Sheep Guarding Llama

We were actually awake at eight thirty this morning, the earliest that we have been awake maybe since arriving in Greece!  We are pretty excited, our first time actually getting out to see anything in three months!  It took a bit to get the kids up and moving, but we were on it from first thing in the morning.  I got up and showered, which is always a challenge in these hotels.  This is one of those “you have to hold the shower head the entire time that you are in the shower” situations combined with the shower being a tiny square on the floor and the shower curtains hanging loose so any air, bumping or water hitting them caused them to billow out into the room since there is nothing anywhere securing them to where you want them to be.  The shower curtails really do little more than keeping some of the mist from escaping.

We started the day walking north half of a block to a nice looking bakery and patisserie that we had seen up there yesterday on our walk.  Luciana opted to get nothing, Liesl ordered a custom sandwich, Dominica got a corn and cheese pastry ring and I ended up getting pizza.  All of the food ended up being great, Liesl really really her sandwich.  We did not eat locally but took the food to go and ate it sitting in the parking lot of the Knossos site across town.

The drive from our hotel to Knossos is not far but is a lot of heavy traffic and driving uphill which is a huge pain (both annoying and physically painful) in that awful Kia Picanto.  This experience has taught me while people actually do choose the Toyota sometimes, the Kia really is awful.  And, to make things even more fun, we had gone through all of the effort of getting a hotel right on the road with the Knossos ruins only to get halfway there and have the road closed for construction and have to detour – except there were no detour signs and we were left to our own devices to even guess which way to go to get around the construction.  Clearly they are not expecting any tourists to be in town yet.

We did quite well and were very proud of ourselves driving around a normal, non-descript Greek residential neighbourhood and getting back to the road that we needed without getting lost.

We got to Knossos and there were people there and the site was open.  Thank goodness!  It turns out that unlike what the guidebooks all agree on, that the site is open from ten in the morning until five in the evening, it is actually open from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon!  So we could have gotten here a lot earlier and were actually on the late side getting there just after ten.  Just after us a few high school field trips arrived as well, so the place was decently busy which high school kids much of the time that we were there.

It was six Euros each for Dominica and me and the girls were free entrance.  We got inside and were immediately presented with the option of hiring a guide for a tour.  Sixty Euros for a private tour or ten Euros per adult (so just twenty Euros for us) if we waited for another couple to go with us.  There were three Brits considering and we decided that if they did it, we would do it, too.  Twenty Euros for a guided tour with a full time, licensed, professional guide is not a bad deal and we did learn from doing the Alhambra in Granada, Espana that we can get a lot of value out of having a guide.

The site at Knossos is really not all that large, physically.  And most of what is at the site is a recreation done with one man’s personal funds in the late 1920s.  With the guide, though, there was a lot of history to be learned.  Luciana found this all to be very boring but quickly figured out that she could entertain herself by running around the ruins.  Liesl, on the other hand, found the tour fascinating and was quiet and calm and very well behaved and paid very close attention to the whole thing and learned a lot.  She loves Greek history and Greek mythology and this is a site that she knows all about and was really into.  It was a great tour for her.  The Brits that were with us actually commented several times about how dry and dull it was and how they were struggling to pay attention thinking that Liesl was having a hard time, too, but Liesl was doing great and having a wonderful time.

The weather was great for us today, warm enough to consider skipping even the fleece that I brought, especially in the sun.

The tour was about one and a half hours, a little longer than they said that it should be but we were the last tour of the day, as it turned out, and the one woman that we were with was in an electric assistance chair and that slowed us down, especially as the chair broke at one point and her husband and I spent some time trying to get it fixed, to no avail.  We learned that a few years ago she was completely run over by a kid doing doughnuts in a car park and didn’t just hit her but completely ran her over.  She was air lifted to a hospital and in a coma for three days and has surprisingly recovered considering the extent of the damage and while she can walk, the old ruins are a bit overwhelming to handle.  All three of the Brits were together and had come from a cruise that was in port and are off to Israel tomorrow.

