Santiago: Venus in Cyprus

Since his wife had died of cancer a year ago, his intention to emigrate had solidified in his thoughts.

As part of his work as a removal manager at Santiago Service in Hong Kong, Wen Tao Bo had travelled all over Asia, and from the few times he could have landed in Europe, Cyprus had impressed him most.

When five booksellers in Hong Kong had disappeared in October 2015, presumably arrested by the Chinese police, his half-dreamed idea of emigration suddenly took concrete form.

His wife had reluctantly taken his first steps, but when metastatic ovarian cancer was diagnosed, their dream was entirely stored.

He had taken care of her as a darling asks, and on her deathbed she had reminded him of the blue Cypriot Sea in which she had been allowed to swim with him once, now five years ago.

Wen's wife was of rich descent and since they had no children, he would be able to gather enough foreign currency to buy himself into Europe through the gates where once the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Muslims, the Englishmen and recently the Greeks and the Turks had reigned.

Over the last 20 years, there has been a huge wave of migration to the islands of Cyprus and Malta from people and from money.

The latter was mainly derived from Russian oligarchy who could launder their black rubles in the azure of the Mediterranean Sea.

However, following the banking crisis in 2008, several Cypriot banks had reported in the blows of the global financial wave and during the euro crisis in 2014, the Germans had forced the Cypriot banks to confiscate 40% of all "savings" in excess of € 100.000 as debt repayment.

Merkel was here not "la mama" but the "bitch".

Curiously, Cyprus as a gateway to Europe, has so far almost completely been spared from boat refugees who had chosen Greece and Italy as their favourite destination.

It were mainly the stinky rich Russians and Chinese who had been seduced by "Aphrodite's Island".

Through his work at the relocation company, Wen had met Marco, a bonk of a Greek Cypriot of Bulgarian origin, who had promised him a high commission on every house he could sell to the Chinese.

Or if he himself might have been interested ...

"I not only sell houses", Marco said: "but also and especially passports."

Legally, it was possible to obtain the Cypriot citizenship on the condition that one invested at least € 2.000.000 in property of which 75% could be sold again after three years without losing one’s passport.

Since Cyprus was soon going to join the Schengen area, it would allow people to travel in Europe without difficulty since they had acquired the European citizenship.

Mykonos was the name of the organization that realized these projects as a developer and sold the villas via a worldwide network with a European passport as a welcome gift.

Marco picked him up at the airport of Larnaka and raced along the coast road with him, passing Limassol to the city of Pafos.

In the evening, in addition to a delicious, out of control Cypriot meze , he was treated with two delicious local white wines flanked by a glass of zivania that made him think of grappa,

Marco let him enjoy, not only from the view of the sea surface around Pafos, but also of his stunning White-Russian Olga.

Her parents had been professors at the University of Minsk, but at a certain point she had almost landed in the opposition to the authoritarian head of state Loekasjenko.

She had almost sold her face to an opposition pamphlet but eventually went on to study law together with Marco in the Netherlands.

Currently she worked as a desk-office manager in a hotel.

Marco himself was born from a Bulgarian-Greek mother and a Polish-German father and during his childhood he migrated from Bulgaria to Cyprus together with his mother who had a job at Mykonos in the kitchen.

"Rich Dad Poor Dad", was for him the best book of all time, as he told in the car: "Professors do great studies and write famous books, but the most elementary thing you have to learn is not part of their devotion: making money."

He himself obtained a bachelor's degree in marketing at the University of Groningen and was promoted in the company to "Overseas Marketing Executive".

They had hubs in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, run by mixed teams with Cypriots and Chinese.

He himself was not really oriented towards direct sales - although he was good at it and also liked doing so - but rather a "developer" of networks and contacts in order to develop and facilitate the business.

Besides his blonde Olga, his black Mercedes S320cdi showed that he had already achieved quite a lot at the age of 28 under the Cypriot sun.

The next day he took Wen Tao Bo for a chapel walk along the monuments of the Mykonos group.

The company was founded about 50 years ago by George Mykonos, now a lusty eighty-year-old who had recently received the award of best Cypriot entrepreneur from the president’s hands.

Besides developer and construction firm, they also owned several hotels, a university and a private hospital with 37 beds including emergency and intensive care.

Of course, they also provided services for maintenance, cleaning and rental coordination of the buildings and they offered full assistance to the process for European citizenship.

As it is usual at a rock festival, Marco started the tour with modest residential blocks of more than 10 years old, built around a central pool garden.

Cypriots were only a very small fraction of this multicultural society biotope.

He introduced Wen to the local flora, the Neapolis University, the administrative headquarters and a project under construction.

Here Marco showed him the Mykonos' intestines : the interior design was minimalist and exuded a class as a distant heritage of the special archaeological remains of culture that had been exposed in the area of Pafos.

Wen saw Marco navigating to the high-altitude Kamares village with hundreds of villas.

But on the way, around noon, the main course was already served to him:

Adonis Beach Villas.

For 5 million euros you get the cream of the crop here.

"An assorted lady included and I’m sold", Wen thought during the tour of the three-storey “cottage” overlooking the sea of Aphrodite.

The dream spots and the accompanying millions of euros were a little later washed away with a glass of muscat in a Bulgarian restaurant.

During this late lunch, Wen was once again painfully reminded that superpower China, like the US, had not reached the finals of the World Cup in Russia.

He saw how a tiny country like Belgium chopped the Tunisian team with 5-2. Only the names Carrasco and Witsel did ring a bell somewhere.

So, it became evening and morning the second day in hotel Coral Beach.

