Crete was beyond all words. First, it’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be. We went to the main city there (Iraklia) on a ferry, which was around 9 hours overnight, and they split us up into four groups. My group went to an ancient Minoan villa and a palace at Malia on the first day. I left my camera on the bus for both of those, so no pictures of those two. But the next day we went to a museum that has every Minoan piece you see in textbooks. EVERRYTHING! It was pretty unbelievable to see the famous stuff in person. I’m not really a big museum kinda guy, but wow.
That afternoon we went to Knossos, the Minotaur’s pad. It was pretty sweet, but really really crowded. Lots of Germans there, all of them climbing the walls and getting yelled at by the guard ladies. The coolest part about the sites here is that you are allowed to walk all over the place and touch everything since it's so stable (and reinforced with concrete here and there). It was pretty cool to touch stuff that was touched by humans 6k+ years ago. There really isn’t that much more to say about the ruins, since it's pretty much just a bunch of rocks laid in rows.
After that we spent the night in a sweet hotel up in the mountains. It was really green with a big central lawn surrounded by a pool, a bar, and a bunch of pomegranate trees, which we picked clean within ten minutes of getting there. It’s not stealing if it’s growing on a tree, right? They even had a restaurant attached to the hotel that had its own fish farm. So we got to feed the fish, then eat them. We took over the bar and turned it into a big loud annoying dance party, which really amused the Greek guys sitting in the back. I turned around once to see one take my picture with his cell phone, then throw me the thumbs up. No idea. Kinda creepy. Speaking of which, about 90 percent of the Cretan guys have moustaches, and lots of them carry a dagger wherever they go. It's some kind of big machismo thing.
The next day we all took off to Phaestos, which is another famous palace way up on a mountain (the mountains in Crete are pretty huge, which means that to get anywhere you have to drive up these huge cliffs and curvy roads). Phaestos was pretty empty, so we had the place to ourselves to explore and look at stuff. By that point it was kinda boring since it was the third or fourth set of ruins we saw. But afterwards we went to this beach that was once the hangout of the Greek hippies back in the day. The water was really clear with huge rocks under the surface, and when you swam out a ways you could climb up into caves carved into the mountains flanking the beach, most of which had benches and what I can only assume were toilets of some kind carved into them. A lot have paintings on the inside too. A bit further out was a cliff you could climb up the side of to about 30 or 40 feet. A few kids jumped off, but I didn't because I was feeling sick from swallowing sea water and battling the currents. Plus I'm a wimp. But the view was still stunning. Back on the beach itself there were tons of even older caves carved by the Romans as a cemetery, which we climbed all over to around 50 or 60 feet up. It was amazing. I've never been somewhere so cool. On another note, I pulled the old “too cool for sun block” maneuver, and as a direct result I got ridiculously sunburnt. It doesn’t hurt now, but it’s really itchy. Kinda lame.
On the last day of the trip we went the Samaria gorge, the second longest in Europe, and hiked from the top of it to the bottom, about 13 kilometers with a descent of 1.5 kilometers. It was awesome. I fed a kri-kri. The pictures I put up on facebook are good, but you can't tell how freaking huge everything is. None of the photos use any zoom at all, they are all of just massive rocks. So after that we all got on a ferry, then a bus to Xania (another cool city with a big Venetian castle [they used to run the place]), then another ferry back to Athens, where I slept for a while and did my laundry.
Oh, and we found a Catholic church here. It's for immigrants mostly, since 98% of Greeks are Orthodox, so it’s a bunch of African immigrants and Filipinos. The music is very.... different. Electric piano and bass dominate, along with really stilted rhythm since it is translated and sung by people who don’t really know the ins and outs of the English language. It’s actually pretty hard to follow. On the plus side, I'm taller than everyone there. There are more people packed into that church than can ever be safe, as in more than a mass at the Basilica after a home game. I'm going to try to get pictures of the church, maybe after mass next week.
The photos are here:
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FOUR
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