Last day in Crete

Not much going on this morning – just packing, eating leftover baklava, and attempting to reheat our leftovers in the bright sun. That last one only worked ok for one of the dishes from last night…the other one tasted terrible lukewarm so we didn’t eat it. Oh well. Then we headed to the bus station and arrived in Heraklion a few hours later. Thankfully, our hotel this time is much better, with excellent AC and a nice bathroom (although again, no shower curtain). I’m a bit mad at myself that I didn’t book this one before, but can’t do anything about it now. I guess I just know which to avoid for next time.

After we were done marveling at our luck in rooms we headed back to the Four Lions Square to do a very important thing – eat more gyros. These are definitely the best we’ve tried in Crete! And then we bought more pastries for tomorrow morning, and a European coke to test against American coke when we get home (we suspect the one here has real sugar). Mmm food. After a bit of waiting we were picked up by Kostas to go for coffee (ie 2-hr chat), and he also picked up another greek girl who was very nice. Again they told us the place we were going was very near but it ended up being about 20 minutes away. No matter, it was riiiight on the water – any closer and you would be wet. Pretty cool! It seems that they don’t really care if the drinks are overpriced or touristy as long as it has a nice view. Kind of interesting. But more than that it was time for some good conversation, about politics and Crete life and a lot of things. The unfortunate part is that Kostas has to stay on the army base tonight so he can’t drive us to the airport tomorrow morning…foo. So I guess we are braving the busses once more. I hope it works. In lieu of that, the afternoon ‘coffee’ (Peter got a milkshake and I got a chocolate drink haha) was really scenic and very nice. I really do hope I get to come back again sometime when Kostas is not in the army. I do want to see Santorini someday, and maybe some other islands, so perhaps making a stop in Crete will be possible. As they say, Crete is the best island as far as they are convinced! Not only is it the only island that brews raki, which is of dubious importance to me, but they also are the only ones (they say) that bring dessert and raki with the check as a gesture of hospitality. It’s definitely won a permanent place of honor with me and hopefully I can convince Peter to come back as well. =)

After that we weren’t very hungry but tried to follow some of Kostas’ recommendations all the same. I was enticed by the idea of a nice last meal but when I told the waiter that we weren’t going to be ordering very much, he told us that would be a problem. So we left. He had plenty of open tables, so I guess he was just being a jerk for his own sake. Kind of a put off, but we went to Ismir Kebap again and got delicious cheap pitas anyway so it wasn’t really our loss. Not exactly the ideal notion of a last night on vacation but it works!

Now we have printed out some of our boarding passes (but not all, grrrr BA) and will be waking up all too soon to do the final final packing and ship out. I’m not too excited about our three-connection day of travel but at least we don’t have to navigate any (outer-airport) metro systems. Hopefully all goes well…by the next update we should be in the states again!