Crete, post the fourth
Sep. 15th, 2008 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbFriday: diving again.
I went down to the dive place just after ten, and had a very pleasant hour's shore dive, after a bit of problem equalising air pressure in my ears, but that sorted itself out soon enough. Baptiste, the French lad, the instructor, caught a small octopus in the sand, the size of my hand. Squirting ink, and trying very hard to get away -- fast little buggers, octopi, it seems -- he put it in my hand, tiny suckers forceful as anything, soft and cool and not exactly slimy, and when it looked at me out of its little yellow eye, I could tell it hated me.
I don't think I'll ever eat an octopus. They look too intelligent.
Finished that by half eleven, and a break until half one, when I took a boat dive. This time, instead of just two people diving, there were twelve. We went out around the headland to another headland, a place called I think Spilia, maybe? and dived there. (I was on the wrong side of the boat, but on the way out, a bunch of the guys saw two turtles in the water, the big ones native to the island.)
So, the dive site. We moored about ten metres offshore; there's a basalt hill and a couple of ruins, possibly another ruin under the water, but hard to tell what it is or was. Max depth was twenty metres, fish and starfish and little things that look like legless multicoloured centipedes, and the basalt rockface descending like stairs out of the sunlight, underwater cliffs and clefts and weed and silt and sea-urchins, spiny and black.
I don't think you've lived till you've dived, down into that rippling silence, where the only sound is the hiss of air from the regulator and the bubbling rush of your own exhalations and the pop of air pressure equalising in your ears. (Never stop blowing bubbles. Oxygen expanding in your lungs if you go up even a couple of metres without constantly breathing can cause some serious damage.) It's intoxicating, and amazing, and the fish ripple light and dark, shoals and schools moving in the play of reflected light, and the weeds on the bottom sway in the tide.
Yeah.
It's also slightly scary, and after forty minutes breathing through your mouth through the regulator your mouth and throat get dry, your teeth feel somewhat weird and icky, and your nose under the mask gets to feeling clogged and wet and snotty. But those are minor downsides.
The evening: dinner in an ouzeri called Chrysofillis, after the olive tree, and had mezedes -- six plates of tasters, each nearly a meal in themselves. Tzatzikis, potatoes in garlic and cheese, a squeaky kind of cheese that's practically a meal in a mouthful, fennel cakes all thin and pressed and grilled like crackers but softer and larger, rabbit in a kind of curry which I couldn't eat, sardines, olives which I can't eat without gagging, and at the end, ouzo, a little bottle of the stuff. It burns and goes down smooth, but the fumes are enough to make me tipsy, and I only had two sips. The parent finished the bottle, and chatted merrily with an English couple from Stratford-on-Avon.
Internet and a milkshake on the way back. It turns out I suffer withdrawal symptoms when disengaged from the system of tubes for too long.
Before dinner, however, we stuck our heads around the door of the town's cathedral, Aghia Triada. Apart from when it's shut and locked, it seems always in use. There was a priest in robes doing evening devotions when I stuck my head around the door, under that - it's a basilica with a dome in the middle, and the altar behind screens in the nave, and the overwhelming impressive you get is of blue, because except for the floor, it's covered in frescoes, red and yellow and gold, on this amazing blue background, saints and angels and biblical tableaux.
It's pretty freaking impressive.
Saturday: a day off. Swimming, lunch in the bar run by the two Dutch ladies, and then hiding from the heat.
Diving in the evening, from five to six. With Baptiste again, from the shore. This time I held two octopi in my hands, cool and warm and soft and fragile and strong, strange alien creatures that they are.
And fish. A multitude of fish, big ones, small ones, colourful ones, dark ones, pale ones. And the detritus of settlement on the sandy bottom, pots and handles and bottles and a bit of old newspaper, or page torn from a book, the lettering still sharp and clear, until you trailed your fingers against it and it dissolved into mulch. A thing that looked like a starfish, five spines, but it eeled and moved itself under a weed.
Afterwards, dinner at Pasifae Restaurent, beside the lake, for the second time. Their lamb kleftiko is excellent, and they do a damn good pizza, too. And, by the way, two of the waiters are absolutely gorgeous. And there is a little catling that runs in and out of the tables and turns big begging eyes on you: a very cute animal, indeed.
