Greek is a tough language. Different alphabet, not spoken by many people, with no living linguistic relatives, impossible to read for anyone who speaks a Western European language.

So far, I can speak one word of Greek, and it is in the headline, above.

“Yassas” … which is an informal “hello” but apparently can also mean “goodbye.” Making it a bit like “aloha”.

This matters, at the moment, because we are in Cyprus, one of two countries in the world where Greek is the official language. (Greece being the other.)

When we got here today, via nonstop flight from Abu Dhabi, I was worried that communicating was going to be a problem. And I haven’t worried about that in a long time.

We can struggle along in Spanish or French or German … but not Greek. And we were not sure how many people in Cyprus speak any English. As opposed to Scandinavia, for example, where everyone does.

Turns out, enough people in Cyprus speak enough English to make this look like a promising visit to a place that, geographically, reminds me a little of the family home in Southern California.

Only 13 million people speak Greek as their mother tongue, putting it 75th on the global list, several of which languages you, as an English speaker, probably have never heard of.

So, Cyprus. Check the map of the Mediterranean. That’s Cyprus, the unnamed island, over on the right. West of Lebanon, south of Turkey.

Here is a Cyprus map. We landed in Larnaca, in the southeast, rented a car and drove east to Limassol. Or just short of it, to one of the hotels overlooking the deep blue Mediterranean Sea.

Cyprus is not well-known in the U.S.  If Americans want “Mediterranean” or “sunny”, they are more likely to stick to the western part of the sea. Or maybe to Greece itself. From Europe or the Americas, Cyprus is an extra hour on the plane.

But from the UAE, Cyprus is an hour closer than is Greece. Even with detours for unofficial no-fly zones over Iraq and Syria.

And it feels more like the “west” than does Turkey. Which seems to be growing more Asian, year by year.

It also has beaches and mild weather and is not expensive.

It also seems a bit undiscovered, at least this time of year. Though tens of thousands of Britons seem to come here in the summer, and lately lots of Russians do, too.

That’s why the tourist industry here is booming. Lots of people looking for seaside sun, in a place not too expensive. Where the weather is agreeable.

The climate in Limassol is not dissimilar from my home town of Long Beach. A bit hotter in the summer and a bit cooler in the winter, but it’s a dry place, mostly covered with scrub, without much running water. So, yeah, like California. Or Spain or most of Italy or the south of France — or even North Africa, though no one much goes there these days.

Our first experience was with an immigration official, who mostly waved most people through, and sped up the process. We may have been expected to fill out a document, but no one on our plane had, so we stood in line and were a bit comforted that the official was competent in English.

So was our rental-car agent.

This is one of four places in Europe where they drive on the left, which is always a bit nerve-racking. I managed the 40 or so miles to the hotel without hitting anything, but I still have plenty of time.

We arrived long after breakfast on the half-empty Etihad flight, so we went looking for lunch after parking at the hotel.

We walked back up the A5 highway to a rather rustic place, on a cliff above the sea, named “Old Limassol” — further identified as a “family restaurant”.

We discovered that upon walking onto the patio. The place was nearly full, at 2 p.m. on a Sunday. And the covered area was nearly full, and all but one table (which we took) was marked “reserved” — in Greek.

Sunday lunch/dinner clearly is a big thing for family units. A dozen of them were in there, attacking very large portions of food.

We had the “salad mezes” which in addition to a Cyprus salad (mostly tomatoes and cucumbers, with lettuce strips and a bit of oil at the bottom) included little bowls of scrambled eggs and halloumi cheese, beets, boiled potatoes and capers, semolina, hummus and some sesame-crust bread.

It was fresh and nice and a fine variety, and it cost 8 euros — or not quite $10.

That would have been enough for lunch. For sure. But we also had ordered grilled halloumi cheese and pork kebabs (which came with fries), and by the time we were done with that … we were very done.

The service was friendly if fitful, but the place was almost maxed out, about an hour after we got there, and we took that into account.

The resto also was good for people-watching. What do they say? What do they eat? (Smallish battered and deep-fried fish of some sort, lots of octopus/cuttlefish, among much of the rest of the menu.)

The whole thing cost 25 euros (about $30), and it would have cost two or three times that in Abu Dhabi — if anyone in Abu Dhabi could do Cypriot food.

We ambled back to the hotel and checked in, and everyone was solicitous to the point of being vaguely annoying, which perhaps happens in the tourist offseason. Been a long time since someone from the front desk explained the hotel to me and led me to my room.

The key feature of the room is the south-facing arrangement of it, with a balcony. The Mediterranean doesn’t crash much, like an ocean would, but the water running up on the muddy little beaches provide a pleasant ambient noise, and the greensward down below is almost magnetic to those of us who live in a desert.

Early in the evening, we went across the street to a little grocery, getting there just before it closed, and bought a bottle of bubbly (a sickly sweet sparkling Muscato), which we sipped while wearing coats on the balcony.

It was in the high 60s, and the wind made it seem cooler. But it was still a fine experience, and far away from our everyday, and different and not expensive, and the sea was rising and falling on the beach, which is exactly what we were looking for.

As well as a “new” old country.