Rethimnon's old town is more-or-less like any old town I know, most of all like Tallinn, except that it's sunny, the stones are brown rather than grey, and the inscriptions left by previous invaders, rapers and pillagers are in Turkish rather than Swedish ...

I find a total of one eating place open there; I do indeed find the folk-life museum, but none of the people I ask in the neighbouring shops or flats seemed to think it's a sensible question to ask when it might be open, nor do they know which the other museums are that are marked on my map.

Still, I do happen to see a place which is being cleaned and, thanks perhaps to language difficulties imagined by the young cleaning lady, am able to have a good snoop round without putting myself in a position of being denied entry; it was supposedly built as a Venetian chapel in the 16th century, converted to a mosque in the 18th, and now used as a 'conservatory' - I gather they mean a concert hall. Of course I don't know anything about these things, but the basic concept of its unfinished domed brick vaultings feels more Byzantine Orthodox than Italian Catholic to me ...

I suspect that the cleaning lady feels distinctly uncomfortable at my being there, but I know I'm doing no actual harm and will be soon gone, so I avoid catching her eye and leave her to express her fears by shouting at her two-year old daughter to tell her she's doing something wrong instead, daughter is equally harmless of course, but has the disadvantage of being 'family' rather than a stranger ...