Sunday: the first trip to Kritsa.
So, Kritsa is this town up in the hills - a pretty big one - that's conveniently located to a very old Byzantine church, Panagia Kera, a gorge, and the ancient polisof Lato. On Sunday, we visited with the intention of seeing Panagia Kera.
After a late breakfast, we caught the 1115 bus to Kritsa -- works out at E1.40 per person each way -- and arrived there at 1130. A helpful girl in the taberna/restaurant across the way, called Lato after the polis, told us how to get to the church of Panagia Kera, about a kilometre outside the town, so we bought icecreams and did the mad dogs and Irishwomen trick again, and walked down.
It's an interesting wee church, with very interesting frescos -- alas, pictures of the interior were not permitted. So after that, we got a drink in the taberna across the road, which played home to two vocal, pretty catlings, one demanding tabby with a cataract in one eye, and one marmalade with a fluffy tail who knew how handsome she was.
There are a lot of cats in Crete.
There were goats and roosters and hens and olive groves on the walk down, and the same on the walk up, and some stunning hills in the distance.
(The walk, short though it was, rendered me tired and cranky. So not my climate.)
We had time to order takeaway pizza -- just -- from Lato taberna before the 1330 bus (there is no other bus till 1710 from Kritsa on Sundays) came, and we got it home. After we got back to the apartment, I lay as one dead until 1600, when we went swimming, and afterwards to dinner. Pasifae restaurant again, it of the stunning, built, blue-eyed waiter and the fabulous food. I had the kleftiko this time, and the parent had rabbit stifado: both were gorgeous. Desert was icecream again -- tiramisu icecream -- and a chaser of raki, with sweet pink melon. Raki is damn strong.
Turns out the lady waiter there is from Poland, working in Crete for the summer, and studying German Philology. So I employed one of my three words of Polish to say thank you. ('Thank you', 'yes' and 'okay'. I also have now two words of modern Greek, outside of deciphering the words for various necessities and the menu, 'thank you' and 'good evening'. Such a paltry vocabulary. Although in koine I could probably manage half a conversation.)
Monday: I reproduce here verbatim my diary entry of the time.
It's September. Didn't do much today. Swam, checked LJ in the little bar with internets: turns out I have a poem up in Ideomancer. And you know what? It's not a bad poem. It might even be pretty good.
I'm tired of being away from home. It's a good thing we're spending all day tomorrow out at Herakleion and Knossos, and probably trying to get to Lato on Wednesday or Thursday. I'm not good at doing nothing, and nothing, it seems, is most of what I'm good for in this heat, without a specific goal.
And god, I'm lonely for the company of people who are not the parent, and worried about my grandmother. She's in hospital right now, you see, having her meds adjusted to try to correct an irregularity in her heart, and having her bowels examined. (The parent keeps getting descriptive texts of the goings-on. Some of them are actually pretty funny, but I worry.)
I am now the proud owner of a black muscle tee with a Greek design on the front. Finally, a sleeveless tee, as the temperature descends at last below thirty. Occasionally.
High winds, too, four and five Beaufort.
We walked around the town at lunchtime, to get something to eat. There was a cruise liner standing in out in the bay, the Queen Victoria out of Southampton. Her launches were disgorging flabby hoards of middle-aged upper middle-class types into buses, with practically the entire wharf roped off with security and ship's officers in starched white and a bit of ridiculous braid directing passengers. A couple of lads from the Crete Coast Guard, in combat trousers and black tactical vests were there to look on, too. Probably to make sure no one got drowned where Agios Nikolaos harbour authority might be liable.
I have to say, I wouldn't want to be a watch-standing officer on a liner. Much less an engineer. Can you imagine the shit you'd have to deal with if the electrical plant, or grey-water reclamation, or the heads, hiccupped? Much less, because the paying customers want the romance of an ocean liner, having to wear starched dress whites and ridiculous braid and play public face half the time.
But it looked like quite an operation, I have to say.
Tuesday, with Heraklion, Rocca al Mare, and Knossos, soon to follow.
