Last Day in Crete

Our plane didn’t leave until 9PM that night, so we spent the day in Heraklio. The most notable thing about that day was going to the archaeological museum. Actually, it was just a small exhibit of some of the more important artifacts—the entire museum was closed for renovations, and that contains tens of thousands of artifacts from ruins like the ones we visited all over the island. Still, I got to see the Phaistos disc (BIG deal for me) along with some other neat stuff:

The Phaistos Disc is a Minoan artifact found in Phaistos, one of the palaces I visited. It's estimated to be about four thousand years old. It's a disc of fired clay with symbols punched into it in a spiral pattern, and it's special because it's the first known example of an actual typeface--it was made by pressing pre-made stamps into the clay. It's never been translated.

Epic Bike Ride to Argyropoulis

Our last full day in Crete, MJ and I stayed in Rethymno. We wanted to take a day trip to Argyropoulis, a town in the mountains that supposedly had some stunning springs and Roman and Venetian ruins. But the buses weren’t running on the weekend. So we decided to bike.

This was crazy for two reasons. One, while Rethymno is on the coast, Argyropoulis is in the hills—and the hills are enormous. Two, it was also about 23 kilometers away. Still, we were feeling like some exercise—at least I was; I’m not sure how enthused MJ was about this even though he suggested it—so we rented bikes.

On the Importance of Speaking Greek in Greece

Knowing the native language in the country you’re visiting goes a long way.

I usually try to learn the basics: “please,” “thank you,” “hello,” “excuse me,” and “bathroom.” Really, just “Hello” and “thank you” will get you a long way. When I greeted the man selling tickets to Phaistos in Greek, he smiled and gave me an orange. When I talked to the lady minding the door, she let me take my sandwich into the ruins—even though it was officially not allowed. Knowing a tiny amount of Greek words got me free raki shots in restaurants as well as curious questions about where I was from. It made the locals much friendlier—and made me think about how annoying it must be to have people continually walking up to you and nattering on in a language that isn’t yours, blithely assuming that you’ll understand.

Chania

We also explored the old town of Chania. Chania is gorgeous—it’s a port city with winding cobblestone streets, narrow alleys festooned with blooming flowery vines, and picturesque little shops and restaurants. I’m pretty sure that I want to own an apartment here someday.

Beach Days

Next we went to Elefonysis Beach. Elefonysis is a series of islets that becomes an isthmus at low tide, with beaches on both sides and a shallow lagune with crystal-clear waters. We rented beach seats under an umbrella, passed out in the shade, went swimming and hiked around the islet a bit (I’d read about ancient ruins and was determined to find them, but they stayed hidden).

Samaria Gorge

The next morning, we woke up at 6:30 to hike the Samaria Gorge.

The Samaria Gorge is 16 kilometers long, running from the Cretan highlands to the sea. It's a must-do for hikers, and we discovered that early on--there was a horde of tourists there even as early as we got started. The mountains at the beginning were stunning, and it just got better from there.

Making Our Own Trail

After running around and freaking out like a total nerd over Minoan ruins I'd read about my whole life (I am a huge greek myth geek...did you know that the plane tree next to the Gortys Law Code is supposed to be where Zeus had his affair with Europa? The tree didn't look really old to me, but it was pretty...)

Knossos, Phaistos, Gortys

So the first day in Crete, we got into Heraklio in the morning after an all-night plane ride, then immediately went to Knossos. Knossos is an ancient Minoan palace rumored to be the inspiration for the Greek "labyrinth" myth involving King Minos and the Minotaur, supposedly because the palace itself is extremely complex in design. It's a bit hard to see the complexity still because a lot of the palace is off limits to tourists, but what I did see was stunning.

The next day we were in Phaistos and Gortys, two other important historical sites. Phaistos is another Minoan palace, while Gortys has ruins from the Dorian and Roman periods. Seeing all of those sites close together like this was actually really interesting, because all three were presented in very different ways.

