It’s no exaggeration that as someone raised on the island of Cyprus, I was astonished by how green the cities looked from above when I first travelled to Europe.
It’s no exaggeration that as someone raised on the island of Cyprus, I was astonished by how green the cities looked from above when I first travelled to Europe.
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”.