Sunday morning, at a quarter past ten, breakfast had already been served and he treated himself to a glass of fresh orange juice and a too-early daiquiri at the pool bar.

It was in the same hotel that Sheng Ling and he had been swimming together in the Cypriot Sea six years ago.

A potpourri of crumpled collapsed women bodies to libidinous tight Venus shapes paraded along the pool a few boulders further.

Did he still belong to the first men's platoon where beautiful women still wanted to cycle to - in that case certainly he was not in front position ...

Although after the death of his wife he had imposed a somewhat stricter mountain bike program and had tinkered all sorts of tricks to continue eating well without gaining too much weight, his white-grey hair would have betrayed his age if he had disposed of European genes.

But Chinese men keep their black locks and usually look 10 years younger than on their passport.

When he had seen enough swimming pools and divine cottages and the drool still hung between his lips,

the rest of the marketing program followed centered on the country's own temptations.

"And low taxes," Marco added, "not to mention the gas that has been found here recently.”

And above all flexibility, everything can be arranged here! "

From his earlier trip he remembered that the country of Aphrodite had a pleasant Mediterranean climate, surrounded by an azure blue sea that encircled a somewhat rocky coast with here and there an exotic sandy beach as a tourist magnet.

But he was shocked by the fact that the island now attracted 3 to 4 million tourists every year, while there were hardly more than 1 million inhabitants.

They lived mainly in Nicosia, which as a split city, covered the border between Greek Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus.

Larnaka owed its economic development to the presence of the airport, Limassol was the business centre and Agia Napa the "party capital".

In the centre of the island was the Troodos mountain transformed during wintertime into a ski resort, to combine with a refreshing dive in the sea almost within walking distance.

Pafos itself was just a few decades ago a fishing village that gradually developed into tourism, partly because of some interesting archaeological sites in the area.

A small detour along the port of Kato Pafos with the Medieval castle of the Lusignans, illustrated the fault line between the rich foreigners and the local fishermen.

Over the last few years, Pafos has grown into a medium-sized city of 80.000 people, including suburbs, where foreigners with luxury yachts were massively imported.

In a way of speaking because it was by business class that the rich Chinese and Russians connected to Cyprus to choose or visit a property and in many cases also virtually via internet or conference call when the purchase was in the aim of a kind of B-plan including a luxury home and a European passport.

For an investment of € 300.000 you could not obtain a passport but a permanent residence permit on condition that you would come to say hello to your little shanty at least once every two years.

If you or your family would stay on the island for seven years, you could subsequently obtain the Cypriot (and thus European) citizenship.

Marco told that the Mykonos group was founded in 1960 as a real estate developer and constructor and today had become a world company with more than 2000 employees.

The last day just before Weng left, the Business Development Manager Overseas explained that a decade ago a concept had been set up whereby the residents not only disposed of a house or an apartment but also acquired access to a community with possibilities for socialization (for example the Kamares club), specialized education, a private high-quality hospital (Iasis Hospital) and leisure facilities (hotels, restaurants, golf) with a European passport on top.

Gradually, Mykonos had focused more and more on foreign buyers, especially Englishmen, but they had often been diverted to Portugal in recent years.

As a result of the banking crisis in 2008, real estate prices had also collapsed in Cyprus and it was only during the last two years that the economic revival had also been translated into a restitution of the house value.

Since 2013 the link between real estate purchase and the acquisition of a passport was started, supported by well-lobbied regulations whereby the captains of industry and the government had a common interest in allowing rich foreigners to invest in Cyprus.

This was not entirely appreciated by the European Community, so the Cypriot shortcut to a European passport might be a short one.

In Malta, a journalist was recently killed while tracing corruption of a minister of the government.

This relative urgency appeared to increase the demand for passports and houses.

On Wen's question whether the prices for passport immigrants and (mostly European) villa buyers were the same, a pseudo stoic response followed saying that the discount for the former might be lower.

Of course, this could be justified by the service that accompanied the acquisition of a passport.

Many foreigners just bought properties from Mykonos because of a return of around 5% which was guaranteed for a certain period.

Marcos admitted that the real return was 1.5% higher, but this seemed to Wen a low fee for the management of the buildings, the cost of renting and the risk of vacancy.

Business-wise it seemed to be the reverse model of a printer where the device is given away almost for nothing and the profit is generated through the sale of the toners.

On the return to Larnaka, Marco suggested to stop at Petra tou Romiou, the birthplace of Aphrodite.

Bath tourists had dishonoured the iconic bay into a ordinary beach.

Suddenly wind started to blow violently with thunder and lightning followed by a ruthless deluge.

Wen was almost the only one left on the beach and when the grey blanket of clouds wanted to give the blue of the sky another chance, the perfect woman seemed to rise out of the splashing wet.

He closed his eyes and hallucinated the Venus of Botticelli, who raised breast after breast out of the water.

"Now or never," thought Weng, "this is the goddess of love, I will ask her : Oh woman, so high above all women, am I still beautiful?"

But seconds later when he opened his eyes again, he was overwhelmed by a black Aphrodite with out-of-hand female forms and maybe just because of that hypersensual.

From between the clouds a cautious ray of sunshine took a photo of her moon-shaped scar, skittish slipped away behind a curl of flattened wet pubic hair.

She saw his eyes resting on her body and kept silent.

"You didn’t expect this," the sea whispered with mocking waves up to his long toes.

Weng felt the "chi" flow away from his limbs.

"Look for the Celestine Prophecy and then, maybe tomorrow, you will understand."