On-the-Road Tales

I met up with some other backpackers and we were all hoping some people would be waiting at the dock to offer us rooms since no one had prebooked. Wrong. Guess They do not want to get up at 0600 either! We took the bus into town and made some calls to guesthouses which no picked up either. A Canadian and I decided to go enjoy the early morning sunrise on the waterfront to wait for something to open. Beside us an old greek man walked up carrying a fishing line in hand and dropped it beside us. As we chatted about finding a beach to swim in later on, he tugs on the line and pulls up an Octopus! Holy cow. I have never seen such a thing. It was sidling around on the concrete in all directions, it was insane. This guy gets down and starts petting it! It was pretty cute I have to admit and he helped it on its way back into the water. He smiled and walked off. Bizarre. Octopus sighting was not a planned event at dawn…

We walked down an alley where a women was standing outside and asked us if we were looking for a room. As a matter of fact..we were. The rooms were ready by the time we finished breakfast. