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!