Knossos was first excavated by the archaeologist Arthur Evans in the early 1900s. He built a lot of reproductions on site that archaeologists today see as a bit controversial. As much as I loved the site, I did find myself wondering about whether interesting things I was seeing were "genuine" or rebuilt--I have those feelings no matter how carefully reproductions have been based on archaeological evidence. But still, a large percentage of what you can see at Knossos is original:




This is the oldest known paved road in Europe, older than Roman roads by thousands of years:



Phaistos is another important Minoan site. There were no reproductions there--all the structures were original. What was really cool was that the site was constructed in stages--the Old Palace part, dating from about 2,000 BC, was mostly destroyed a few times before the major reconstruction of 1600 BC--but the old palace facade was excavated along with the new, so you're really looking back in time and seeing multiple layers of history here.







Gortys was neat in a different way. There was a large excavated part that had a gorgeous church and the amazing Laws of Gortys, the earliest law code in Greece which is still in situ at the site. But across the street from that, there's a huge area that's barely been excavated and not restored at all. We weren't allowed to go inside, though we could look at the excavated part from a distance. The small part that was excavated was surrounded by fields full of bricks and rocks from Roman walls. The most interesting thing to me was thinking of how much of the old city was still under our feet.



This is what most of the unexcavated part looked like, although there were still a few standing walls:





At Gortys there was an olive tree that had grown around a broken Roman column and was at least a few thousand years old. The plaque next to it said that it was possible someone had put the column there and the tree had grown around it, or that it had fallen against the tree during the earthquake that supposedly destroyed the town.



I think this is what I always look for when I'm in an old, haunted place like this. I look for signs of the actual people--not the walls, not the statues, not the columns, but the people who were there and what happened to them. The column in the tree is something that evokes a story--a mysterious story, but something real. It's more than I felt at Phaistos (though I walked around looking for it all day) and definitely more than I felt at Knossos, where sometimes I wasn't sure whether I was looking at something real or a reproduction. I always want to feel like the first person to find a place after the people who lived there left. I want to root around in the bones and the ash. Like an archaeologist, I want to bring them all back.

Open Mic Night

I've been teaching myself guitar, and I've got the calluses to prove it. I remember when playing guitar used to hurt. Now, I actually like that bite I feel when pressing the pads of my fingers up against the steel strings. I press them harder to make it sting more. When I haven't played guitar for a few days, my fingers ache to feel it.

The other night, I went to an open mic night at a cafe near MJ's place. When I got there, I found it was really informal--it was just the owner and her friends hanging out and singing each other songs. And I actually did it. I actually played a song, in public, using the owner's guitar. It was a bit hairy--I definitely screwed up a few chords--but I got through it. Hopefully it'll get better from here.

And then I read some poetry. I am a far better poet than I am a musician--so it was the poetry that got me the free drinks. Several glasses of wine later, I collapsed in bed and woke up with a hangover the next morning, my ambitious plans for an early morning gym visit completely shot. The hangover's gone now, but I've been pretty lazy all weekend. Maybe next week, I'll go back.

Skiing in the Netherlands

If you’re going skiing indoors in the Netherlands, here are a few tips.

1. All skiing in the Netherlands is indoors. You'll see why if you ever visit here--the entire country is flat as Kansas.

2. An hour is enough time. Really. No matter how huge the facility is, it’s really just a bunny hill with a roof.

3. Those rope pulls move fast. The one on this slope did not get along with me. It whacked me in the back. It whacked me in the face. It jumped out of my hands when I tried to grab it. Once I went up the entire hill hanging onto it with my hands—harder than it looks. I made it to the top through sheer will.

4. Don’t let the indoor-ness fool you. It is cold in there. They have to keep it above freezing. Both times I’ve gone skiing indoors in the Netherlands, I hadn’t brought my ski clothes—so I’ve had to borrow MJ’s. This time I went skiing in jeans, about six layers of thin sweaters and t-shirts, and MJ’s jacket—which is laughably too big for me, as can be clearly seen in the above photo, in which I imitate a potato with legs.

That’s pretty much it for tips. Other than that, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Let the fun begin!

On Being Far Away

While I’ve been in the Netherlands, a lot has happened. New York City has experienced an earthquake and a hurricane—neither severe, thankfully. My hometown in Vermont, where my parents and sister still live, was hit a bit harder—with massive flooding that tore down beloved landmarks, gouged canyons in the roads, and reshaped the landscape.

