Iraklion
 

 
 

Iraklion, Day 2


Our day today was spent just exploring the city. I came to really like it (if they could get rid of the punk kids). The central square was buzzing with cafes and restaurants, and there were tons of shops and such. We had some drinks, we had some snacks, we had a really really good olive paste with the bread course at the place where we had lunch.

 
Lin-Wei always wants to jump
in these things
We also went to the Knossos museum. They had the actual artwork that Evans chiseled off the walls of Knossos here, so that was a bit better. And Lin-Wei wanted me to mention that we'd been there, so that we don't forget 10 years from now, when we re-read this and remember what it was like to travel.



Our final bit of adventure in Heraklion was to visit the tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis, the guy who wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. I was kind of psyched up to see it, mostly so that I could photoshop it and replace Nikos Kazantzakis with Andrew Sapuntzakis. But the grave turned out to be kind of a bust.

 
Here lies Zorba. He was gruff
It was just a white wooden cross on the top of the city wall, with no adornments. But we kinda had to go around some "do not enter" construction tape to get to it. That was quite daring, wouldn't you say?

The venetians built an extremely long breakwater wall to protect the Iraklion harbor, and since we had time to kill today, we walked down a very unreasonable length of it and caught some nice views of the ocean and the city. It was actually pretty astounding how ginormous this thing was.

 
Wall. Long. Iraklion in background.
Soon, our time on Crete was at an end. We hoofed down to our boat, and on the way there we actually saw the foot guy from the Samarian gorge! And he was walking with yet another woman. Nice. On the boat we got seriously better treatment that we would have expected on a "ferry", avoided alcohol and stairs, bid farewell to Crete, ate in the ship's restaurant, and turned in for the night. And dreaded returning to Piraeus.