Back from Crete

I'm back! Crete was fabulous. The only negative thing I can say is that it is just too far away from the U.S.A.. If we could just get Greece a little bit closer, I'd be there all the time. In fact, there's some concern in our household that I might move. Only thing holding me back is that I think the plane trip would be too long for Harry and Sally... Since I have lots of photos, and Crete is beautiful, I will post a little bit of explanation each day or so with some pictures. This way, I can still think I'm on vacation and you can vacation vicariously.

We arrived in Chania (English speakers: say Han-Yah, Hebrew and Arabic speakers, you know how to say this the right way with the "ch") and we stayed in a 600 year old restored Viennese townhouse B&B in the old section of the city near the harbor. We carried our luggage through the streets and up three flights of steps to stay in this old renovated townhouse. This is what the streets look like:


We walked through an alleyway to the harbor. Here's the view of part of the harbor, which is mostly lined with restaurants, gelato places, and touristy shops. Check out the dome in the skyline--this is the mosque, built during the Turkish (Ottoman) occupation. It's now a big pottery workshop. The most fascinating thing was to see the layers of history in the every day guts of the towns--ruins were alongside modern buildings, tourist shops were on the ground floor of buildings with abandoned and wrecked upper stories, and the exposed walls of old wooden frames with mud (wattle and daub) construction were like a historical lesson in building if you looked.


This is the inside of a shop along one of the alleys, filled with traditional handwoven kilims..this is what many of the shops used to look like. This shop is owned by Kostas Liapakis I want the kilim on the left.

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Our first day, we purchased some handmade Cretan knives from a local craftsman who showed us his tools and signs his name to each knife. We ate inside at Tamam, a restaurant built inside an old Hamam, or Turkish bath house.

I'm still pretty jetlagged, so I'll add more another time. For photo buffs out there, these are my photos from a digital camera. We also used a couple of film cameras, and those photos will be added to the mix as soon as they are printed. More textiles, more scenery, and more food soon, I promise!