The weekend and Monday were the hardest three days of the whole trip, and Monday was by far the most demanding.
The weekend, as you read in the report just below this one, was spent in Istanbul, spending 16 hours bombing around the town, mostly by foot, sometimes on the tram, with four trans-continental (cool, huh) boat rides, and a couple of bus rides in the heat.
Monday was a tough travel day, the most demanding day of the trip so far, and coming on top of the heat and enervation of the weekend, a real trial.
Took a cab to the cross-Bosporus catamaran, then rode the boat to near the airport, then took a cab to the airport. No big deal. Except all the stuff from the car, much of which had stayed in the car overnight when I was in sleeping, was now jammed into the four bags and I was, of course, having to tote all four barges and lift all four bales all at once.
Charles Atlas--- Here I Am
I just now (Thursday AM) mailed the gym bag home full of loot, and I need to share with you that I was really feeling my age, having to lift and heave and lug (must be where the word “luggage” comes from) the damn thing around, thinking it weighed maybe 40 pounds or so--- it’s the one with all the gifts in it.
And when I have the luxury of two trips, such as when changing hotels in Iraklion or loading the car from the second hotel, I’d put the big backpack on normally, then put the gym bag across my shoulders, and really feeling the weight, thinking I was getting pretty weak and feeble. . . .
Certainly feeling weak and feeble.
Well, I might well be getting weak and feeble, but no bully better try to kick sand in my face at the beach when I am with some cutie, because I just hit the local post office to mail the thing home, to get rid of it, to make traveling lots (read LOTS) less difficult logistically, and the gym bag didn’t weigh 40 pounds, it weighed 40 kilos! That’s about 88 pounds!!!
Jack LaLanne has met his match!!!! Boy—some old guy throwing (well, hoisting, carrying, and pretty awkwardly at that) 88 pounds of gifts across his shoulders. . . .
But still--- 88 lbs!
Hah!
And now, to return to the program in progress. . . . .
And they don’t make you take off your shoes in the security lines over here, but they do insist on the belt, and I’ve lost about 10-12 pounds, I’d guess, and the image of a guy almost 70 standing in an airport with 50+ pounds of gear and his pants around his ankles does not bear even thinking about.
And there were five different security lines to go through. Two in Istanbul and three in Athens. I think there were five, although it might only (only???) have been four. A pain in the drain in either case.
So I got to Crete, after a four-hour layover that stretched to almost five, then flew south across the Mediterranean, turned right at the north coast of Crete, and landed.
Beverly Hills
I’d chosen the left-side window, so could look at the north coast as we turned east to land, and it looked something like Beverly Hills if it was moved to a poor country. There were hotel compounds, clearly fenced off from the rest of the area, full of tennis courts and bright-blue twinkling swimming pools, and up in the hills across the main coast road, which I’ll be heading east on in a couple of weeks or so, the unmistakable shapes of multi-cul-de-sac housing enclaves— gated, it’s my guess.
The rental car wasn’t ready, which I engineered to be OK, as I didn’t need the damn thing in town and I was going to take it easy for a couple of days and recuperate, so I took a cab to town, got a place to stay (more costly than Turkey, that’s for sure— about $30 for what I’d expect to pay 30 Lira (about $18) for in Turkey.
And I rested and I bombed around town.
I went into a bookstore to get a Crete travel book—books are pretty expensive over here: one travel guide was almost $40—would be about half that at home.
Greek Treasures at the Archaeology Museum
One of the chief differences so far between Turkey and Greece is that Greek women have bosoms and cleavage and some great (volleyball) butts and even waists—here’s a prime exhibit at the Archaeology Museum
that I snuck a shot of from the hip---
I mean Turkish women may have all those qualities, but under (apparently) many layers of clothing. . . . . but even after just a couple of days here in Greece, I can rejoice in the freedom these women have to dress like this. . . .
There were other wonderful things to admire in the museum as well— although the place is all-but closed for a major renovation, and only a small part of their extensive collection, including all the really good Minoan stuff from Knossos (just down the road) is on display.
Zorba Was Here
I was talking to the woman who ran the bookstore— trying to shift from Turkish to Greek—and there was a sound system in the place and the music was the theme from Zorba, the Greek.