I will put a picture of the fluffy-tailed marmalade cat up soon.
I went down to the dive place just after ten, and had a very pleasant hour's shore dive, after a bit of problem equalising air pressure in my ears, but that sorted itself out soon enough. Baptiste, the French lad, the instructor, caught a small octopus in the sand, the size of my hand. Squirting ink, and trying very hard to get away -- fast little buggers, octopi, it seems -- he put it in my hand, tiny suckers forceful as anything, soft and cool and not exactly slimy, and when it looked at me out of its little yellow eye, I could tell it hated me.
I don't think I'll ever eat an octopus. They look too intelligent.
Finished that by half eleven, and a break until half one, when I took a boat dive. This time, instead of just two people diving, there were twelve. We went out around the headland to another headland, a place called I think Spilia, maybe? and dived there. (I was on the wrong side of the boat, but on the way out, a bunch of the guys saw two turtles in the water, the big ones native to the island.)
So, the dive site. We moored about ten metres offshore; there's a basalt hill and a couple of ruins, possibly another ruin under the water, but hard to tell what it is or was. Max depth was twenty metres, fish and starfish and little things that look like legless multicoloured centipedes, and the basalt rockface descending like stairs out of the sunlight, underwater cliffs and clefts and weed and silt and sea-urchins, spiny and black.
I don't think you've lived till you've dived, down into that rippling silence, where the only sound is the hiss of air from the regulator and the bubbling rush of your own exhalations and the pop of air pressure equalising in your ears. (Never stop blowing bubbles. Oxygen expanding in your lungs if you go up even a couple of metres without constantly breathing can cause some serious damage.) It's intoxicating, and amazing, and the fish ripple light and dark, shoals and schools moving in the play of reflected light, and the weeds on the bottom sway in the tide.
Yeah.
It's also slightly scary, and after forty minutes breathing through your mouth through the regulator your mouth and throat get dry, your teeth feel somewhat weird and icky, and your nose under the mask gets to feeling clogged and wet and snotty. But those are minor downsides.
The evening: dinner in an ouzeri called Chrysofillis, after the olive tree, and had mezedes -- six plates of tasters, each nearly a meal in themselves. Tzatzikis, potatoes in garlic and cheese, a squeaky kind of cheese that's practically a meal in a mouthful, fennel cakes all thin and pressed and grilled like crackers but softer and larger, rabbit in a kind of curry which I couldn't eat, sardines, olives which I can't eat without gagging, and at the end, ouzo, a little bottle of the stuff. It burns and goes down smooth, but the fumes are enough to make me tipsy, and I only had two sips. The parent finished the bottle, and chatted merrily with an English couple from Stratford-on-Avon.
Internet and a milkshake on the way back. It turns out I suffer withdrawal symptoms when disengaged from the system of tubes for too long.
Before dinner, however, we stuck our heads around the door of the town's cathedral, Aghia Triada. Apart from when it's shut and locked, it seems always in use. There was a priest in robes doing evening devotions when I stuck my head around the door, under that - it's a basilica with a dome in the middle, and the altar behind screens in the nave, and the overwhelming impressive you get is of blue, because except for the floor, it's covered in frescoes, red and yellow and gold, on this amazing blue background, saints and angels and biblical tableaux.
It's pretty freaking impressive.
Saturday: a day off. Swimming, lunch in the bar run by the two Dutch ladies, and then hiding from the heat.
Diving in the evening, from five to six. With Baptiste again, from the shore. This time I held two octopi in my hands, cool and warm and soft and fragile and strong, strange alien creatures that they are.
And fish. A multitude of fish, big ones, small ones, colourful ones, dark ones, pale ones. And the detritus of settlement on the sandy bottom, pots and handles and bottles and a bit of old newspaper, or page torn from a book, the lettering still sharp and clear, until you trailed your fingers against it and it dissolved into mulch. A thing that looked like a starfish, five spines, but it eeled and moved itself under a weed.
Afterwards, dinner at Pasifae Restaurent, beside the lake, for the second time. Their lamb kleftiko is excellent, and they do a damn good pizza, too. And, by the way, two of the waiters are absolutely gorgeous. And there is a little catling that runs in and out of the tables and turns big begging eyes on you: a very cute animal, indeed.