The experience at Knossos was great.  Luciana fell once but didn’t get too badly hurt and at some point she cut her finger, we have no idea where, and was bleeding.  Dominica, Liesl and I all really enjoyed the tour and learned a lot about the site, Minoan civilization and more.  It made for a really great educational field trip for Liesl.  This is one to remember.  Thankfully she is old enough to really appreciate and remember this trip and hopefully it will always stick with her.

One of the neat things that we learned about was the 3,800 year old pipes that run under the ruins that brought in fresh spring water from several kilometres away.  And learning that the ruins used to be up against a river, that is now dry and just fields most of the year (but a women tried to drive though it during a rain storm a few years ago and was washed away and drowned so it is not absolutely dry all of the time, apparently) which make the site of the ruins make so much more sense that a raging river used to be at the foot of the settlement.  Seeing it today, the site of Knossos makes little sense given the local geography.

We got to go see and sit in the old theatre that was part of the site.  Unbelievable how long that old theatre has been sitting out there, under the sky, being sat on, rained on and it is still there just as it always was.  The girls insisted on getting their pictures taken sitting in it.

After the tour was over, it was just after two.  We walked across the street and hit some of the knick knack souvenir shops for the girls. Dominica had seen a giant stuffed Minotaur across the street and wanted to take the girls there to at very least pose with it.  Luciana declined but Liesl was happy to get her picture taken with it.

Luciana got a little stuffed sheep that says “Love Crete” on it.  Liesl looked at a few shops and eventually settled on a dolphin that says “Greece” on it.  Just small things.  A dolphin might seem like an odd choice, but dolphins were the symbol of the Minoan queen and the archaeological site was loaded with dolphin frescoes.  So the dolphin was perfect as a choice given the Knossos ruins that we had just seen.

We drove back to the hotel and relaxed for a little bit.  Then Liesl and I took a walk back to the bakery that we had visited this morning because she had seen some good looking ice cream there and was still wanting some since last night.  Dominica and Luciana just stayed in the hotel room, not having the energy to go out again.  We brought back some little treats for them.  Dominica got a lemon pie tart.  Luciana wanted a mouse mousse which is a popular treat here on Crete – it is a chocolate mouse shaped into a mouse and then coated with chocolate.  We see them all over.

We put in a couple of hours relaxing at the hotel and then went back out at a quarter after five to go get a very early dinner (about four hours early for the locals at least) as we were all hungry and tired.  Everyone loved the food from Hari’s last night so we all voted to return.  Dominica kind of wanted to try something new and different but with little kids there is something huge about finding a place that they actually like and want to go eat at.  So back to Hari’s we went.

The walk was not bad although we are pretty tired by this point.  It’s a good fifteen or twenty minute walk to get there.  We got the same waitress as last night and she recognized us instantly.  The girls got the same thing that they did last night.  Dominica got an omelette and I went for a smoked salmon and cream cheese waffle which was excellent and quite a bit better than a normal lox and bagel is.  The girls were so excited when the food arrived, the waitress definitely understood why we were back when she saw their faces.

Dinner was awesome and from there we walked back home, stopping for half an hour or longer at the same playground that we used last night.  The girls were very happy to have this to cap their day.  In under an hour they were tired and both talking about getting back to the hotel, climbing into bed and just watching some YouTube to wind down.

Before making it all of the way back we swung into the Carrefour grocery store on our block and got a few things to make sure that we would not be short anything for the evening.  It was a quarter till eight when we got back to the hotel but we were all tired and all very happy to be calling it a day.

I would totally have gone out for a long walk on my own by the tendinitis in my left heel is acting up and I have to baby it to keep it from getting really bad.  So sadly I am hotel bound for the evening.

It was a very quiet evening.  Dominica read, the girls watched videos and played with toys and I worked on uploading pictures to Flickr and getting SGL totally caught up; and was successful.  As of today, I am posting SGL on the same day that it happens.  That feels good.

Our hope is that we will fall asleep on the early side tonight and be able to be up before nine tomorrow.  We are going to pack up and head out from the hotel as soon as we are up and moving and we are heading about fifteen miles away to a really cool looking dinosaur museum that Dominica found out about online and has been researching.  Several places call it one of the must do activities on Crete for kids and it is rated one of the “top eight things to do on Crete.”  We are very hopeful that the place will be open as it will be very disappointing if they are not, but a lot of research has been done and they do appear to be open tomorrow.  Unlike most things that say that they close on Sundays, this place is actually closed all week and is only open on the weekends during this season.

