Week Break – Crete (Part 1 of 3)

I am back safe and sound in Athens! My bed was a wonderful thing to sleep in last night as hostel beds leave something to be desired. Since the last 10 days of my life have been nothing but action packed and amazing to write about the task at hand is a bit daunting. I have decided to break up my posts into three sections, one for each of the islands I visited during my 10 day break from class. Since I didn’t get a spring break after last term – I just flew to Athens – you could call this my Spring Break but when I do people look at me funny so I’ve taken to calling it my week break.

Crete was the first island that I visited for the first three nights of my nine night vacation. My eight hour ferry arrived in the port of Heraklion at 5:30 am and my friend that I met last time I was in Crete for a school trip picked me up from the ferry. It was a really great feeling for me to be back in a place I’d already seen and yet have so much more to do on the island since it is huge! I spent the 3 days I had in Crete exploring the east side of the island this time since the school trip took us west through the ruins and into Hania. That first day my friend showed me around one of the branches of the University of Crete which looked like a prison. It was just some white concrete buildings and nothing else. There might have been one palm tree off in the corner but the rest of the campus was just white and brown as the dirt. The first night I stayed in Ammudara which I guess is a district of Heraklion? It was a cute place next to the beach except that the pillows were rock hard like the bed. We went to a small bakery down the road from the hotel and got two of the Χορτα version of spinach pie which I believe is called Χορτοπιτα. It was amazing! I will have to look for it in the bakeries here in Athens. The day was spent relaxing on the beach with my amazing book that I ended up finishing and then the night was dedicated to salsa dancing! My friend and I went back to the dance club that we met at and I saw another guy there from last time as well. We were unfortunately both tired that first night though so we didn’t stay out as long as I would have liked. It was that salsa club that really made me want to come back to Crete and I was only there for a few hours!

Saturday was when we went to the National History Museum of Crete which was tiny like the rest of the museums I have been to in Greece. I did get some really cute pictures of the animals in the living section of the place though.

Tiny Tim the Turtle and friends! Click on the picture for the rest of my pictures from Crete.

Tiny Tim the Turtle and friends are to the right! After leaving the museum we took a walk along the path to the lighthouse which most of my friends had already walked to last time we were here. The water was beautiful and there was just enough wind to make you feel like you were out on the ocean. Walking back into town I found a couple of cafés with funny names like Mani Mani Tasty Seconds (Pacman themed) and Mr. Mam with the image of a man giving a baby a bottle. That afternoon we had coffee in the main square of town with my friend’s parents. Neither his mother nor father spoke a lick of English and my Greek isn’t good enough to entertain a conversation so I mostly sat and smiled feeling extra awkward. That evening we drove off into the country for his work as a member of a traditional village. Since he is a professional dancer he and 4 other guys dance with 5 girls for hours on end to entertain tourists in a traditional setting. I got to sit with the rest of the tourists for a large buffet dinner and watch the dancers in their perfectly choreographed moves that looked like they were taken right out of Zorba the Greek.

Traditional greek dancing. Click for the rest of the pictures from Crete!

As soon as dinner ended we raced off to Agios Nikolaos to check in to the next hotel. The town was very lively at night and since the restaurants were closed we sat at a table next to the lake for a while. Sunday brought a morning view of the town which was calm and serene. The lake is one of a kind in Crete and acts like a small harbor to the sea which is just on the other side of a bridge in town. That day was spent relaxing on a beach not far from town which I think is responsible for one of the many layers of tan from the trip. I even put actual tanning oil on my legs to force them into changing color. Even red would have been a welcome color compared to the engineering white I usually sport. It wasn’t until Santorini that I really became ‘tan’ but that’s a story for tomorrow.

There has been a lesion that I learned in each of the three islands I went to on break these past days. From Crete the lesson is this: In Greece, lanes in the road are just guidelines. Every time I got into my friend’s car or a bus or a taxi a line from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie comes to mind when the pirate says, “They aren’t rules, they’re more like guidelines.” Racing to The Traditional Village Saturday night I had to close my eyes and just trust the lord and my friend’s 6 years of driving experience on that road 3 times a week up and back. The fact that the white lines on the side of the road are the actual curb to the road makes “driving on the line” even more frightening. If a car isn’t coming around the corner the second you’re taking it, the middle line has no real meaning to the driver, nor does the idea of ‘solid’ and ‘dashed’ lines for passing. Greeks pass whenever the hell they feel like it.

Glad to have survived 3 days of Greek driving and sleeping in a car on the beach Sunday night, I departed on a super fast ferry to Santorini on Monday morning. This is a story for me to tell tomorrow. Goodnight!