Moving on to the islands

We have really enjoyed our time here in Crete, particularly Xania (or Chania to the common tourist, like us). This is a very different place. It was occupied by the Venetians, and then by the Turks for a couple of centuries, and there seems to be a bit of a Morroccon influence, as well. I think the Venetian influence is definitley noticeable in some of the harbour front architecture. The food here reflects all that complex past. There is a lot of the standard Greek fare (moussaka, souvlaki, etc) but always with a twist. They also have food that we never saw in Athens: imam (eggplant), boureki (zucchini pie) and lots of different fish. This is a beautiful and very foreign-feeling place. Possibly the only downer was that the Samaria Gorge was not open yet for hiking...it opens the day after we fly out. Google it and you wil see why we wanted to hike it.

Further to our previous post about trying to speak Greek, trying to read it is another challenge all together. Chania (pronounced with "ch" as in chutzpah or challah) is written XAVIA in upper case Greek letters. Crete (pronounced kree-tee in Greek) is spelled KPHTH. Try throwing the letters that look like pitchforks and crosshairs into the mix, and it gets a little confusing just tying to figure out where we are, forget about trying to pronounce anything!

At the conclusion of nearly every dinner we have had here, the waiter brings over a small flask of booze accompanied with a pair of shot glasses. We think it is typically customary to receive this. Very nice gesture but proceed with caution! This unassuming clear liquid tastes like paint thinner and packs a wallop. We think it is Raki. We were told its about a 100 proof...harsh stuff for these two wine/beer babies.

We are flying to Athens early tomorrow morning to embark on our 1 week yacht cruise. We aren't too sure if there will be much WiFi in the ports, but we will post when we can and leave the rest for when we fly to Milan on May 7.

Oh yeah - a VERY big thanks to our friend Pam, who was kind enough to let us ship a package to her office from Greece. We will be travelling a little bit lighter and a lot happier since we got rid of the extra things that we had to buy to get through our lost luggage days. Thanks Pam!

The sea was angry that day...

The weather here has been very strange. It has been warm the entire time, but the last couple of days have been cloudy and it is just slightly windy. When we arrived in Chania on Saturday the sea was calm and the skies were clear (see the photo of Jim). On Monday afternoon, the skies clouded over briefly and the sea just went nuts! The waves were about 0.5m high, or higher, and moving really fast. On Tuesday, things got even worse and when we were in Chania town the waves were breaking right over the promenade. Of course, we pursued the only sane option open to us: we went swimming! It wasn't really swimming, actually, it was more like flailing around as we tried to stand on the same spot and jump up high every time a wave was going to break over our heads. The goal was to keep our heads dry. This worked well for Jim, but not for Joanne, who is one foot shorter. After 15 minutes in the surf she looked like a drowned rat!

We were quite proud of ourselves for braving the waves until we got back into our suite and looked out our balcony. A man was much farther out in the bay than we dared to go. We thought he was struggling to get to shore and were getting ready to do our best slow-motion/Baywatch run down the beach to rescue him, but then he waved to some people on the beach, and started to swim in another direction...with very little effort. Landlubbers like us are no match for him!

Today the sea is calmer and it is shaping up to be a beautiful day...a great day to hit the beach, with maybe just a little less excitement!

Greek to me

So far on this trip our attempts to say anything in Greek have been completely thwarted. We must look so obviously English speaking that it oozes from our pores. Typically when we walk into a restaurant or a shop, we are immediately greeted in English (a couple of times in Athens, Joanne was spoken to in German first, but never in Greek). Sure we have tried to say "Kalimera" instead of "Good Morning" and have remembered our ps and qs (parakalos and efharistos), but we were mostly just humoured by people whose Greek (and English) were far superior to our own.

We thought that being on Crete, which is a little less touristy than the areas that we have been and will be going to in Greece, would give us a chance to at least try and say a few things in Greek. On Saturday we finally got our chance. We went into a bakery/liquor store far off the beaten track. There was an English couple ordering through pointing (quite rude, actually) and three Greek patrons. The shopkeeper came around the counter and waited for us to point at what we wanted. Instead, Joanne said (probably a little too forcefully and a little too loudly) "Ena bookalee lefko krasee, parakalo", and the shopkeeper said "White wine?" Success! Sure, she spoke English and Jim was able to reach up high and put his hand on the one that we wanted, but still every victory must be savoured.