Finally today, for the first time since we arrived on Crete, we are heading out to actually “see” something!  It is crazy that we have managed to live on Crete for a full season, three entire months, and we have not managed to have a single outing to actually go anywhere.  Of course that is not entirely true as we have made it to Rethymno a few times and last weekend we came into town for the Carnival, but that is all our local city and not really going anywhere.  It does not really count.  Today is different. Today we have a hotel reservation, a place to be and stuff to do.  We need to get moving.

Dominica and I were both awake way too late last night and everyone overslept horribly this morning.  We had planned for this and it is not the tragedy that it might have been but it is very annoying, at the very least.  Dominica had managed to get up early this morning to deal with getting some laundry drying so that it would be dry and able to be packed, but she fell asleep again after that and it was around noon when she ran around in a panic waking everyone up.  Whoops.  We had originally wanted to have gotten up around more like nine in the morning and gotten out to Irákleio (written as Ηράκλειο in Greek) by ten or eleven this morning, but as we had to return for the third day in a row to the Rethymno hospital we were not able to do that.  But now we were going to be later than necessary at the hospital, too.  Argh.

So we moved pretty quickly, more or less, and were out the door just after one.  We had to pack up the GoPro, the Nikon camera, stuff for the kids to do, clothing, snacks, medicine for Luciana and everything into the car.  This is our first overnight away from the house in Prines since New Year’s Day!

We are getting very good at getting down to the hospital.  We zip right through the city, straight to the hospital itself and know exactly how to park and even know the parking guy now!  This is getting to be easy and routine.  We have been to Rethymno General more than any place other than our home and the corner store in all of Greece.  That’s a bit sad, but no one can say that we are not really “living” on Crete.  This is real life and not in any way a tourist situation.

We were the only people in the waiting room today, our total wait was only about three minutes.  Super fast in and out.  While waiting for some lab results I got to see the news on a television in Greek showing the Turkish president talking at the Council of Europe – a few hours later the BBC announced that a deal to handle Turkey’s flow of immigrants had been reached.

The stop by the hospital was a very fast one and all we really did was see the doctor from yesterday, get confirmation that Luciana was on the right antibiotic and were on the road to Irakleio in no time.  Very glad that we figured out the parking situation yesterday as that made today so fast and easy.

Before heading out from the hospital we jumped into the “MiniMall” (which is very misleading as it is not as big as a normal coffee stand) to get coffees and pastries for the drive.  Unlike normal times when there is meat in everything, Lent means that all of the pastries are meat free.  Yay!  There was nothing that Liesl wanted, she wanted to return to our favourite place and get pizza, but there was no time for that.

The weather was nice today and the drive east went smoothly.  No one got sick and no traffic issues.  We did stop, just before the city, to go into the same gas station where Liesl got sick the last time that we came out to attempt to see Knossos a couple of weeks ago.  I had promised Liesl that we would stop here to get some snacks as there had been nothing that she had wanted to eat at the coffee stand.  Luciana, of course, demanded that we buy little Barbie toys there as this gas station has a decent toy selection of real stuff.  Both girls had a list of things that they only know are sold here from last time that they really want.  They ended up talking us into allowing two toys each which is a bit silly but it made them very happy and it has been a while since they got much of anything.

Getting into the city and to our hotel was quite easy and there was simple parking right on the street directly in front of it.  Dominica had found a great rate for two nights for a triple room at the Athinaikon Hotel, right down by the Irakleio water front, just one block south of the main port.  The hotel turned out to be great, far better than we were anticipating.  Very empty, which is surprising as the shoulder season is just drawing to a close here and the tour buses are to be seen all over the island, but there were a few people about.  The front desk was super friendly and helpful.  Our room is quite nice, nothing fancy, but lots of space and great WiFi which is a very nice change of pace and something that we were very worried about.  We have a huge balcony although the view is into a resident alley so not very exciting.  But fresh air and space and a full table and set of chairs, it is quite nice.  We have a fridge in the room too, thankfully, which is very important as Luciana’s antibiotic requires refrigeration and we needed a place to store it.

