Confused between static page inside/outside wordpress installation

hi ..I need a help regarding a front page for my blog. My blog was at
http://www.triptocyprus.com/blog. The wordpress installation is also under the same directory. Until now, I used to have a static (not linked in any way to WordPress) index page at http://www.triptocyprus.com/index.html.
But, i wanted this opening page to talk to wordpress. So, i copied index.php from http://www.triptocyprus.com/blog to http://www.triptocyprus.com/ (made the change for the path to include wp-blog-header.php.
So, now my main page http://www.triptocyprus.com and the blog page http://www.triptocyprus.com/blog are the same. But, I want my main page to look different eg: have just the excerpts of recent posts with some static content (along with the usual wp related sidebars).
If i choose static front page in the options, it will only affect http://www.triptocyprus.com/blog look and not the main look.
How can i achieve this change ?
thanks for your time.