Sunday: the first trip to Kritsa.
So, Kritsa is this town up in the hills - a pretty big one - that's conveniently located to a very old Byzantine church, Panagia Kera, a gorge, and the ancient polisof Lato. On Sunday, we visited with the intention of seeing Panagia Kera.
After a late breakfast, we caught the 1115 bus to Kritsa -- works out at E1.40 per person each way -- and arrived there at 1130. A helpful girl in the taberna/restaurant across the way, called Lato after the polis, told us how to get to the church of Panagia Kera, about a kilometre outside the town, so we bought icecreams and did the mad dogs and Irishwomen trick again, and walked down.
It's an interesting wee church, with very interesting frescos -- alas, pictures of the interior were not permitted. So after that, we got a drink in the taberna across the road, which played home to two vocal, pretty catlings, one demanding tabby with a cataract in one eye, and one marmalade with a fluffy tail who knew how handsome she was.
There are a lot of cats in Crete.
There were goats and roosters and hens and olive groves on the walk down, and the same on the walk up, and some stunning hills in the distance.
(The walk, short though it was, rendered me tired and cranky. So not my climate.)
We had time to order takeaway pizza -- just -- from Lato taberna before the 1330 bus (there is no other bus till 1710 from Kritsa on Sundays) came, and we got it home. After we got back to the apartment, I lay as one dead until 1600, when we went swimming, and afterwards to dinner. Pasifae restaurant again, it of the stunning, built, blue-eyed waiter and the fabulous food. I had the kleftiko this time, and the parent had rabbit stifado: both were gorgeous. Desert was icecream again -- tiramisu icecream -- and a chaser of raki, with sweet pink melon. Raki is damn strong.
Turns out the lady waiter there is from Poland, working in Crete for the summer, and studying German Philology. So I employed one of my three words of Polish to say thank you. ('Thank you', 'yes' and 'okay'. I also have now two words of modern Greek, outside of deciphering the words for various necessities and the menu, 'thank you' and 'good evening'. Such a paltry vocabulary. Although in koine I could probably manage half a conversation.)
Monday: I reproduce here verbatim my diary entry of the time.
It's September. Didn't do much today. Swam, checked LJ in the little bar with internets: turns out I have a poem up in Ideomancer. And you know what? It's not a bad poem. It might even be pretty good.
I'm tired of being away from home. It's a good thing we're spending all day tomorrow out at Herakleion and Knossos, and probably trying to get to Lato on Wednesday or Thursday. I'm not good at doing nothing, and nothing, it seems, is most of what I'm good for in this heat, without a specific goal.
And god, I'm lonely for the company of people who are not the parent, and worried about my grandmother. She's in hospital right now, you see, having her meds adjusted to try to correct an irregularity in her heart, and having her bowels examined. (The parent keeps getting descriptive texts of the goings-on. Some of them are actually pretty funny, but I worry.)
I am now the proud owner of a black muscle tee with a Greek design on the front. Finally, a sleeveless tee, as the temperature descends at last below thirty. Occasionally.
High winds, too, four and five Beaufort.
We walked around the town at lunchtime, to get something to eat. There was a cruise liner standing in out in the bay, the Queen Victoria out of Southampton. Her launches were disgorging flabby hoards of middle-aged upper middle-class types into buses, with practically the entire wharf roped off with security and ship's officers in starched white and a bit of ridiculous braid directing passengers. A couple of lads from the Crete Coast Guard, in combat trousers and black tactical vests were there to look on, too. Probably to make sure no one got drowned where Agios Nikolaos harbour authority might be liable.
I have to say, I wouldn't want to be a watch-standing officer on a liner. Much less an engineer. Can you imagine the shit you'd have to deal with if the electrical plant, or grey-water reclamation, or the heads, hiccupped? Much less, because the paying customers want the romance of an ocean liner, having to wear starched dress whites and ridiculous braid and play public face half the time.
But it looked like quite an operation, I have to say.
Tuesday, with Heraklion, Rocca al Mare, and Knossos, soon to follow.
I will put a picture of the fluffy-tailed marmalade cat up soon.