Meanwhile, things are peaceful here in the Netherlands. It’s cold and rainy—though we’ve had a few nice days. And I can’t help feeling a bit frustrated with that peace, and at being so far away from events that are affecting people and places I care about.

Oui, Je Parle Francais!

Earlier this week I went to a wedding. The bride was a coworker of MJ’s who spoke French. I wished her congradulations, told her she looked beautiful, then had conversations with some of her friends. When one of them turned to MJ and said “You choose beautiful women” (meaning me), I realized we'd all been speaking French the whole time.

I love the French language. A French person can read from the phone book and make it sound like the most erotic thing ever. Automatic ten sexiness points if you speak French. I figure if I learn the language, I will immediately be a total babe. It won't even matter if my hair is messy or I have an entire four-course meal stuck in my teeth. I am hot and I speak French. Bow DOWN.

Dinan

On the way back to Paris, we stayed a night in Dinan, where Mugambi’s great-grandmother came from. And the old part of Dinan probably looks just like it did when she lived there. We’re talking an entire neighborhood full plaster-and-timber buildings straight out of a Shakespearean movie set, each one at least 500 years old. Usually you’re lucky to see just one or two houses like this, even in European towns with a lot of history. Check this out:

Breton Food

I used to read this fantasy series called Redwall by an Englishman named Brian Jacques. One of the things I loved about this series—other than that all the characters were heavily-anthropomorphized woodland creatures like mice, squirrels, stoats, and weasels—was the descriptions of food. Every chapter or so there would be a feast with a groaning table full of cheeses of every description, flower-scented creams, fluffy white and wheat breads, vegetables in elaborate stews, and sixteen different kinds of beverage including golden ales, brown ales, frothy dark ales, jugs of creamy milk, icy water, and anything else you could imagine drinking. Jacques was effortless at describing the sheer richness of the food—and every feast was different.

St. Thegonnec

Afterwards, we drove to St. Thegonnec, a little town in the heart of “close country.” The distinctive feature of Bretagne’s compact little towns—other than utterly NO urban sprawl, cobblestone streets, ancient-looking houses and creperies and pubs with huge oaky-beamed ceilings and cozy nooks by the fire where you can read a book and drink your weight in cider—is the parish close. Churches (often dating from the 1200’s or 1300’s) are surrounded by a circular wall that encompasses a graveyard, an ossuary (which I think is a kind of mausoleum, but most we saw had been converted to gift shops), and an elaborate edifice called a “calvary.” The calvary is like a huge stone coffin (except twenty times larger than a coffin) carved all over, with towering representations of Christ on the cross on top. It’s really just easier to show you a picture:

Drive to the End of the World

One day that first weekend, MJ and I went jogging by the harbor. I’ve hated to jog my whole life. I’ve usually only made myself do it by convincing myself that I was really going for a walk—I like walks—and then jogging in very brief thirty-second spurts after about five or ten minutes of walking. I hurt my knee a few years ago and that’s been an excuse, too—it hurts when I jog. So I told MJ not to wait for me—I had a feeling I’d be really slow.

Turns out my body surprised me. I started running and just didn’t want to stop. I wasn’t tired. My knee didn’t hurt. And the sea just spread out in front of me and I felt my heart open up. I just wanted to run. We ran all the way around the harbor and back, barely resting, and then jogged into Old Town.

So yeah, jogging is AWESOME. Did you guys...know about this?

The Festival Interceltique Lorient

Our first weekend in Bretagne, we stayed in a town called Concarneau, by the sea, and went to the Festival Interceltique in nearby Lorient. The festival is an enormous week-long celebration of Celtic music, and this year’s theme was Diaspora—so there were Celtic music groups there from all over the world, including Africa.

The parade was a highlight, with lots of bagpipers, marching bands, dancers, and people in traditional dress:

Delft

It was a beautiful day today, so I went to Delft. It's a small town with a beautiful cathedral and picturesque canals just a few minutes from the Hague. There's a huge market there full of neat, cheap stuff. I picked up an antique key and a red satin ribbon for under two euros--plus a whole bunch of nail polish and a pair of sunglasses. Sunglasses are awful for me; they're always too big for my face, look weird, and I am terrible at judging which ones are flattering. I had a pair of awesome sexy movie star sunglasses that somehow managed to be both trendy and flattering...and I lost them this week. The new sunglasses are NOT as cute as the old ones. MJ says they make me look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar. So I will look like the Terminator all throughout Brittany, instead of looking like Mary Kate Olsen with my cute waify sunglasses. Sighh...

