crete last week

We went to “The 7^th annual plinius conference on storms in the meditteranean” in rethymno, crete. Well, more accurately philippe went… but we also did some touring around. There are photos of this trip up on our yahoo pix link.

The city of rethymno was inhabited by the ancient greeks, but there are few remnants from this period (3^rd century BC). HOWEVER, the sea-faring Venetians built a harbor and fortress, some fountains and public buildings there around 1200 AD. After that, it was conquered by the turks, and was under ottoman rule for a while.

The historic stuff was interesting, the village pretty, but the best part was our hotel room was ON the beach, with a great sea-view. So we quite naturally went swimming a couple of times.

Lucas was easy to travel with, and enjoyed the continual stream of new things to see, and people to meet. We drove around in the country side oohing and aahing the whole beautiful way, and discovered what it is that the greeks are so proud of their country for. We drove around in the mountains ~where we picked up a piece of fabulous green marble off the side of the road~ and went through some TINY villages, (pop. 12, I am sure) ravines and gorges and found the south coast on a very windy day. (reminded me of big sur.. that is - very curvy roads on mountain cliffs looking over blue water) We also visted the arcadia monastery, which was nice .. thick with history and well-kept gardens. Apparently, about a 1000 cretans exploded their own gunpowder magazine and died rather than give in to the invading turks. Legend has only one little girl surviving to tell the story and grow old.

We watched a lecture and photo presentation of a guy who flew through the eye of rita when it was 897 millibars and a category 5 storm. Most notably, he showed a series of 4 photographs of the computer monitor in front of him getting shakier and shakier as they approached the eyewall, until passing thru the eyewall itself -when he couldn’t even hold the camera up- and took a picture of his lap instead. He said wind speed on the eyewall was 150 knots which is very very fast, like more than 200mph. And he said it felt more like some mach5 nasa simulator than a data collection plane.

Back on earth, We spent quite a bit of time with our friend eric (another frenchy scientist at the Athens observatory - except he studies lightning, where ph is doing long term climate stuff). he introduced us to several superbly nice people (an evelyn and two jean-pierres from toulouse) with whom we shared dinner and stayed out late a couple of nights while in rethymno. Eric also came with us to hania and we found a great little place to stay while we ran around town for a day and a half, and ate dinner at a terrific Turkish restaurant.

Side dish note: one very delicious item was a spicy avocado sauce on top of oven potatoes.. so I am going to experiment around to see if I can duplicate it, but feel free to try for yourself. it looked & tasted like -avocado, yogurt, garlic, cayenne, lemon, with paprika & parsley snips sprinkled on top- it should be fairly easy too,.. unless I missed a critical ingredient… like the potatoes (doh!)

..for my souvenir, I got a 10-euro necklace of my name in greek! Goofy, but cool. I had always wanted a necklace with my name in Arabic too… so I figured I should extend this wish to all foreign alphabets, no?

We think our next trip (whenever that will be) we’ll go to the meteora in central Greece.. then hopefully Istanbul. We’re so close it’d be a shame to miss.

Speaking of turkeys, our friends serra and arnaud are preggy! Congrats to them. and while I’m extending congrats, tricia just had a nice big solo show in Chicago. Get-it girl!