Crete

We are now staying just outside the town of Chania, which is at the west end of Crete. We are staying in a small hotel right on the beach (see the photo of the view of the pool and beach from our balcony...yes, it's a rough life we are living right now!)

It is low to mid 20C, which we are finding more than warm enough. Last night at dinner, however, the waitress asked us why we were sitting outside when it was so cold! If this is cold, we don't think we could handle "hot".

We had a very interesting conversation with our cab driver in Athens yesterday (a conversation that took place while he was driving about 130 km/h and zipping in and out of lanes at top speed). He told us that the unemployment in Greece right now is closing in on 20%, people cannot afford to get married because no one has enough money to move out of their parents' house and that students who spend 4 years in university cannot get a job. While he was telling us this, a man and a woman on a motorcycle zoomed by going about 150 km/hr, neither one of them were wearing helmets. When we asked him if it was the law to wear helmets, the taxi driver said, "Yes, it's the law, but he has very nice hair. We would rather pay the 300E fine than wear a helmet." No income, but ready to pay a 300E fine to avoid helmet hair. Kids today!

Reunited and it feels so good!

Meteora

Day Four, Meteora:

Our final stop was at the site of Meteora, just outside of the town of Kalambaka. Meteora is a group of monasteries that were built on top of isolated monoliths by a group of monks looking to create a "community of hermits" (no, that doesn't make sense to us, either), starting around the year 1000 AD. When these were originally built, the only access was via a bucket and pulley system. Fortunately there are bridges and staircases, today.

Overall the coach trip was worth going on. We saw sites that we never would have otherwise seen and had full explanations at every stop. The bad part was the bus itself, which can't be anyone's favourite way to travel. We were lucky that the bus wasn't full and that we could each have our own row (we tried sitting together, but one of us is content to gaze serenely out the window at the countryside and the other one is a fidgety galoot). We didn't think that we could go the entire tour with the same clothes and no luggage, but we made it!

Delphi

Day three, Delphi:

The Delphi site contains the ruins of Apollo's sancturay, and is also the place where those who sought to know the future could visit the oracle for a prediction. Basically the oracle was a woman that a bunch of old guys would get high, then she would start to babble incoherently and the old guys would interpret what she was saying and pass the information on...for a price, of course! The interpretations were kept as neutral as possible, so that the oracle could never be blamed if things didn't go as expected. It is sort of like when one of his ministers tries to explain or expand on something that Ed Stelmach has said.

The really amazing thing about this site is that it is on a mountain side and was buried so deep that a village had been rebuilt over the ruins. They moved out the villagers, dug down 5 - 6m, and voila!

Olympia

Day 2 on the Coach Tour: Olympia

This is the site of the original Olympics that were held in ancient times (~ 500 BC to 200 AD). The site is in really good shape because there was an earthquake in the area shortly after the site was abandoned, and the ruins were buried and so were protected by the soil. Even though very little is still standing, some of the detail is amazing.

There is an opporunity to run the length of the original running track, but, since it is 190m one way, neither of us felt is necessary to commune that closely with the ancients. It is enough that we walked the same pathways, we didn't need to run it. (Plus a girl on our bus who did run it spent the next hour sounding like she was coughing up hairballs!) Here's a picture of us modeling the latest in fashion from a downtown Athens deptartment store.

Coach Tour, Day 1

And finally, we visited Epidaurus. This 14,000 seat theatre was excavated and found in more or less this condition in the late 1800s. It was in use from around 1500 BC until about 200 AD. For scale, note the picutre on Joanne in the awesome Marks and Spenser clothes. These clothes can seen in every photo on this trip!

The first stop on our tour was Mycenae, a site that was first settled 3 - 4 thousand years ago. We were led through all of the significant portions of the ruins and promptly forgot just about everything! We did see many of the artifacts that were excavated from this site in the National Archeaological Museum in Athens, so we were at least a little ahead of the game. Hopefully we hold on to some of the knowledge.

