domes and minarets reflected in the still water, surrounded by flamingos. We stood at the fence in the fading light, gazed at this accidentally perfect composition, and silently accepted that we had made our scheduling choices and now had to live with them. It was beautiful. We were very annoyed.

We ended the night at Maqam Al Sultan for a Levantine feast that successfully dissolved all residual annoyance into something closer to contentment.

Thursday Morning – Goodbyes, Arches, and One Last Brunch

St. Lazarus Church in Larnaca is the kind of ancient, layered, quietly magnificent building that makes you feel both small and somehow calm. A fitting farewell to Cyprus, which had spent the whole week being simultaneously exhausting and extraordinary.

The Kamares Aqueduct nearby features so many repeating stone arches in perfect perspective that it genuinely looks like a screensaver or a visual illusion. We took photos that we knew would not do it justice and took them anyway.

Then: Edem’s Yard for a farewell brunch, a flight, and the cultural whiplash of arriving in Brussels four hours later.

Thursday Evening – Brussels: Gothic Architecture and Immediate Chocolate

The Grand Place at night is one of those travel experiences that genuinely lives up to its own reputation, which is rarer than you’d think. The ornate guildhalls and Gothic Town Hall are floodlit and extraordinary, and the whole square has the warm, slightly unreal quality of being inside a very beautiful snow globe. We stood there in the cool evening air and did absolutely nothing useful for about half an hour. Correct choice.

Brussels Grand Place: A Gothic masterpiece that actually lives up to the hype

Friday – Surrealism, Chocolate, and a Beer That Made Us Philosophical

The Magritte Museum should be mandatory for anyone who has ever felt like the world is faintly absurd. René Magritte spent a career painting bowler hats, men with apples for faces, and skies that appear in the wrong place, and somehow the cumulative effect is not chaos but a kind of profound, slightly unsettling order. The building itself is grand and neoclassical, which makes the contents feel even more pleasingly wrong.

The Sablon District is the kind of neighborhood that knows it’s beautiful and has made its peace with being expensive. We went directly to Pierre Marcolini for chocolate, spent an amount of money on small squares of ganache that we will be deliberately vague about, and felt absolutely zero regret. The chocolate was remarkable. We bought more than we needed. This is fine.

The Marolles provided the necessary counterpoint: winding alleys, vivid street art, the chaotic energy of the Place du Jeu de Balle flea market, and the general sense that not everything needs to be polished to be wonderful.

The day’s peak was a private beer tasting in a traditional estaminet — a cozy, wood-panelled Brussels institution that is basically a pub that has achieved a higher level of consciousness. We moved from a crisp, effervescent Saison to a Lambic, a wild-fermentation beer that tastes like someone bottled a rainstorm in a barn and then aged it for two years. It is complex, challenging, and completely unlike anything else. We found it transcendent. This may have been the beer talking. We have no regrets.

Saturday – The Quiet One

We packed. We ate pastries. We stared at the city’s skyline of Gothic spires and Baroque guildhalls and felt the specific melancholy of a trip nearly over. Our suitcases, substantially heavier with chocolate and a few impulsive antique purchases we are calling “investments,” were eventually wrestled shut.

The airport received us with its usual impartial fluorescence.

Final Verdict

Cyprus is a place that will strand you outside closing-time castles, hail on you at ancient temples, and trick you into thinking Neolithic ruins might just be rubble — and then show you a sea stack at sunset that makes you understand why humans invented the concept of sacred ground. Brussels will make you spend forty euros on chocolate and convince you that it was the most reasonable decision you’ve ever made.

Both are correct. Go to both. Eat everything. Accept that the best sites will sometimes be closed when you arrive, and plan your schedule accordingly. (We did not plan our schedule accordingly. We are passing this wisdom on at no charge.)