TFR – Christmas Dinner

On Sunday the 2^nd December, 69 members of The Foreign Residents in the TRNC arrived at the Mountain View Hotel in Karaoğlanoğlu for their annual Christmas dinner and to catch up with friends and acquaintances old and new.

This is such a nice friendly group and although we haven’t previously known a lot of the members we are steadily starting to recognise more and more people and it is nice that there are so many nationalities which makes any occasion quite an international one. On our table there were some people from Holland, Russia, Germany and the UK.

The tables in the dining room looked lovely, with festive decorations and chocolates scattered around on each table. The meal was 3 courses with coffee and brandy to follow and the food was excellent as was the service with the waiters buzzing around serving both food and drinks. Well done Mountain View.

Later in the evening, Horst Gutowski, the Treasurer, donned his top hat and announced that raffle prizes had been purchased and this would be drawn after tickets had been bought and he hoped people would be generous for the raffle to come.

There were some lovely prizes and I think everyone who had a winning ticket was well pleased with their prize.

Speaking to Horst during the evening, he said that there had been another 7 new members that day, with 3 from Germany and 4 from the UK and this now makes the total membership 133. We spoke with Barbara Ball, one of the new members, she said she had been in North Cyprus for 9 years and as her circumstances have changed with the loss of her husband, so has her circle of friends and along with others like Richard Gosney & Diane Lewis, who have found themselves on their own for various reasons, they have bonded together and are now doing different things as a group, such as joining TFR and in fact they are off to Thailand for 6 weeks in the near future. No-one needs to be alone when there are organisations such as TFR who are always ready to welcome anyone from any country.

On a sad note, when we were leaving, we said our farewells to Uwe Vandieken who will be leaving the island in two weeks’ time to start a new life in Istanbul. He will be missed by many and especially the social get-togethers he organised in his lovely garden here. We only ever managed to attend one of these but at least I did get to see his garden and write about it with lots of pictures included. If you would like to read about Uwe’s garden click here