no heat in rooms, a bit cold at night, but not enough to ask for extra blankets; cold tiled floors; everything slightly damp after the rain, no way to dry your socks, certainly no way to dry anything you might think of washing - it's a lot warmer and cosier at home though the temperature is 20° colder!
- there were two exceptions, Georgetown, where I stayed the first night, and the place run by the German kyria, which had a lovely warm radiator, the one night when I got to wash my shirt...

I was able to do Qi Gong every day and sometimes twice, even in the boat cabin :-) I thought I was dependent on Jenny's battery to play the CD, but I worked out how to do it without too ...

click for a larger view!

after a while I began to feel that everything on Crete is the same dead stones - whether it's the classical archeological sites, the Venetian fortresses, the natural scenery, or the skeletons of the new houses they're building

I was surprised at the way they had handled the classical archeological sites; I knew that Knossos was the only one that was reconstructed, but somehow I had still expected there to be some sense of being in a place, and a place where something had happened, like there is at Old Sarum or Hadrian's Wall, not to mention the mediaeval church where I spend all my summers; but NOTHING ... The signposted "Roman Villa" at Ierapetra was just a few stones fenced in; and the museum in Sitia felt like a random collection of bits of broken pots, some of them attractive enough as objects, but with nothing to show any context, and not even anything in writing to tell you anything about them, just the name of the place it came from and the museum's catalogue number ...

what would your reaction be to seeing a signpost pointing to a "Traditional Cretan Village" - ? Mine was to steer in the opposite direction; but the one nice evening I had in a traditional Cretan atmosphere was actually in a place that was signposted like that! I was sent there by the German kyria in Kamilari as the best place to eat ...

somehow I was puzzled by one contrast; I seemed to be in a culture where the ambient attitude, to many everyday things like driving, parking, crossing the street, and keeping animals, was relaxed, if not nonchalant; while at the same time you never see any female citizens between the ages of 17 and 65, and the atmosphere in the churches I can only describe as heavily repressive ...

remarkable that, even the most isolated chapel, in a place where you would only be if you intended going in, there are loudspeakers outside the door, presumably to transmit to the outside world the audible content of what goes on inside ... fascinating, and perhaps telling, that the dangerously-powerful amplifier is under the control of the priesthood, hidden - like the priests themselves - within their inner sanctum, rather than at the back of the congregation in the hands of a sexton as it is in Sweden ...

the first three days were sunny though not exactly hot; the last seven were rainy though not exactly cold. But the hail, thunder, lightning and cancelled ferries weren't exactly what I'd been led to expect.

I had the impression I was 20 years too late to see any authentic Cretan life; and 2000 years too late to see any fertile cultivation, or indeed anything that could really support life ...

sun-heated water: there's a combination of solar-panel and water tank on just about every roof: to the visitor from western Europe, an optimistic sign of ecological awareness; to the local inhabitant, a simple survival necessity.