Tonight's our last night on Crete. Our last few days here probably couldn't have been more stereotypically Greek; our bodies and our luggage have been overstuffed with food from these amazingly generous Greeks.
We left Chania yesterday and have had a brief stay in Kissamos, a small beach town in western Crete, before a 7 hour ferry ride to the Peloponnese tomorrow. We're in a little apartment in Kissamos and the hosts speak no English, but we--mostly Sam--can communicate quite well with them. When we arrive somewhere new with our significant luggage, we inevitably have to give our hosts our backstory about selling our house and most of our belongings, residing in Greece, etc. But we've gotten reasonably skilled at telling the story in Greek. Poor and ugly as it is, our Greek usually appears to delight them.
The Ever Expanding Meal
It's watermelon season here and so we lugged half of a monster back to our Kissamos place for a favorite summer salad (watermelon topped with olive oil and myzithra, a Cretan cheese that's sort of like chèvre). As we finished our salad, we heard a knock on our door. Our host stood at the threshold holding a plate full of obviously homemade chicken and rice in a lemon sauce. She said she made it with love and she wanted to share it with us. We offered profuse thanks and since she had arrived right after our salad, we started eating our unexpected main course! But several minutes later, there was another knock on the door... This time she brought a homemade spoon sweet of bitter oranges. Now we've got dessert, too! We went back to eating and soon there was a third knock... This time it was her husband at the door, in shorts but no shirt (it's hot), and he had a chilled bottle of raki for us. Somehow we went from a light salad to a full meal thanks to Greek generosity.
Food Fight!!
During our last days in Chania we were invited to celebrate a milestone birthday of our friend the Chef. We went out for a birthday eve dinner and got to hear live music--a treat in these times. We heard
Haris and Yorgos Pantermakis, a famous Cretan brother duo at a restaurant. Greeks at the tables closest to the musicians banged their glasses, tapped their feet, and recorded videos on their phones for several hours. They were
into it!
Greeks have an amazing shared cultural knowledge of seemingly every Greek song ever written---what region it's from, when it was written, and what lyrics make it especially poetic (the craziness and over the top melodrama of Greek lyrics merits a dissertation). Even people who typically seem stoic appear very moved when they hear certain songs, getting a little misty eyed and excitedly telling you 'this is a song from Thrace!' This type of regional music appreciation seems quite different from what we're used to in the States. We'd never say, 'this is a song from the Midwest!' or 'boy, those North Dakotans can play!'
Our chef friend and Sam have been good-naturedly sparring for weeks about him being too generous with us (
e.g the petalides incident). He's given us so many special treats... A fig spoon sweet from foraged figs (which can only be made with male figs--who knew there was such a thing?!). A few weeks ago we finished a watermelon and he ordered us to save the rind so he could make a spoon sweet with it. He came over and pared off the rind, foraged for a special scented geranium, arbaroriza, for the syrup infusion, and a few days later delivered the neon red, delicious treat. And we've consumed large quantities of the olives he brought from his home in Agrinio.
We had to strategize in order to even attempt to return his generosity. I sneakily bought his birthday eve dinner and the look on his face would make you think we had committed a capital offense! We braced for the consequences and indeed, he turned the tables and sneakily bought us drinks the next night, then the next day as we were packing to leave Chania, he inspected our array like a drill sergeant and forcefully tucked even more bottles of his homegrown olives in the last remaining crevices of our bags.
Tomorrow we'll spend most of the day on a ferry with a ridiculous number of olives in our bags. We will be delighted to see them in our new temporary home in Kalamata.
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| Portrait of Sam that I did at the beach the other day |
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| Fig spoon sweet by the Chef |
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| Watermelon rind spoon sweet on yogurt |
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Some of the olives from our friend
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| In Greece, for reasons we have yet to fathom, it's common to see partially empty coffees on almost any flat surface. I created this handy forensic guide to assist in the analysis of abandoned coffee. |
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A Cretan specialty, snails at the birthday eve dinner
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| Spoon sweet of bitter orange in Kissamos |
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| A last view of the Chania old town |