We set up in the room but were not there for very long before setting out to explore.  It was after four when we arrived at the room and the sun was starting to get low.  The front desk had given us a map to do a walk to the Venetian Harbour, which is the thing to see in Irakleio so we wanted to be sure to do that tonight.

The total walk was five kilometres so a decent walk considering that it was late and that there were a lot of elevation change along the way.  We walked past both of the main city parks.  We decided to cut through the first one and, as always, Liesl’s keen eye spotted a small playground and the girls insisted that we stop, which was actually good as they have gotten far too little time at playgrounds since we have been in Greece as there is none near our home so we took a little time for them to play and work out their “have been sitting in the car”-ness.

Then we cut through the city and got a bit lost and ended up walking through an odd neighbourhood and having to go down tons of stairs to get down to the harbour.  But we popped up right at the edge of the Venetian Harbour and it was, more or less, perfect.

The Venetian Harbour was very neat.  Dry docks and the old fortress from five hundred years ago.  This was where the Venetian fleet was built and set sail during the height of the Venetian Empire.  So much of it is still intact.

Dominica and I really enjoyed this bit of history.  Venetian History is abstract enough that Liesl is not aware of it yet but she was very interested in the fact that this was five hundred years old and very visibly useful buildings right in the middle of the city.  The old Venetian cisterns are still used every day by the city as part of the water supply!

On the way back we walked through the giant pedestrian market in the middle of the city.  It was huge and very nice.  We had not expected this in the middle of downtown.  This really must make this part of the city great to live in, if you can afford it.  Although I am sure that all summer this is just packed with tourists.  There were tons of shops that clearly were not intended to be selling much of anything to the locals.

We worked out way back to a creperia that we had seen on the walk down to the harbour an hour earlier.  The girls had seen Hari’s and demanded that we go there for ice cream.  Dominica and I saw the sign for their savoury crepes and liked that idea.  So to Hari’s we walked.

At Hari’s the girls split a strawberry Belgian style waffle, which they both agreed was the best waffle that they had ever had in their life.  Real Belgian waffle, of course, and not the thing that they call that in the US.  Dominica got a light crepe that was basically a Mediterranean salad in a crepe.  It looked very good.  I went for a Cypriot crepe filled with cheeses, mushrooms and a farmer sauce.  It was absolutely amazing.  Every one loved their food.  Very happy that we chose Hari’s.

From Hari’s we walked back to the hotel and called it a night.  I worked on SGL updates and posting pictures from last week off of my iPhone until the batteries died.  I had to plug in the laptop across the room sitting on the floor as there are almost no electrical outlets in our hotel room.  There is a nice enough desk, but no power to be used by it.  Everyone was pretty worn out and just wanted to chill out in the room reading or playing on their Kindle Fires.

At eleven I decided that since my laptop battery had just died and everyone was done for the night that I would go out for a nice, evening walk on my own.  So I set out going north from the hotel down to the new port of Irakleio and then going east along the water front for a ways and then climbing up one of the small hills into a hotel and then residential area and exploring a little bit before heading back to the hotel a little after midnight.

In bed before one and read “Somewhere Different” until I was ready to fall asleep.

We had to get up today and return to the hospital in Rethymno for another check up for Luciana. On the way we stopped quickly in Atsipopoulo to go to Memento to grab some quick coffees for the day.  We are loving that we found this place.

We got back there and today, for the first time, we were told that we could not park in the hospital parking lot.  Who knows why, it is all quite confusing.  But we discovered a parking lot that you can pay for right across the road and it is only two Euros fifty for the first hour there, which is not very bad.  And it is much easier to park there than at the hospital and the lot of monitored so we liked that.

We got down to the paediatric emergency room and when the nurse saw our paperwork they ushered us straight in (because it was a super fast, non-exam visit just to check paperwork and medicines) bypassing the people that were already waiting which very obviously annoyed people who were in the waiting room.  I do not know what they were saying but it did not take much at all to guess what it was from the looks and gestures and they talked agitatedly to each other.

