It was very windy today but not so much that we couldn’t go down on the beach. The sea was roaring. I continued reading Sharpe’s Waterloo.Here’s a separate blog post about my holiday books.
We went back to Vatania for lunch – I ordered a roast vegetable club sandwich. I was trying to be healthy but it came with a huge pile of chips. It was all very nice. I can’t remember what Siggy had but I suspect it was probably a fruit salad.
After finishing on the beach we had a look around the back road but there wasn’t much to see. We found a big supermarket and bought a box of Greek equivalent of Sterident tablets to sterilise our metal water bottles. We popped in to Cafe Ela K. E. S. I. On the main beach road for coffee before going out in evening. Even with just a couple of cups of coffee they gave us free cake while all around us everything was in danger of blowing away.
While we were getting ready to go out for dinner, Faith No More ‘Midlife Crisis’ popped up on a Nineties playlist on Spotify. I wondered what an early-90s student Matt would make of 2019 Matt lying on his back rubbing aloe vera after-sun cream into his burnt belly. My moment of reflection over, we hopped into a taxi for 5 euro to the harbour/old town area.
We visited Loggia Restaurant for din-dins. Loggia is a small garden taverna situation off one of the many small alleyways in the old town. Siggy ordered some very nice lamb chops and had some grilled octopus. Before the mains arrived we were given some bread and three dips egg plant, ricotta and some chilli ricotta – it had something green with a kick in it anyway. They gave us free blamanche with melon and a sweet dessert wine type thing plus more raki.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. The bars along the main front of the town are everything that’s wrong with the over-commercialisation of the Greek tourist industry. For some reason we tried My Place for some drinks accompanied by over-loud bangy-bangy music.
Bass for your face Crete! This yoof music was competing with Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ from a rock bar next door. ‘If only I’d worn my ‘Wish You Were Here’ tee shirt tonight,’ I thought to myself. My Place has over 50 cocktails competitively priced at around 6.50. We ordered a White Russian and a Zombie and waited fucking ages for them to arrive. We couldn’t wait to get the drinks drunk and leave.
We only got as far as Chaplins Rock Bar next door which had better music and a more relaxed vibe about it. I had a large glass of Eza draught beer (my only one of the this holiday as it happens, but it was very nice) and Siggy had an Amstel Radler. The DJ was playing more funk than rock by the time we got there such as ‘Superstitious’ by Stevie Wonder.
We drank our beer, I sneered at the waiters in My Place and watched little neon helicopter kids toys shoot up in the sky – this year’s laser pens – sometimes they got stuck in the palm trees that line the main road. ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ preceded Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’, then we had ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Creatures of the Night’, ‘Union of the Snake’, Mungo Jerry’s ‘Summertime’ and Hendrix ‘Purple Haze’. Then the music took a bit of downward turn with Fleetwod Mac and Eric Clapton. We saw a kid with his fingers in his ears and Siggy tried to make an intervention – suggesting ‘Chelsea Dagger’ and/or ‘Midlife Crisis’. The DJ told her that it was ‘a bit too early’ for Sweet Child of Mine – it was Sunday after all.
While we were waiting for our tunes to play some random fire jugglers turned up and performed and the music got a bit wild with lyrics such as ‘crazy bitch but you fuck/look so good’ (‘Crazy Bitch’ by BuckCherry) and ‘I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket’ (‘Short Skirt Long Jacket’ by Cake). None of Siggy’s suggestions got played before we left, I guess we shouldn’t really rock up to a bar and demand they play our tunes even though it’s obvious our tunes are better than anything they might have thought of! lol
On the way back we had a bit of a sing-song and I Googled ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ on my phone to discover there are only two verses and that we weren’t indeed going mad. I wondered how those two other drunkards that had been on our flight were getting on.
The man with the Guinness tee-shirt and his wife were staying at our hotel but apart from that no one else on our flight were there. Five star baby.
couchmagpie 