Maastricht and Aachen

We decided to go to Maastricht on Friday night and stay til Saturday. I think Maastricht is my new favorite town in the Netherlands, for the following reasons:

1. I thought Utrecht was the oldest town in the Netherlands, but Maastricht is. It's been inhabited since Roman times. There's some dispute about another city, Nijmegen, being older because it obtained Roman city rights, which Maastricht never did--but as far as uninterrupted human habitation, people have lived in Maastricht since at least 50 BC when the Romans founded the town, and possibly about 500 years earlier than that.

2. Maastricht is the place where the first Mosasaur was discovered. A mosasaur is an enormous aquatic lizard up to 56 feet long (!!) that was one of the fiercest beasts in the sea for millions of years. Mosasaurs have double-hinged jaws that let them gulp down a 20-foot fish whole, sharklike teeth that point inward and literally drag the prey down the gullet, and their fossils have been found all over the world. They're believed to have been extremely ferocious--there have been skulls found with massive tooth wounds from other mosasaurs. Think about how life would be if they were alive today. There would be no fishing industry. No scuba diving. No humans anywhere near the ocean. Mosasaurs would eat all the ships! Mwarrr.

Mosasaurs are epically cool. As can be clearly seen, here:



Anyway, the first mosasaur skull was discovered in Maastricht's famous limestone quarries in the 1700's. It was thought to be the skull of an enormous beast that lived in the River Meuse, which runs through Maastricht. All these medieval towns have rivers running through them, incidentally. Most of those rivers do not have significant mosasaur populations, as far as I know.

3. People speak lots of languages in Maastricht. It's located in a little uvula of the Netherlands dangling down between Germany and Belgium, and people speak French, Dutch, German, and English here as well as Limburgish (Maastricht has its own unique dialect of Limburghish, Maastrichtian).

So we got in kinda late and wandered through beautiful cobbly streets in the evening, periodically coming upon wide squares dominated by cathedrals or ornate town halls. Maastricht's basilica, noted for being entirely flat in front (like a halibut!), dates from around 1,000 AD:



More pics from the picturesque night walk:



Yummy:



Local color.



So in the morning, we visited the basilica, including a tour of the museum inside where lots of religious artifacts and statues were on display.

Is anyone else creeped out by reliquaries, or is it just me?



Mugambi went to great lengths to keep the next activity a surprise. He asked me not to read guidebooks about Maastricht, and kept me in the dark right up until we got on a boat that traveled up the river Meuse. I love boat trips! I thought this was it, until the boat pulled over and started letting people off...for a tour of the limestone quarries where the mosasaur was discovered. So excited!! Turns out there are over 185 kilometers of massive tunnels underneath Maastricht where people have been quarrying limestone since the 1500's. It's an enormous labyrinth that stretches all the way to Belgium underground. People came from hundreds of miles around to get limestone to build cathedrals. The tunnels are enormous--walking through, you get a sense of the vast, soaring space of hundreds of cathedrals, stretching on and on into the darkness.

Since the middle ages, people have been putting artwork into the limestone, usually with charcoal. In World War II, the tunnels were used as an air raid shelter and hiding place for Jews and downed pilots.











So we were planning to go home Saturday night, but on a whim we decided to go across the border to Germany and spend the night in Aachen. Aachen is a fairly small town whose claim to fame is that it was the capital of Charlemagne's empire in the 700's. You can still see the cathedral dome he built, complete with 32 (or so) pillars scrounged from ancient Roman sites that are a thousand years or so older than Charlemagne's original buliding. The dome and the surrounding cathedral (built in the 1200's) were quite picturesque. So was the town hall, built around 1000 AD after Charlemagne's palace had been allowed to collapse into ruin. Could you imagine living in Aachen a hundred years or so after Charlemagne's reign, with the big collapsing corpse of his palace just moldering in the center of town? Weird.