The second doctor, the one that was on call today, pretty much just read the results from yesterday, called down to the lab to get the latest updates and decided the same thing as the doctor yesterday, that antibiotics would be needed again just to be safe and that we would try a different one than Luciana had tried before.

They are putting her onto antibiotics again, but there is nothing to do but start the medicine tonight and have her return for more detailed lab analysis tomorrow on our way out of town.

We left the hospital and drove up the hill stopped at our pharmacy on the way home to pick up the new antibiotic.  They wanted to try a different type than the last one to see if the different medicine choice would make a difference.  Only eight to ten Euros for this antibiotic, too.  And, we should point out, we have not paid another penny after the original seven Euros that we paid almost a month ago the first time that we went to the emergency room in Rethymno.

Tonight is an attempt to get everyone off to bed early.  It is super cold tonight and we were so cold that Dominica and I decided to actually attempt making a fire in the fireplace so warm the place up.  We went out back and found some wood that was stored there.  There were not any matches or anything so down to the store I went to buy a lighter and some basics.  While I was gone Dominica got to work on a tuna noodle casserole for our dinner.

The fire never got going much and the chimney is designed in such a way that a bit of smoke does not make it out which was making our eyes sting a little, so we gave up on that.  Dinner was good, we love tuna noodle casserole, and we spent some time watching travel shows on YouTube.

During the day today I did a bit of performance testing of different cloud providers and ended up doing a lot of work through the night getting some NodeBB forums migrated over from Rackspace to Linode which went really well, but kept me super busy until after five in the morning!  Tomorrow is going to be tough.  Dominica went to bed about six hours before I did, but was up until just thirty minutes or so before I fell asleep as her stomach was bothering her all night.  So both of us are going to be seriously hurting tomorrow.

I have been sleeping in the girls’ room all week.  They whine and complain if I am not sleeping with them, wherever they are, and Dominica has been going to bed so many hours before them and they go to bed an hour or two before I do that she doesn’t care because she is long asleep, normally, before I even think of heading to bed.

We are figuring out more and more than it is very important that we rent homes with a king bed and worry a lot less about having lots of bedrooms.  In this house, which sleeps eight to ten, we have the largest bedroom converted to a gaming room and the neat loft that we were sure that the girls were always going to use being all but abandoned and everyone either piles into Dominica and my room and either cram into the one queen bed, which is just too small (Luciana gets crushed and I get pushed out of the bed) or someone sleeps on the floor next to everyone else; or else we sleep very near each other with the girls’ play area in their huge bedroom being converted to a sleeping area so that they can be as close to us in our room as possible (which is very close, only a few feet away from each other.)  So what would be much more important for us in the future is having a big king bed that is big enough to accommodate all of us at once as nearly all of the time that is how we are going to sleep anyway.  It’s getting silly to keep up the pretence that we are going to realistically have the kids in their own room very often – our kids are just not “sleep in their own room” kids.

We tried on Monday and failed to make it here because everything was closed.  We had to give up on yesterday because of appointments that took up much of the day.  So today, on Wednesday, finally we were able to get everyone up and out of bed, dressed, ready and out the door at one and into the car and down the hill to the Rethymno General Hospital to finally get Luciana in for her UTI checkup that we have been needing to do for a while.

We parked at the hospital and went in and had a little wait as there were a lot of kids in to see the doctor today.  Not that the wait was more than fifteen minutes, but it was not instant either (or course, it was only a checkup and not even a sickness, let alone an emergency.)  We got to talking to some of the people in the waiting room and it turns out that the one woman who was there with her son was the niece of the couple that own the corner store by our house and she used to live in Prines.

Luciana took a test while we were there today and while we were waiting for the lab we returned to the pizza place that we like by the hospital to get a pizza and some French fries.  We go the vegetarian for Dominica, Liesl and me and two slices of plain cheese for Luciana.  We were all very happy to get a chance to eat there again.

They found high white blood cell counts in the lab work.  So they are a bit concerned, but she has no fever or symptoms of a continuing problem.  They sent us up to the paediatric ward to do another test and try things again.  They were worried that the first test might be wrong, it was so dramatic.

