Crête - Chania - Night of Arrival

Our first encounter with the island was a mix of heat, little annoyance because of a silght flight delay, darkness, noise, and fire in the sky. All that in just a few minutes.

The heat, we noticed it first in Athens when we had to use buses to connect flights at the airport. I hate that: I love using runways to move from a mere waiting-room to the sky... The heat was welcomed. People kept telling us "you're crazy, it will be so hot there in August..." Well, I personnaly wanted the heat ! and I got it.
Because of little delay (due heavy traffic and all the good excuses in the airport world) we arrived at night. The island being further south than Paris, night falls much earlier (kind of like in Pittsburgh) and at 9pm it was completly dark. I was annoyed because reading a map, road signs in a foreign alphabet and navigate at night is not a relaxed way to start a vacation.
The noise and the fire was coming from taking-off military jets. Wahoo, those planes are noisy and their firery tails quite bright.

We traveled with Aegean Airlines, a greek company. We were fed and given a movie to watch. It was fun to listen to the movie (... 17 again... :-/) while decifering the greek subtitles. Like a kid I was reading everything I could out loud.

We had trouble finding a parking place near the hotel for several reasons :
One being that the hotel was located in the old city on a tiny street that was no more than 2 meters wide.
The second reason was related to a fair going on at night in the venetian harbor area.
Finaly we had to deal with one way streets, tiny one way streets, cars and scooters being parked randomly, people driving randomly.
We identified an indoor parking lot located 10 minutes away from the hotel. On the map it looked much further away. Chania is the second largest city in Crete with about 55 800 inabitants.

Our first minutes in this city were magical, even if we had to carry the heavy bags. We were surronded by happy people enjoying the night. The street of the hotel (belmondo) was covered with vines and lit by small lights. Our room was in a renovated Venetian house and had a huge balcony. We had our first excellent diner at Ela located in the ruins of factory from the 17th Century. First raki too!

One word of the not so nice : the girls... they dressed like tramps imho. Some could have been tourists but what I saw in the stores the followong days confirmed the first impression.