Naxos pics

The weather is sublime here this week. The whole country is in high holiday mode for Pascha - Easter. Each day is special, with special rituals and food. More on that later....

Naxos

Hello! My name is Shirley Valentine. HI SHIRLEY! Ok, my name isn’t Shirley and there is no 12-step program for people who have my particular kind of addiction. Travel is my poison, my vice, my love. Travel to Greece in particular seems to have become the drug of choice.

I’ve been indulging myself by going to Greece for over 25 years now. It started when I got a scholarship to go study archaeology there. I KNOW! How cool is THAT!?! Ever since then, I’ve been lured back – to work, to play, to explore – to live the Greek version of la dolce vita… er, I’m sure Zorba has a phrase for that, but it escapes me at the moment.

Of the 1400 or so of Greek islands, I’ve managed to visit about 50 so far. I track them in a diary, much like birders do when they spot rare purple-footed boobies. If I have to be a geek of some sort, I suppose there are worse ones to be.

In the pre-9/11 days, I’ve been known to take off to Greece with a day’s notice….. GIMME A TICKET TO ANYWHERE BUT HERE! Once there, I’ve been know to sashay down to the port and grab the first likely looking tub to the island de jour…. “This looks like a fine boat – Ooooo look, they serve ouzo for breakfast…. So where are we headed exactly?”

I swear to god, this is precisely how I found the island that has now been my spiritual home for over 20 years now. I found a ship that was leaving, settled my ratty hobo bag at my feet, pulled out my ever-present corkscrew and bottle of retsina and only after opening it and taking a long pull, inquired of the ship’s purser where the heck we were headed. “Naxos,” he said. It was a serendipitous discovery.

Naxos – the largest and greenest in the Cycladic group of islands…. a thriving bustling island with mountains, farmlands and the best beaches in Greece. Tourism is important here, but second to agriculture and the commerce of the islands. I found this place purely by accident. I honestly settled on a ferry one whimsical day and only then inquired where we were bound. I was captivated by the sail past tiny islands and by the endless azure sea. Once on the port in Naxos town I was captured by a determined granny who insisted she had the finest rooms in town. She did. And so the love affair lasting more than two decades began.

A dash of Shediac, a dollop of Caraquet

The job I do back home in Fredericton requires my attention for about 20 or 30 hours a week. How to fill in the other hours on my idyllic Greek island? Well, I can’t live on free olives and the view alone, so I’ve hung my shingle out here to teach English, French and Italian to the locals. I can handle school age kids who’s parents are keen on private lessons or local business people who want better language skills for their tourist based business.

Between you and me? I’m secretly keen to take on a few French students. I grew up in Moncton you see, and my French has that unique accent. Not the toff Parisian accent of the swanky language academies. I harbour a secret delight in educating a generation of Greek kids to speak chiac. It’s my revenge, you might say.

See, I learned to speak Greek from a Japanese professor. 30 years later, I apparently still have a damnable but very distinct oriental accent when I gamely and earnestly try and inflict my Greek on the polite but mystified villagers.

I never knew I had an accent of course. But too many times I’ve left a shop or restaurant to be followed out the door by gales of laughter – it finally dawned on me. Dear god, I sound like a bad Jackie Chan movie and should come with my own subtitles.

So, yes, I’m quite looking forward to teaching little Nikolai and Despina the finer workings of Chiac. Beh OUI for sure!

A thousand words,,,,

.......'nuff said?

Walter Mitty goes hi-tech

We all have those Walter Mitty kind of dreams. On days when our office workload seems to overwhelm us with tedium and eye-glazing boredom, we stare out the window at the February snows and imagine a virtual office on a sun-kissed island.

The difference with me is that I’m actually doing it. This winter, with the reluctant blessings of my boss, I’m actually working from home. The only difference is that my virtual office at home is on a lovely Greek island, halfway around the world.

Why Greece? Well, the addiction to Greece started about 25 years ago (see first blog posts). I don’t really need to explain the lure of gorgeous vistas, a joyous welcoming people, history, architecture, music and fabulous food do I? What you might not realize is that Greece is a pretty hip country when it comes to modern communications. A perfect set up for a virtual office for a snow-crazed Canadian.

Because it is essentially an island nation, Greece is way ahead of Canada when it comes to internet capability and cellphone technology. It is a way of life – a common utility that islanders take for granted. In fact, the island I normally visit – Naxos – is completely wi-fi enabled. I can sit in my little apartment there that clings to the seawall and get a decent and fast connection – or make my branch office the little seaside taverna where I have my lunch. It’s a bit of a culture shock to see the black garbed granny waddling down the country road on her donkey, cellphone clapped to her ear, like any North American teenager. Yes, the new age of communications has utterly captivated the always chatty Greek population.

So - for all you techno geeks, here are the bare bones details. I write for a living mostly. I sit on my fat bum in an office and crank out reports, grant applications, write public relations copy and news items. To do that, I need a reliable computer, a good internet connection and, er, focus. Ahem. Well. I've now had a month of doing my job from 'away,' as we say in New Brunswick. And so far so good.

