Today is the Crete flight day! I tried to pack up before leaving for the university so I’d be prepared. It was also cool enough to wear pants in the morning, but I soon realized that it wasn’t helping my bug bites from previous dinners outside – I now have 15 on the left leg and 5 on the right. Hardly balanced, and far from not itchy. Oh well, what did I expect.
The most eventful thing I learned while working today was that on Sunday the air traffic controllers are calling for a 24-hour strike, which would complicate matters significantly. Not that I’d be sad about another day in Heraklion, but it probably will be annoying to figure out. Although livingingreece.gr/strikes says “Wait for confirmation, as strikes of this type can be declared illegal. Airlines typically announce cancellations and rescheduled flights with less than 24 hours notice for this reason.”…what? I didn’t know you had to clear strikes with the government. So confusing. In learning about this, I also found that there is a strike today in one of the ATH terminals until 5pm (our flight is at 7pm!), and tomorrow all of the public transportation in Athens is on strike – yikes! Hopefully we will get lucky.
The drive back to Athens was pleasant, though. We discussed airline miles, and Spyros was telling me that Aegean airlines serves moussaka on their longer flights, which is awesome. He also told a few jokes (plus some history) about how Greeks don’t really work well in large groups before the infighting starts. Kind of interesting to hear it from a native. Otherwise, our flight was uneventful (probably the newest plane I’ve ever been on, actually!) and we were met by Nikos (statistically high that we meet a Greek named Nikos!) who works with the Crete university. He drove us in, but had to drop other people off. Spyros and I had dinner along the market street I’m familiar with (at “h agora”, which does indeed mean “the market”), which was good – and we avoided the rain! – but it started at 10pm and we didn’t get back until 12:30! The waiter took forever… couldn’t take the check because he hadn’t delivered dessert, and then appeared to forget about us for a while. Way to make it a very awkward advisor-student dinner, dude! There are only so many things you can talk about with your boss! Oh well – it turned out fine, we had brownies and ice cream, and the raki cleared out my nose.
The hotel is very nice, by the way. I meant to do a little more blogging but I fell asleep in my clothes… one glass of wine and some raki really knocked me out. Whoops!
9/22/11
Breakfast at the Marin Dream is a pretty impressive event… it takes place on the rooftop of the building, which has an excellent view of the port. While appearing more extensive than most breakfasts in Europe, I didn’t ultimately eat much differently – toast, jam, fruit and an egg. But hey, it’s ok. I was to meet Spyros at 11am (having foregone the opportunity to go to the university at 8am…) but the traffic was bad enough that they didn’t come until 11:30 or so. Too bad, because I could have explored a little! Anyway, we arrived at the Finokalia measurement site around 1pm, which isn’t too bad time-wise, but definitely reminded me of driving up in the Andes at times. Very full of small switchback roads. If you can see three lengths of the same road twisting toward you, you are in a questionable place to be driving. But that’s why they chose this for measurements, so they wouldn’t have any interfering local emissions to complicate the air quality.
As remote and hard to get to as it was, it did certainly have a great view. I mean, it’s basically on the side of a cliff, with the Mediterranean opening in all directions in front of you. I also understand the clouds were in rare form today because of last night’s rain, which was great as a photographer. It was also great to see Andrea, who had been semi-isolated from English speakers except for another American who was there. It’s not the jet lag that gets you, but the food lag (2pm lunch, 9pm dinner, my stomach!!) and the planning lag. Which is to say, the total lack of concrete directions regarding what time things are happening or where to go or anything. Spyros says this makes them relaxed, because they know they will figure it out when they need to and do it, but for someone used to considerable planning it is a very anxiety-inducing game of chicken. How long until we go back to Irakleio? Are we coming at the same time tomorrow? What’s the plan for the weekend? All of these questions are not relevant – if you are asking about sometime farther out than four hours, it is probably too early. This precludes things like plane tickets, but not bus tickets. So planning whether I’m staying with Andrea tomorrow so we can go exploring in the evening, or whether she should come to Irakleio on Friday or Saturday evening or not, is a little difficult. I’m sure it will work out, as they say, but it is difficult to wait to know!
At 9:15pm we met with Nikos, his wife Maria, and the two Japanese students to go to dinner at Erganos, which is a little out of the city. It was AWESOME. I may or may not have revealed my true glutton colors to everyone present, which is not necessarily a card you want your boss to be aware of, but too bad! We ordered tons of things – cooked veggies, a salad with greenery that didn’t have an English translation, several kinds of meats, an omelette and many more things. The most delicious – or at least the newest to me – was staka (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roux#Cretan_staka), which appears to basically be superfatty goat butter. It looks like hummus, though, which is very different than what it really is! Anyway it was a great dinner and it was nice to have a 3:3 english-greek ratio to have a bit more guarantee of English spoken. I was super super stuffed at the end for sure.
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