An urban hunter

I spend a bit of the morning wandering round Sitia harbour; it's sunny for the first time in four days, though still not hot.

Brightly-coloured fishing boats like you see on the postcards do indeed exist - about 1 in 10 of all the boats there, all cheek-by-jowl with modern power-boats, and only 100m away from a freighter and a naval gunboat polluting the air with large quantities of bad diesel fumes.

click for a larger view!

An old lady is knocking dates out of the 'tourist' palm-trees with a long-handled broom - it's interesting to note that, the fact that they are so obviously there just for decoration would stop me from 'using' them, but that the old lady evidently has no such inhibition.

It's also interesting that it doesn't feel at all like an option for me to offer to reach the dates which are too high for her, even though I'm twice as tall as she and it would at least double her harvest ...

click for a larger view!

A little while later I see her sitting on a bench with an equally old man - since it's Greece, I guess it's her husband - enjoying the fruits of her 'scrumping', as we called it when I was little.

I'd slept badly that night for two reasons: one was that I'd been nearly at the end of the book and couldn't put it down; the other was that in the middle of the night there was some kind of a row going on across the corridor, a man berating a woman, she sobbing in 'victim' mode; I went down to the reception in the end, he said he would ring. What do you do as a visitor in a foreign country, even if you think her eyes look unnaturally dark round the rims next morning?