My apartment here in Chania Crete (the one in the 600 year old Venetian manor house) has superb wi-fi highspeed internet. I have Skype, iChat, Messenger, Yahoo and all my work files here. I have a reliable person back at the office to print off what I write and to lick the envelope. The 6 hour time difference isn't a challenge - the boss likes to work late. When he arrives at the office, I'm just settling in to watch the Greek version of Desperate Housewives. That gives me my mornings to dwaddle in cafes, go to the market, walk along the beach or do laundry and enjoy being part of a bustling community.

Mobile phones are virtually disposable here - they come cheap, you can get temporary accounts and if your mobile doesn't work (or 'Handy,' as I have heard the Brits call them) then there are phone cards for the payphones. Easy peasy.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself. I live in a 600 year old building. I look out my window across the tiny harbour carved out by the Venetians at a church built in 1265, a mosque built in the 1600s and, just beyond, to a hill that was the original Minoan settlement dating back thousands of years. My computer beeps and it is the boss on video camera discussing the day's mail.

Technology makes this possible. Astonishing in the cradle of civilization.

Freedom fighters

No one knows for sure when it was founded, but it is believed that the Arkadi Monastery may date between 950 and 1200 AD. In Venetian times, the monastery housed as many as 300 monks in its precincts.

In 1866, when the Cretan revolt broke out, 1500 of the leaders gathered there to plot the rebellion. The Turkish pasha in Rethymno set out a force of 15,000 with 30 cannon to nip the rebellion in the bud. The local people and rebels barricaded themselves inside the monastery – some 260 men and over 700 women and children. The Turks encircled the monastery and the Cretan situation became hopeless. The abbot gathered the women and children inside the powder magazine where they chose to blow themselves up rather than surrender to the Turks.

The rebels fought bravely and held the Turks off another day. But eventually the walls were breached. Only three or four managed to escape the slaughter that followed. The pasha believed that this put an end to the rebellion and taught the Cretans a lesson, but it only served to inspire the freedom fighters to continue. Crete finally won its autonomy in 1898.

Crete – the crossroads of history

I’m not a professional writer, but I adore words and writing and I guess I DO actually make my living by stringing the right words together. I try to avoid clichés – it is a point of pride for me that I wrote press releases for four different elections, both federal and provincial, announcing each candidate’s bid for a seat and NEVER ONCE used the tired cliché – “tossed his hat into the ring.’ That’s – let me see … doing the math….. about 237 press releases for each candidate’s announcement sans cliché. Now THAT, my friends, is wordsmithing glory.


But Crete and Greece can’t help but inspire clichés… azure seas, sun-baked beaches, deep-fried tourists… you get the idea. I am trying to avoid most of them in this blog, but here is one I can’t seem to get around: Crete is indeed a crossroads of history, of continents and cultures.

Swaddled by the Libyan Sea, the Cretan Sea, the Mediterranean and - farther out - the Aegean, Crete was an inevitable magnet and staging ground for a millennia of conquerors – from the earliest times – the Minoans, Myceneans, the mysterious Dorian invaders, Romans, Turks, Saracens, Venetians, to the last century’s Russians and Germans. And they’ve all left their mark in architecture, in food, art, culture and a gut wrenching history of battles, inhuman slaughter and heartbreak. Today as I write this, American jets are blistering noisily across my “azure” sky, launched presumably from those big carriers off shore. This lovely island is an important piece of real estate in the machinations of world politics, past and present. Crete has been so brutalized by turbulent history that the Cretans can seem quite guarded and insular, understandably so. They view themselves as Cretans - not Greeks.

I live in the part of North America that is considered “historic.” We are smug about our “old” houses dating back to the late 1600’s and I’ve worked on archaeological sites dating back about 6,000 years. Pffffft…. here, in Crete, I am living in a 600 year old Venetian building and look out my window at a mosque built in 1645 and at the dome of a church begun in 1320. My laundry room entrance is through an exquisite Venetian arch and I hang my smalls to dry on a marble balcony used by Marco Polo’s contemporaries. The mind boggles.

This past weekend I hopped the local bus for a short trip along the coast to the town of Rethymno. It’s fun doing this – I throw my jammies, some clean undies and a toothbrush in a light shoulder bag and off I go. The local bus is a cheap and really comfortable way to explore the small villages. No luggage to drag around; makes me feel free and quite intrepid. They haven’t had significant earthquakes there so much of their stunning Venetian architecture is still intact, including the magnificent massive Fortezza guarding the town. East meets west here for sure, with lots of Turkish mosques and minarets intact and the lovely Venetian houses, fountains, and palazzos. My hotel was the exquisite Veneto Executive Suites (www.veneto.gr) – a 14th century manor house, replete with sweeping marble staircases, indoor tinkling fountains, a serious wine cellar, flower draped balconies, stone archways and modern plumbing.


In the Old Town, some of the narrow winding streets are reminiscent of the real Venice (without the stinking canals and rude tourists), with the enclosed wooden balconies (sachnisia) and stonework. Lots of cafes and restaurants, interesting shops, museums, the Fortezza, and a pretty harbour front walk make Rethymno a lovely spot to visit. It was fairly deserted of tourists in late February and it is quiet on the weekend, but I expect it rocks in high season. Which is why I am here now :)



I walked the hell out of that town during my weekend there. My arthritis was screeching, but it felt fantastic to just get out and roam on my own. When I had enough (and my knees protested loudly), I once again hopped the local bus and made the 45 minute coastal drive back to Chania. Next week: Heraklion and the archaeological sites.