Current time in my woods
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As I said before, we’ve spend a day in the capital of Crete - Heraklion. All morning was dedicated to the Knossos and his invisible Labyrinth and the rest of the time we just wandered around the marine, the old town, browsed through the exotic goodies at the market and attempted to find an archaeological museum. It is listed in every guide, but in reality we didn’t manage to find the entrance into it…as if the whole museum existence was just a myth…
I have to say: despite of Heraklion casted out by the mainstream crowd of the tourists as a place of less interest compare to the other gems of Crete, personally I found it to be quite nice. And maybe you have to drive out of city for a while until you’ll reach first beaches, but for a crazy tourist type like me, the beaches weren’t on the top list of my priorities and as for history and general feeling of the island, Heraklion was just as good as any other city there. It is also the largest city on the island. Although the old town and old Venetian harbour don’t take too much time to explore. I liked the old Venetian harbour and the fortress. The fortress (Castello del Molo) is very photogenic and looks like a perfect set for a pirate movie…there is something very romantic in her unpretentious design on the backdrop of Mediterranean azure…also later I’ve learned that Heraklion was founded by the Saracens and in Vizantian times served as pirates base indeed.
We visited the fortress, we strolled a bit along the pier with the ambitious idea to reach the end of it but turned back at about one third of a walk - it was too hot and we’ve been too lazy and the waves were playful and beautiful so that it was almost impossible to take your eyes of them. We sat for a while in a shade of the fortress, watching time goes by and if this is not tranquil, then I don’t know what is…
As I said –it was a hot day. Hot so much that local dogs transmuted into water-dogs
Thanks god we managed to race the heat and be the first in Knossos. We didn’t have compulsory itinerary for the rest of the day, so what we managed to see was entirely random and mostly by accident…the feet took us around the old part of the city – they still have a moat around it and if one follows it, eventually they will come to the place they’ve started.
We’ve seen few interesting places along our way, but mostly we’ve been lucky to see the “away from the touristy crowd” life, the real life of Crete. We’ve learn few things about Cretan Special Features on this first day, which later we would come across again and again to realise it is not a single peculiarity, but the way of life on this island.
Take, for example…a pavement. The random absence of it, to be precise. As our 7 Cretan days went by more and more certain we become that Cretans do not have any concept of pedestrian pavement. Not that they haven’t got it, because they have. They use the pavement for anything but not the walking on it. They park their cars there, put out tables of a street café, and often they build their pavements in discontinuous manner. Imagine you walk along the street, completely unaware, at your own happy tourist pace, feeling safe and comfortable and suddenly…the pavement you’ve been walking on, ends. The street – doesn’t. So you look around and notice the pavement on the other side of the road. OK, you cross the road and carry on walking…and just when you feel you are safe, there is no more a pavement to wander on…this was the case for every city we’ve been on Crete. There was no consistency in the pavement’s presence. They were built for the sake of having them, not for walking on them. That was little funny part of my observations. We had few more of such in the course of our travel – all in their own time…
And more of Heraklion to share:
More to come...
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