We woke up "early" (before 9am) in order to be at the Phaistos ruins early enough to beat the tourist buses and the heat.We were successful on the crowd side, not the heat. At 10 am it was already above 30degrees C.
Phaistos was the first Minoan palace we visited and Cnossos would be the last one. In Phaistos we were able to roam freely, trying to figure out the walls, the rooms... there were signs everywhere showing us what the place would have looked like.
Afterwards, we went to the lovely village of Vori.The place is celebrated for its small ethnology museum. It presents the crafts and way of life in Crete for centuries. The village itself was small, white, with blue, and dark green accents... Those white buildings are really nice, but damn! they are hard to look at under the blasting sun. Seated under a huge tree, on the village main square, we enjoyed a coffee (the cheapest of all the coffees we would drink) and we tried to figure out the cards games some old guys seating next to us where playing. It involved some getting mad at each other and the use of trumps. Not everyone was playing all the time...
Our plans involved a tour of Matala, but not before the end of the afternoon. We went back to Kokkinos Pyrgos for lunch and a nap (we did wake up "very" early after all ;-) ). We randomly walk to a taverna called Dimitri. To choose our dish we were invited to the kitchen and the chef presented the options of the day. We decided for lamb slowly roasted in the oven with potatoes and a basic greek salad. Most of the people we met spoke very good English*, but we did our best to learn a few words, mostly related to food and ordering though!
Matala used to be a hippie place. Guys lived in the caves on the cliffs. Those cave were roman tombs... The village is a nowadays a sea side resort but it does maintain a very relax and cool atmosphere. The souvenirs shops sold organic Greek products !*Lesson of the day : I later noticed that US movies and sitcom on TV are not dubbed, as it is in France, but subtitled... not mystery here. People who hear English regurlarly speack it better but France has this thing about protecting the language...
1 comment:
Because the powers that be in France dealing with language are idiots that have no linguistic knowledge whatsoever, and even some linguists are so nationalistic that it blurs their judging ability.
best way to damage a language (on top of making people monolingual): "protect" it the way the French Academy and the government do.
When you put something in a museum, it may be beautiful but it's dead, whether it is a statue or a language.
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