While we waited this time, as we had already eaten, we just sat in the car.  Everyone had their Kindle or Kindle Fires with them so we all just read, played games or whatever.  It was a decently nice day so no reason to not just sit out in the car and relax.

This time the test showed that the first test was, indeed, an anomaly and while there were a few white blood cells there were very few.  In theory there should be none (but a future doctor would explain that some people have a continuous baseline like this and it does not indicate anything.)  So they are still wanting to look into the situation but with these low readings and no fever they have no actual concern.  They want us to return tomorrow when the lab will have had more time to look at the tests and to consult with a second doctor when we are around.

We went back home.  As we went through Atsipopulous we stopped at a little book store that the girls had seen as we went down the hill and did some shopping.  The girls each found some little toys that they wanted so we treated them to that since they had spent the entire day doing boring hospital and doctor stuff.  Then Dominica and I went across the street to a coffee shop called Memento and got some cappuccinos.  This is our first time getting coffee from a cafe near our home, why didn’t we find this sooner!!  Coffee is so cheap here, two double cappuccinos are just three Euro and they give you a bottle of water with each coffee as well!

It was decently late by the time that we got back up to Prines.  Our whole day was spent dealing with medical stuff.  It was dark by the time that we got home.

Today I was wrapping up the non-stop uploading of pictures and videos that we have from over the weekend.  Hundreds of pics and many videos to get uploaded.  This is our first big bulk of media that we have had to deal with since getting to Greece.  We have managed to get out and see so little, thus far, that we really have not generated the kind of media that we normally do.  This was rather a sizeable amount of media all at once.  So getting stuff to Flickr, YouTube and Facebook has been taking quite some time and is not exactly done today, but the bulk of it is now completed.

Today was a write and post all morning, and school for Liesl, day.  We did not go anywhere as there was a bit to get done around the house.  After my calls and stuff were done, it was time to go out for dinner, for the first time in a very long time!

It was eight when we all walked down to The Olive at the bottom of our street.  It was very cold and a little rainy on our walk.  We were quite cold.  Who would have guessed that the southern most point of Greece and Europe would be so cold in the middle of March!

Dinner was amazing.  Lent is on so there is no meat on the menus in Greece.  It’s all vegetarian for the month.  A whole month of vegetarian for the whole country!  It is crazy.  Of course lots of people are not strictly religious so there is still meat but the rate is way down and going to the local taverna and getting the local home cooking means all vegetarian.

As always, we just “eat what is being served.”  We were the only ones eating tonight, there were a few other people there but they were just having a drink and watching the television in the corner.  It was cold and the little stove in the middle of the taverna was ablaze to keep the place warm.

Our meal tonight was nearly all seafood.  First course up was a sardine paste that was really delicious – heavy lemon on the front end and you dip some nice sesame bread into it.  I went through that very quickly.

Next up was octopus on French fries covered in octopus gravy.  Doesn’t sound that exciting, but it was absolutely amazing. The girls were not up for trying it, grilled octopus is pretty obviously octopus – no kidding a plate full of tentacles. But Dominica tried it, her first every octopus, and I dug in having had a bit of octpus while in Spain.  But this was octopus to a whole new level.  Truly delicious.

Even Dominica was really amazing but just how delicious the octopus dish was.  She is now a believer.  It is obvious why octopus is so common in all of the grocery stores here on Crete.

We had the most delicious dish of roasted potatoes and fresh (from the garden this morning) artichokes covered in fresh dill that vied with the octopus for the star of our dinner.

And, as always, there was fried cheese covered in sesame seeds.  So tasty.

There was also calamari which was a huge hit with both girls and they ate nearly all of it all by themselves.

And of course we had a bottle of wine with dinner and after dinner, for apertifs Dominica and I had shots of raki which is just what you do here.

We had to roll ourselves home after we were done with our food.  This has to be our best meal on Crete yet.  All of it was just amazing and there was a bit of new food discovery.  Dominica’s first sardines and octopus and both of our first times having fresh artichokes (which are amazing, no wonder the Romans ate them so much.)

We got home and Dominica was pretty much ready for bed as soon as we were back.  She went to bed long before midnight.  The girls and I played video games together this evening before getting off to bed around two.