It was filmed here, the last scene on the coast west of where I am now, and the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, was born here in the town (Iraklion) where I am, and he’s buried here, but they didn’t like him much when he was alive, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lambasted the middle-class pretentiousness and jingoistic snobbishness and ignorant arrogance of the upper mid-west, based on Minnesota mostly, and now has theaters (the Prairie Home Companion’s home stage is the Fitzgerald theater), and film festivals, and arts festivals, and performance centers named for him.
Well, they hated Kazantzakis enough here that the church (don’t get me started here on the political connivings of the publicly pious) ex-communicated him, then did a bunch of back-room politicking to deny him the Nobel Prize. Hypocrites. Bastards. And with the succession of fascist governments in the 70s and 80s in Greece, he didn’t even live her the last quarter or third of his life.
Much like Mozart— if you go to Salzburg, in the western part of Austria, all you will hear about is either Mozart or The Sound of Music. But as soon as Mozart could, he was out of there (about age 7, I think— had the original stage father, by the way) and never came back again as I remember.
The Adventure by Bus
So I walked around and rested and went out and walked around some more, and decided at the far end of a “lost-again” walk to take the bus back to the center of town.
So here’s a bunch of guys sitting around a café in the heat of the afternoon, and one of them directs me to the local mini-mart— maybe the size of a VW camper— and I buy a bus ticket and then the guy makes sure I’m standing at the right place around the corner to catch the bus.
And the bus comes, past the café first, then turns the corner to get to me, and I see the guy coming around the corner motioning to me that this is the right bus and I should be on it. Pretty nice.
And the bus driver has a knob on the steering wheel, what we called in high school a necking knob, because if you had one, you could steer with one hand and perform some complicated but delicate (at first, anyway) gropings with your right hand on whatever willing damsel chose to sit right next to you in the car. . . .
Political Graffiti
There was some graffiti in Istanbul (some of which attracted Kim visually, but with my cop background, it was really hard for me to got past the vandalism to the visual quality of it) but I hardly saw any (or didn’t notice any) in the rest of Turkey, except in Iznik (Nicea).
Not so here.
I have hardly seen a building (including churches) without (pretty apparently political) slogans all over them, but I thought this one, in English, obviously, was worth sharing.
Wednesday AM, I took the bus out to the airport, got the rental car, and then spent about an hour fighting my way through the traffic (Iraklion is the capital of Crete and has about 160,000 people in it and during the time I was coming back from the airport to the hotel they were apparently all in their cars in the center of town) and trying to learn where I was, then trying to get where I was going, befuddled (betrayed may be closer) by one-way streets and all that.
But I finally got on the road, and am now about 40 Km from Iraklion, up in the hills, looking for Minoan sites.
Minoans
The Minoans were the dominant group, from 2,000 BCE until about the time of the Trojan War (1250 BCE) when they got pretty much wiped out by earthquakes and Tsunamis.
There’s even some scholarship that suggests that the same earthquakes and resulting tsunamis are what brought Troy down-
Gee, Dad— you mean they made up the business about the horse?
Yes, son, and a great deal more than that. . . .
So the Minoans lived here twice as long ago as when we re-set our calendars.
Tylisos
Here are some pictures of a place I visited today---
Three pretty good-sized houses, although (once again) the rooms in these places seemed really teeny.
I put my hat and camera case (a 128-tape-cassette carrying bag) in the picture to give you a sense of scale.
This is the entrance to one of the three houses I saw today
I could really sense that actual people lived here, raising their families, grieving losses, celebrating birthdays, struggling, conquering--- just what we all do—
And they walked into these hallways and into these rooms and sat down and had dinner and visited and tried to get along.
The more I travel the more I think we all face the same storms, internal and external, and we are far more alike than we are different, but the ways that make us different are very interesting.
Enervation
It’s now about 8 PM on Thursday PM (10 AM for you at home—just add two hours and switch to the other half of the 24-hour clock) and it’s just now cooling off to where I could be out in it again.
I’ve been heading out early, toughing out the heat and the travel and the new language and all that as much as I can, then finding a place and hunkering down for the afternoon, thinking when it cools off, I’ll go back out.
But sometimes, I’m so tired and it’s still too hot out, and I don’t get back out, even though that was the plan.
I’m at the coast right now, and it’s cooler, but I’m pretty much shot, and I’m thinking I did the trip backwards. Spring was late in Turkey this year by about two-and-a-half to three weeks, and I might better have planned it coming here to Crete first, then heading NE to Turkey.
But one of Robert’s Rules is that it’s not always what you know, it’s when you know it. . . . .
So here I am trying to wring the most out of it that I can.
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