Note for the blog: we have no idea how to have mulitple photos on one post, so are having multiple posts with one photo.

Tuesday April 20, 2010: Day one of our coach tour, Corinth Canal and Mycenae.

We started a coach tour across the Peloponnese and into Northern Greece. The first day we drove south out of Athens towards the Peloponnese, and crossed the Corinth Canal. Driving across it was stressful enough, but we enhanced the bum-clenching experience by walking back across an open-grid metal pedestrian bridge to take a photo of the canal. It is about 60 metres straight down (it feels like about 800m) but only about 20m wide. It is absolutely horrifying to stare straight down into it!

The Coach tour was very good because our bus was nowhere near full due to so many cancellations (volcano). Of the 16 people aboard, we were nearly all from Canada...half anglophones and half francophones. This smaller group gave us more time with our guide, made for more comfortable bus rides, and gave us a chance to meet all the other travellers.

Mrs. ChickenLegs

Another beautiful day in Athens! Today's main activity was a trip to the National Archeaological Museum. It contains thousands of artifacts from the civilizations in Greece, covering the period from neolithic times to about 500 AD. Quite an amazing and interesting place. Once again we were subjected to the throngs of people who insist on taking a photo of every exhibit, and to spend 10 minutes focussing on the subject and getting exceptionally huffy with anyone who dares to come within 5 metres of their shot. You want a pristine photo of every exhibit? Buy a book from the bloody bookshop! (This fine photo of Mrs. Chickenlegs took about 3 seconds: point, click, walk away...easy!)

As for our luggage that is currently enjoying a stay in Munich, there are still no clear answers as to when it will arrive in Athens. We have decided to just forge ahead with our travel plans and will be leaving on Tuesday morning for a tour of the classic sites. We return to Athens on Friday, and hope to have our luggage waiting here for us. It will be a joyful and tearful reunion. Safe or not, we think that Lufthansa, and all airlines, are desperate to start making money again!

April 17 2010: It was dramatic and sometimes traumatic, but we have arrived in Greece...and only about 10 hours later than initially scheduled. Our flight out of Calgary was delayed by an hour and then re-routed south along latitude intended to skip flying near Iceland. This meant that a flight that normally takes around 9.5 hours was going to take about 12 hours! We didn’t find this out until just after take-off. A few hours before we were scheduled to land, the pilot announced that Frankfurt was closed and that we would be landing in Munich, instead. The only bad part for us was that they were not unloading any luggage. After de-planing, we were lucky to get seats on a 6:00 flight out of Munich to Athens. We should say that we were REALLY lucky, because it was one of the last flights out of Munich. If we hadn’t made that flight, we would be sitting – luggageless - in Munich, rather than luggageless in Athens. And according to other flyers, there wasn’t a hotel room to be had in Munich due to the stoppages in every flight going north, east and west bound. Anyways, our luggage has been identified in Munich and hopefully they start flying soon and get it to us. We don’t mind wearing the same clothes everyday, but people we meet might start to mind a bit, especially if they are downwind! We are certainly not the only ones suffering right now: we went into Marks and Spencer and it was full of Brits chatting on their mobiles, telling tales very similar to our own. This is a real boost for the local economy! We think this is all a conspiracy by Iceland to get back at the rest of the world for screwing up their economy. We weren’t the ones who made them buy junk bonds and gradeless asset backed paper!
For all the turmoil, we have had a really good first day in Athens. We spent time in the Acropolis area, including the Parthenon and theatres, and saw the Agora grounds. It is quite a challenge to gawk upwards and walk without tripping or slipping on old and worn pathways. We don’t know how anyone could look at the worn marble underfoot and not think about how many people have walked those same paths previously. Maybe because Canada is so young, but it is really hard to think about anything being even 200 years old, forget about 2000!
It is not all mourning lost luggage and wandering through classic sites: we forced ourselves to sit on a patio and share a bottle of white wine from Santorini on this warm and hazy day…it’s a tough life! The weather is fantastic, about 23 C as we enter the early evening here on Saturday April 17. Maybe it is just looking for a silver lining, but the sunset does seem extraordinarily beautiful…the upside of all that airborne volcanic particulate, perhaps?