My Wake-up Call
A noisy, expensive room here in Rethymno (at least by Turkish standards), but here’s the view of the sunrise reflected in the window of one of the two doors that open onto the balcony about 6:05 this morning. . . .
And here’s the scene from dinner last night— salad and view of bay. . . . .
And the room is only (only!!! Yikes!!!) about $44 a night.
The downside is that this is the main road along the beach, so there’s lots of traffic, including the semi-finals of the Horse’s Ass Olympics—one team on really noisy motor scooters (I think they get extra points for carrying, rather than wearing, their helmets).
The other team is the vapid twenty-something men who have turned their cars into stereo systems, and have the (incredibly) misguided notion that everyone for kilometers around wants to hear the (pretty dreadful—in a line I’ve used before, it sounds like an avalanche with a drummer) sounds (I will not call it music) roaring out their open windows.
I have seen the bumper stickers (they don’t have those over here at all, by the way--) at home that say,
If the music is too loud, you are too old.
But I might amend that to say,
If your manners are that bad, you shouldn’t have a car stereo.
The world over, I think “macho” is the Portuguese word that means “teeny weenie.”
And here’s the scene a few minutes later, straight out over the roofs of the outdoor cafes on the far side of the read.
Bombing Around in the South Hills
So I’m out the door by 6:30, heading up into the hills
south of Rethymno.
The first place I wanted to see was a Minoan necropolis (cemetery), which I thought would look great in the early AM light—and I was right, but I was on the wrong side of the fence, and the gate was locked, so I took off to see some other places I’d marked on the map.
The first was Argiroupoli, a well-thought out destination (well-marked things to see, thoughtful explanations, free W-C) so I spent some time there walking around.
The city was built a top an old Greek city, Lappa,
but they are doing a lot to retain as much of the old sense as they can.
Lots of doors over here have this really great intense, but faded, blue
Here’s the mosaic floor of a Roman bathhouse,
Cool, but a Visual Nightmare
I realize this may be the worst image of the whole trip— power lines, bad light--- but here’s the cool part. This is someone’s outdoor cooker, across the street from his house, and standing there you can look down a pretty steep canyon through some olive groves to a small river.
Pretty nice.
But the really cool part is the two antiquities he has just kind of sitting there— how many of you have segments of the tops of two Roman columns on your Weber?
Well, Well, Well
This is the old town well—the town backed the right side once, anyway, in one of the Roman civil wars, and the payoff was that they got a well dug and cisterns built, and you know the Romans were engineers more than almost anything else—the arch is a Roman invention, for example, and aqueducts. . . .
And the system is still in use and still works.
This is the historic place where people got their water.
Really Good Loot
They'll Go on my Weber
When I was walking around the town, I noticed that lots of people, especially up in the older part of the village, up high, were working on some remodeling projects of various sizes, which was nice to see.
Some of the places up there could have used a D-8 Cat although the archway up into that part of town, up where the mosaics were, was way too small for anything much bigger than a Bobcat front-loader.
Anyway, up next to one of the little dumpsters like they have all over both places (Turkey and Crete) I’ve been this summer (actually over much of the hill), was a pile of construction rubble and busted stone and old cement and wood and wire--- you know the drill.
Some of what looked like some pretty old stone, and other places where a bucket-full (or several) of the modern corrugated-brick building blocks they use here instead of cement blocks had been dumped (Lord, is he ever getting to the point?), I scored a couple of really cool things.
They are just old-looking (not as old as me, I’d guess, although that’s now getting up there pretty good) shards from terra cotta garden pots, but they look really old, and that’s the cool part.
Here they are.
And I certainly plan on pretending, when I get home, that they are old, although I really know they aren’t.
If I thought they were old, I would have taken them to the local officials, but I figure the homeowner knows better about what he cleaned up out of his yard and building project than I do.
Smell That? Smell What?
Back when I smoked, I used to get really bad colds, several a year, and so lived for about a week during each cold on Afrin, which I’d shoot up my beak whenever I couldn’t breathe. About every 20 minutes.
You may remember when I was teaching, even though I hadn’t smoked for awhile, still getting bad colds and snorting the stuff in class. Terrible manners on my part. . . . Sorry about that.
And Afrin is something like 2% hydrochloric acid, which is why it works, but consequently, I can hardly smell anything. Sometimes a blessing, not always.
But the sage and oregano they grow around here is so concentrated, and so extra pungent, that I could smell the fields of it as I drove by in the early-morning still air.
So I can imagine what a person whose nose worked normally (or even just worked) would experience over here.
Quite a delight, I’d guess.
Lost and Found
And I was going back and forth between all these little places, doubling back (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and one of the times I wound up back in the same place again just after I’d left it) I noticed something on the side of the road I hadn’t seen either of the other two or three times I’d gone down the same little stretch of road.
There was what looked like a small, very furry animal (we’ll just say “sleeping”) between the edge of the pavement and the start of the weeds, but there was no real animal form to it, so I turned around and went back (on purpose this time) and it was a bunch of wool (hair— whatever you call it) that had been kind of sloughed off a goat.
And up the road a little more, there was a little more, and the same thing a third time, so I have some pretty cool real stuff to bring home: about a softball’s worth of goat hair when I get it squeezed into as small a space as I can squeeze it.
Ankara’s Original Claim to Fame
By the way, in a flashback to the Turkey trip, and I know some of you crafts-people know this, before Ataturk picked Ankara to be the capital of the new Turkish Republic (for a break with the old, sleepy, graft-driven, somnambulant Istanbul), Ankara’s only claim to fame was the quality of the hair of the special goats they had bred there for centuries— Ankara goats, which got westernized into “Angora goats.”
Rock Tombs
I saw lots of rock tombs in Turkey— mostly Lydian, as I remember, but these
are Minoan, the people who ran the island between 4,000 and 3150 years ago.
And these (back at the place I’d started at this AM but was locked)
are also Minoan, but are cut into some pretty hard rock, by the way, so I expect these were not for everyone. . . .
This is a lovely spot; it’s now an orchard, olive trees everywhere, and lots of birds making lots of music as the morning turned to afternoon and it got hotter and hotter.
Step Right Up---
Special Prices Today on Little Roadside Shrines
And up the road from where I saw the wool, there was a pretty good-sized construction yard, where you could buy cement and lumber and all that, at both the residential and commercial level, but they also had a big supply of the little road-side shrines—
People put these up where people died in accidents, or where they didn’t die, so it was clearly due to the inter-cession of some saint, and there’s icons in there, and olive oil, and wicks, and wick-holders, and lighters, and pictures of the gruesomely departed or miraculously saved.
Some look like houses, but most look like churches, and they are pretty solid (they have to withstand weather, of course) and made of some ceramic, I guess, or some ceramic-cement mixture---
I went into in the supply yard to see what the little doofers cost--- and was amazed to learn they cost almost $1,000 for the smallest ones.
This one is an older one, but you get the idea— the whole thing’s maybe five feet tall, and about 12-15 inches square.
Water and Light
Finally, last night, I was down by the shore (there’s a 15-foot seawall, but a few sets of stairs, too) and the sun was going down around the point to the west, so I walked out on the rocks where the tide was coming in (although the seawall was in the shadow of the Venetian Fortress, the sunlight was still hitting the rocks fifty feet or so north of the wall) to see if I could get some surging-tide-hitting-the-rocks-in-the-dying-light pictures.
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