Our House

Our house is about eight by twenty five feet, a little wider at the back. The ceilings are about twelve feet high. The backgammon players drink coffee at a cafenio in the next building, essentially in the next room. Across the street is a baker who makes large decorated cakes for special occasions, of which there are many in Greek life. Your birthday is not as important as your saint's name day, and you celebrate with everyone else with the same name. Next to the cafenio is a potter; down the other way, there is a weaver, across from Steki, our favorite place to eat and hang out. There are a couple of T-shirt shops, a shop with olive-wood bowls and utensils, yet another cafenio (cafe'), and several other houses, all in about one hundred feet of our little street, which is also about eight feet wide. There is a scooter across the way that has been there for years, apparently, in a pretty arched niche in the wall.

Sunday Walking Around

I wandered around the backstreets today with a camera. I will eventually get tired of ruins juxtaposed with newer buildings, but I’m not there yet. I saw archaeological excavations of Minoan structures, marked for the levels in the ground. The city was called Kidonia before the Venetians came and renamed it La Canea. I saw old monasteries. I saw a lot of partial buildings joined to other buildings. It is a little hard to conceive of so much history all in one place, coming from an area where the visible history is less than three hundred years. There are many pieces of wall with windows enclosing nothing but air and vines. (There are lovely Morning Glories blooming cascading blue down the walls.) A sign on a ruined monastery advertised rooms to rent, with bath and kitchen. The rooms were actually located in a building that was behind the roofless stone walls and gaping arched windows, which I saw only after I did the double take.

I saw minarets and old churches; Byzantine arched buildings under restoration; scrollwork wrought iron doors and balconies; blooming bougainvillea and hibiscus; what looks like poppy buds except the leaves are wrong; geraniums; ripening oranges, plums, lemons, pomegranates, roses, olives, morning glories, several varieties of palm, grapes and another vine. There is not a lot of green space in the old city, but there are a couple of small parks farther back from the harbor.

Saturday,October 25

We had a wonderful fish soup at Steki tonight. It was a special request of a regular customer who is going back to Denmark soon, and we got to share it. The broth is a sort of AvgoLemono and comes with a tray of fish and vegetables, which you then add to the broth as you please. I found the recipe in a Cretan cookbook; when we went back to buy it later, the shop was closed. I will try again; this food is really good. We were offered ice-cream for dessert, also not something they usually have. Johnny warned us that it was not fresh but frozen, and that it was served cold… We split a dish among three of us.

Camilla and Hazel were at Steki on their way to a disco party. Camilla had told us about her costume earlier, and we got to see it first hand. She is Danish and works in a jewelry shop, but is going to Denmark on Thursday. She was wearing white knee-high boots with platform soles and very high heels, over white knee socks that formed a cuff at the top. Her dress was a referee-striped halter with a fitted long bodice and a skirt about 8” long from the hip; she also wore a lacy petticoat, which extended the hem length another four inches. The dress had in its breast pocket a red card for handing out to reject a prospective suitor. Johnny made sure she also had a yellow one in case she wanted to say maybe. I don’t think she had any in green.

What We Did in Crete

Last night, three of us sat on the doorstep with our laptops, and provoked a chuckle from the neighbors. They felt better when we told them we were working and sending messages to our children; they are not keen on computer games, I think. It would have been a great photo: “What I did in Crete”. Sometimes we can get a wireless signal in the house, sometimes not. This time, we found it on the doorstep.

Smoking seems like a national pastime. Our teachers all smoke. Sometimes we have to get up and shut the classroom door, form, though they don’t smoke in the classroom, the office is right next door, or the balcony, and they don’t think about how the smoke travels. All of us students are bothered by it, but what can you do? There is often smoking at the next table when we eat. It really is everywhere. Our sheets and towels smell of cigarette smoke. We are glad to have the chance at a lot of fresh air between sessions. It will get harder as we shut the doors and windows, of course.