Incidentally, the whole time it was bitterly cold. Like 50 degrees F. Which explains why I'm wearing pretty much every piece of clothing I brought with me (all mismatched) in this pic (did I mention it's July here, too?):





Reputedly Charlemagne's actual throne, dating from the 700's:







There are very ornate golden reliquaries in Charlemagne's cathedral containing (ostensibly) his bones and the loin cloth and swaddling clothes of Christ, as well as the Virgin Mary's cloak. Hundreds of thousands of people have been coming to this place for over a thousand years to make a pilgrimage to see the cloth. Naturally, I was the one with the temerity to ask whether they'd ever been carbon dated to see if they really came from the time of Christ. Answer: nope.



So, that's pretty much it. This week is all catching up on work (maybe a trip to Delft, maybe some salsa dancing) and then I'm off to Bretagne for 10 days!

Utrecht

Yesterday I woke up to gray skies and a forecast of thunderstorms. I decided to go to Utrecht anyway.

I love Utrecht. It's the oldest city in the Netherlands, and some of the canals are over a millennia old. The cobbled streets are crammed with bicycles and little shops and houses hang out over the canals. You can eat lunch on the walkways running at the edge of the water, buy a pastry from a bakery hidden down a twisty alley, and check out the soaring cathedrals. Which is pretty much how I spent my afternoon.





There must be a lot of demand for pet snot in the Netherlands.



For lunch I stopped at a Turkish restaurant. Mainly to see how "Turkish" was interpreted here. The menu was only in Dutch, but the waitress was really nice and went through all the options with me. I wound up ordering a "hummus plate," which involved (I was told) lots of different kinds of hummus and pita. What I got was a plate of babaganoush, tuna salad, cucumber salad, lots of tasty things--but no hummus. There was no hummus on the hummus plate. Oh well.



There's this awesome little park in Utrecht that used to be a 10th century monastery's cloisters. I love it there. It is always full of beautiful flowers--and it always smells like pot. I took my laptop and worked on my novel there for about two hours.



Then, as I was heading home, I came upon--are you ready for this?--KAYAKING. There was a boating company that let you rent a kayak for about four euros an hour--and go boating on the canals! How cool is that!! So I totally flipped out and rented a kayak. I wound up getting pretty lost and wandering around for about an hour before I heard the thunder. There was no rain--it was actually sunny, with some clouds--but it sounded like it was right above me. So I set about trying to find my way back. Overall, a day well spent!



Houseboats!



This is a prison. No idea there was a prison here!

A Rare Sunny Day

Most of Holland is supposed to be under the ocean. I think of this whenever I ride a train through the countryside, which is utterly flat and criscrossed with endless canals. I think of mud flats at the bottom of the ocean, channels carved by random currents.

This summer, the world has evidently decided to put the country back underwater. The rain has been unrelenting for two weeks, heavy curtains of it driven horizontal by the wind off the North Sea. So far we've NOT gone to Luxembourg or Amsterdam, and I've also managed NOT to go to Utrecht or Delft to work in a sunny outdoor cafe by the medieval canals, because there have been no sunny days.

Except today. Today when I have client calls scheduled for the afternoon and can't go anywhere. Whee.

My goal for living and working in the Netherlands is to take one work day a week as a field trip--go to some new town, do some work in a pretty place, spend a leisurely afternoon wandering and exploring. So far the weather hasn't cooperated, so I'm playing it by ear and trying to leave my schedule open for unexpected sunny days (so far the weather sites have been really undependable). I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that today isn't the only nice day this week.

It's also been cold, even in sunlight--not much higher than 65 Fahrenheit. I have to say I'm obsessively jealous of New Yorkers and their heat wave.

Back to work...

Blogging My Life...Take Three.

I've tried creating travel blogs to take everyone with me as I run around Europe and various other places...and each time I try it, it doesn't work out so well. I quit after a handful of posts. I think I've been setting expectations too high.

So this time I'll be doing it differently. No longer will I be writing elaborate, poetic multi-page posts about everything that happened in the past week. Instead, I give you this:



This is Dutch butter. The Dutch have this hilarious habit of naming foods things that sound, in English, profoundly unappetizing. Heh heh..."smeerbare." Here's another example:



Mmm...lintpasta.

So yeah, that will be about the level of discourse here. I'll also tell you all about my travels...and when I'm back in New York, I'll update on my life there too. Just...not every day.