this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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City Life
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@agrammatic This is incredible. It's a Mediterranean city, so one would expect there would be all sorts of specific vegetation there, with no exception inside the city.
I cannot emphasize enough the mind-boggling culture around urban vegetation in Cyprus - something that only became apparent to me once I experienced other countries.
This is normal in Cyprus. It's common for residents to defend it by saying that fallen leaves are a nuisance, and that mature, tall trees facilitate pests entering higher floors of buildings.
At the same time, more than half of the year is unbearably hot in Nicosia, and walking, cycling, or waiting at public transport stops between 08-20h is indeed incredibly challenging.
@agrammatic@feddit.de wrote:
What? No, they're not. Not for me, at least. And not a bigger one than garbage thrown all over the place (but that is just speaking from a Romanian who has do deal with all this, oh well).
I heard this argument as well. You can just, you know, clean their house, get some poison for bugs and all sorts of pests... there are solutions.
And ultimately, pests also attract all sorts of predator animals, like birds - keeping these in check.
People are just too afraid of nature...
I had truly internalised that one up until my late 20s. In Cyprus, we do see leaves on the ground as trash that needs to be cleaned. Having a lot of trees means a lot of leaves and you need to keep cleaning your yard/balcony and municipal services needs to keep cleaning the streets. Too much work, it gets expensive. You stop doing it, the people start complaining that the area is getting neglected.
It wasn't at least I was made fun of by Europeans for asking "so when is the city coming to clean this" in my first autumn outside Cyprus, that I realised that it's not a universal fact that "leaves = trash".