ReCrete-ing, Part II

For our second day, we drove to the capital city of Heraklion--a beautiful drive along the coast/ through the pine forests/the mountains. 

We saw Knossos (with perhaps one-tenth the number of tourists as the first time I went), and then stopped along the way back at the quaint town of Bali. Which was a ghost town. All the shops and restaurants were closed up tight. We saw all of five people total driving through the entire town. But it was still beautiful.

Then we stopped at the third-largest city of Crete, Rethymnon. After some very stressful and confusing driving on much too narrow streets, we found a parking spot and walked around the Venetian fort and down the old cobblestone streets.

On our way back to the car, we paused for gelato (delicious Nutella gelato!), and within a minute of us refusing a seat in the warm, sheltered gelato shop, instead taking it in a to-go cup, it began to rain buckets. It poured, and poured, and poured...finally we had to just bite the bullet and sprint through the flooded streets back to our car. It made for another very stressful drive back to Chania.

For dinner we went to the highly-recommended Italian restaurant in Chania. It was a beautiful restaurant, with little fairy lights pressed into the ceiling and twinkling like stars. The food was a refreshing break from Greek food: beef carpaccio, delicious pizza with arugula, asparagus, and prosciutto, and a "pork parmesan" dish that was the best pork I'd ever tasted in my life (and reminded me of a childhood-favorite that I used to order every time we went out to eat at one restaurant in Bloomington). 

At the end of the meal, in traditional Cretan manner, they brought us alcohol and dessert--with an Italian twist. The liquor was a dessert wine rather than raki, and the dessert was handmade truffles 

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We spent our last day in Crete wandering the streets of Chania--a really beautiful city

We ate a fantastic last lunch of Cretan salad, stewed beef with zucchini, "BBQ" chicken (nothing like barbecue but deliciously flavored and tender), and cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and served with Greek yogurt. Then we headed off to the port to take the ferry back to Piraeus. (Also, small world: on the ferry back, a middle-aged Greek man walked by and I kind of stared at him, he kind of stared at me, and he looked really familiar...but what Greek people did I know in Crete? Then he smiled and said "Rethymnon?" and I remembered he had been sitting in the same cafe as us at Rethymnon! He told us he was on the Athens police force, was on a break in Crete, had visited his brother in New York...and that was where his English comprehension ended. Quite funny to recognize someone, though).