It’s odd. When I was a child I used to hate writing about what I did on my holidays. If I wanted someone to know I could tell them, why would I want to tell the teacher or the whole class. And now I’m happy to put this on the Internet. I think this is because nothing on the Internet is real.
My week in Crete started off bad and then got better. I landed just after some of the worse storms they’ve had in decades, and on my first night I was woken up by an earthquake. For the locals this was just a normal small tremor, but this was my first earthquake and any earthquake is terrifying. After a few days the weather returned to normal, and normal for Crete in October is very nice. It also took a few days for the beaches to be cleared of what I thought was bamboo. It turns out this was the remains of the reeds that grow wild. The only things on the beaches were the stalks, up to two inches thick and as hard and hollow as bamboo.
As well as relaxing on a beach, I did do things. There was a wine tasting, on the side of a hill at Douloufakis Winery followed by what was one of the best meals I had when I was there at Arodamos Stone Grove. If you can reach the village of Dafnes then I’d recommend both. The other good restaurant was Peskesi in Heraklion. It’s popular with tourists so I’d book in advance, but it has a good take on modernised traditional Cretan food.
For culture there was the Palace of Knossos. There’s a free audio tour that explains that a lot of the things you see were made up by the British archaeologist who first excavated it around 1900. The finds from the palace are in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, which shows the rise and fall of the palace culture (mostly by increasing and then decreasing quality of pots and vases). There’s also a lot of Roman statues, but everywhere was occupied by the Romans so we’ve got that at home. I also went to a smaller museum called Museum of Ancient Greek Technology. You can see all of it in half an hour. There’s a lot of interesting gadgets, showing off ancient Greek hydraulics and gearing, but it does gets a bit silly with the arguments that the Greeks invented everything. There’s even a globe they use to try and argue that the ancient Greeks invented Australia.
And I’ve worked out why I’m writing this. This is for me to remember what I did, not an exercise that seemed pointless. I can see that the point was to learn the English language skills needed to document your life. So i suppose it wasn’t as pointless as I thought at the time. And even at the time I learned something useful, if someone asks you about something that is none of their business you can always lie.