And now on to the final chapter of our trip, Crete. Crete is the biggest island in Greece, and one of the most popular tourist destinations. We stayed in Iraklio (Heraklion), which is the capital of Crete and the 5th largest city in all of Greece. This means it was a modern, bustling city rather than a quaint little town like Fira in Santorini.

The ferry to Iraklio was actually pretty painless. For some reason it was unassigned seating so we just sat wherever we wanted. The smoking/non-smoking thing wasn’t an issue as I think we managed to sneak into a non-smoking area. Most people slept during the ride… me, I tried to watch Flubber. I thought it might be better subtitled in Greek but to my surprise it was not. This ferry had nothing on the British Air flights in terms of on board entertainment, that’s for sure.

When we arrived at Iraklio there was a sound coming from outside that sounded like rain — which was simply unthinkable. It turns out it wasn’t raining at all, and we hiked to our hotel rather quickly. The street signs here had no English characters, so it’s a good thing Alicia was able to read Ancient Greek to translate the street names for us. Hotel Mirabello reminded me of a hostel we had stayed at in Geneva, Switzerland a few years back — it was clean and modern, but kind of plain. After showering we set out to find some dinner. The guidebook said that our hotel was on a quiet street… yeah, no kidding! The city seemed like it went completely dead after dark (it was only around 8:00) but once we found our way to the main square with the lion head fountain there were people everywhere.

A restaurant owner yelled over to us as we walked through the square. I was a little annoyed that Alicia let him get our attention but then after he showed us some of their decent vegetarian options and reasonable prices we surrendered and sat down to eat. The waiter was adjusting an umbrella above one of the tables and joked that it was supposed to rain later that night. I foolishly half-believed him and questioned him further about it (the strange ferry noise was still fresh in my head), to which he replied, “Uh… actually it never rains here in the summer.” He must have thought I was a stupid American. Ah well. More free Ouzo on the house here (or as he called it “holy water”).

The next day we were off to see Knossos, an ancient Minoan palace from around 1500 BC. Something else strange about Iraklio is that everything in the entire city appeared to be currently under construction. After dodging tractors and ditches and construction workers, we located a kiosk that sold bus tickets and hopped on a bus to Knossos. It was surprisingly easy to get to and only about a 10 minute ride out of the city centre. Crete is not as easy to navigate as some of the other cities we’ve seen though, and probably a little frustrating for tourists.

Knossos was impressive although not quite as cool as Pompeii in Italy (which, to be fair, is a whole city as opposed to just a palace). It is, however, where the myth of the minotaur and the labyrinth supposedly originated, as the palace has a confusing maze-like layout, and the Minoans had a weird fascination with bulls. As Alicia explained some of the theories about the reconstruction of the place, I realized how much archaeology is just about having a vivid imagination and finding a few small shreds of evidence to back it up. Afterwards we went to see the archaeological museum, which had some original pottery and the famous frescos from Knossos. Unfortunately, like a lot of museums, too much of the same thing made it all seem less impressive by the end.

We did some shopping afterwards for more souvenirs, but there were also a lot of modern stores selling DVDs, video games, CDs, etc. I went on a hunt to find some cool movie posters in Greek but every store we saw only had the original English movie posters. It seems like North American culture has infiltrated Europe a bit too much for our own good!

Speaking of North American culture, we caught a screening of X-Men 3 that night. It just happened to be playing at a theatre near our hotel, so how could we resist? Maybe it was sad to be watching Hollywood movies while overseas, but it was kind of fun to get a taste of what we were missing back home. Of course, the theatre going experience in Greece was always just a little different. We found out that they do have plenty of comic book fanboys in Crete though, and they look and smell the same as they do back home, only here they speak Geek… I mean Greek.

Throughout our time in Iraklio there was a group of gypsies that we kept running into that were really getting on our nerves. The first night one of the young girls was going around to tables at restaurants playing the accordion, then later trying to hassle couples to buy flowers from them. Restaurant owners would shoo them away but then they’d come back a few minutes later. They even came up to us one day while we were sitting on a bench and simply demanded money outright. They were getting pretty damn pushy.

On our last day in Crete we had to catch a flight back to Athens. We were originally going to take a bus but remembering how hot the bus ride to Knossos was, and now carrying our large backpacks, we decided to cab it instead. At the airport some lady started talking to Alicia in French out of nowhere. This was interesting because the day before we were discussing if our nationality was apparent from our appearance. We usually weren’t wearing anything with “Canada” written on it, but I didn’t think we looked particularly American either. I think our pale skin seemed more in line with other travellers from the U.K… but I’m not sure why this lady would have assumed we were French. Weird.

The last night of our trip was spent in the Sofitel Airport Hotel, which is like a 2 minute walk from the airport in Athens. Our flight was early the next morning so we figured it wouldn’t make sense to go all the way back into the city again for one night. It was nice to have a quiet and clean environment to chill in the last day. We watched some good ol’ European MTV (some German prank show seemed to be on most of the night), some BBC news, and then the next morning caught our flight back to Toronto.

During the flight Alicia had a middle-eastern guy sitting beside her who had something wrong with his arm and legs. He couldn’t fill out any of his paperwork so Alicia had to do it for him. He didn’t speak English very well either though, which made it difficult. He also slept a lot of the time, which was the worst because neither of us wanted to disturb him when we had to go to the bathroom. The plane also had a bunch of loud Welsh rugby players on it, who were apparently coming to play some friendly games against a high school in Stoney Creek.

The perfect end to the trip was that when we got back to Toronto, we couldn’t find our luggage. It turned out our bags hadn’t made the flight back with us because we had been rushed through customs in London to make our connecting flight. A couple days later they delivered our bags to us at home in St. Catharines, but had this happened at the beginning of our trip we would have been screwed! I wanted to blame it on Toronto’s own Pearson airport (which is easily the most chaotic airport I’ve seen) but I guess British Airways was probably the culprit. At any rate, we were home safe and sound, and it was a great little trip. I can’t wait to see where we’ll travel next. I’m pushing for Japan (or at least somewhere cooler for once!). But if you do get the chance to see Greece, make it happen! You won’t regret it.