Shopping and sunset

Slept in today…it is very loud in our room at night because we’re at ground level and have to keep the window open in lieu of having AC. As Kostas said, during the day the little kids play, then at night the big kids ride around on their motorbikes. Wah. Oh well, shouldn’t be a problem after tonight. Also we rewarded ourselves in the morning by going to get loukoumades and the cheese version of boughatsa, which I hadn’t yet tried. The loukoumades were pretty good, if a little cold, but I definitely prefer the cream boughatsa by a lot. Cheese was interesting but more like having some ricotta-derivative for breakfast. At least we tried it! We followed up by going back to the bakery for a few more things…I think by now we have tried most things in there. Yum.

Then we started our day of shopping! Having time to shop is pretty nice. We went up and down the market roads, into some supermarkets, checked out some clothes shops…ended up with a pretty good haul of gifts, clothes (for Peter..I’m still not having a ton of luck), and airplane-secure containers for the olive oil and raki that Kostas brought us. I now have three whole liters of olive oil so I guess I am cooking a lot! I also have 1.5 L of raki, unfortunately, but we’ll find some way to use it up I hope. At least when we’re done with both we will have nice mason jars for things.

For lunch we went to Ismir Kebap (kebap kebap!) and got souvlaki and lamb kebaps… deeeelicious. Peter and I lamented that we would like to continue eating Greek foods while being back at home. I’m just glad he likes the food (not that I really had doubts). Afterwards we went down to the Venetian fort on the harbor to check it out from the inside. I hadn’t realized it was open to the public last time! So we got to enter and it seemed a lot larger from the inside than I would have expected. There wasn’t really any information about the various rooms but it was still pretty cool, although windy enough that it was dangerous in a skirt. Ah well – a sight I haven’t seen, hooray!

I wanted to watch the sunset from the breakers but it was a bit early, so we walked down the ‘mall area’ on the coast. Didn’t find anything good to buy so we just got drinks and sat and watched the world go by, as the Greeks are so good at doing. Us fastpaced Americans only lasted 45 minutes but that was pretty good for just one drink (for us, anyway). Finally it was time for me to change into shorts so we could walk down the pier unflustered. I have to say the repeat experience of walking the whole pier was quite excellent, and although there weren’t any clouds to exaggerate the sunset it was still very nice. Lots of pictures taken also, of course. So relaxing! We then went to the restaurant by the pier that Ismat had taken us to the first night for dinner…ordered lots of things, including prawns and meatballs, and it was pretty good. They were a bit slow and missed bringing us one plate but we were full by that time anyway. A pretty good night in all!

Unfortunately the internet is out completely at the hotel – they’re having lots of issues with it – so we went to the big pedestrian street and used the municipality signal. It’s nice that Iraklion has so much free wifi signal! Having to surf in the presence of some creepy street performers was less than awesome but they went away fairly quickly. I didn’t have the posts ready in time so we just did mail and left it at that. Plus we were very sleepy!