22/4 - Moni Arkadiou
Sheep tethered to pithos at the place where we'd stayed the night
Moni Arkadiou was a pretty 16th century monastery where in 1866, Greeks fighting during an uprising supposedly blew themselves up, together with many Turks. The guidebook had a discusssion of this event which talked about the "accepted version of events". It seems they're suspicious as well.
I saw at Moni Arkadiou the first cock car I'd ever seen outside of a city.
My namesake
Inside church
Silver icon
Easter altar, decked with garlands
Icons
Moni Arkadiou was the best monastery of all - flash photography was allowed and no admission fee was charged.
Exterior
Courtyard
Tree in courtyard - everyone was snapping a picture of this
Where the Accident happened
Entrance
Church rear
Mist covered landscape
I love it when the clouds swamp the area where you are. It lends the landscape an unreal quality.
Corridor - the previous picture was taken through the door at the end of this
The next stop was the Melidoni Cave. Someone and my brother in law declined to visit the place (the ticket price of €3 was €1 above the latter's reservation price) and sat at the cafe enjoying a very good vanilla milkshake (which they declined to buy for me when I exited or even tell me about until we had left the place). The old man at the ticket booth said I was the first person from Singapore to visit the cave.
Wrong cave entrance
I was wondering why the ascent was so hard, and why there were plants on the path. Then when I reached the top I realised it was the wrong cave. Gah.
Wrong cave - Ascent
Right cave
Descent
Stalactites
Memorial to some Greeks who were suffocated alive by the Turks in this cave
Stalactites
When we reached Rethymnon, we found that the Venetian fortress had closed earlier that day due to it being Easter Saturday. We did have very good shrimp saganaki for lunch, though. Normal saganaki is basically a slab of fried (mild) cheese, served with the ubiquitous wedge of lemon. This shrimp saganaki, though, had shrimp in a tomato sauce. The shrimps were as fresh as those you'd get in har gao in top quality dimsum restaurants.
We then drove some more, to the town of Chania. At dinner, a Greek family was singing happy birthday to a young boy. The curious thing was that they sang the birthday song in English. Maybe it has no Greek translation. Or maybe they're bringing up their little boy to be a Global Citizen.
Yucky food - sea urchins and "Mountain Grass Salad"
Luckily my brother-in-law finished the latter, and someone and he mopped up the former, which tasted like slime. The latter was literally mountain grass - totally unpalatable.
Like all Greek restaurants, the taverna in Chania where we had dinner provided vinegar with the meal, for us to dip our bread in. Unlike the others, at this one the red wine vinegar tasted more like wine than vinegar. I've heard of wine turning to vinegar, but this is the first time I've heard of the reverse. My brother in law suggested this was a way to smuggle wine into the country, since the vinegar at another table tasted similarly foul, but then wine is so cheap there I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.
At night, someone was being difficult and refused to allow me to turn on the air con. Normally I'd have no objection to that, but we also couldn't open the door to the room since we were afraid outsiders would come in and steal our electronics as we slept. There were also no windows - even the toilet window had been bricked up. So we had to sleep in an enclosed room with no ventilation. Naturally it soon became hot and stuffy after someone and my brother-in-law went to sleep. I couldn't take it and had to sleep on a towel on the floor beside the door so I could get some (cool) air. This, considering that I was attempting the 16km length of the Samaria gorge the next day. My brother in law always complains I pay little when I go on holiday with them, but that's because I have to sleep on the floor, do saikang, always go down and ask for directions and more. Meanwhile someone pays nothing at all and does the least, so my brother in law, who pays the most and drives, is getting a really raw deal.
Someone tells me that the Interrail pass, at least in the past, allowed the bearers only to travel on the slow trains - stoptreins and those slightly faster than those. Interrail pass holders could not travel on Eurocity and Intercity trains. But then at that time Europeans were also eligible to purchase Eurail passes (now they're not), so. The current Interrail doesn't seem to be so crippled.
Besides Chinese restaurants, it's hard to find other types of restaurants, period, in Greece outside Athens. I saw a few pizzerias, and some places (catering to tourists) served English Breakfasts, schnitzel and pasta. Someone says this is because Greeks, like Italians, only know how to eat their own ethnic food.
There's a non-negligible number of cars driving around without license plates in Crete. Hell, I even saw at least one in Athens.
Greek keyboards are sensible. Instead of rearranging the letters so non-Greeks get confused (like the Germans do) they overlay the Greek letters above existing ones, so Greeks and non-Greeks can happily co-exist.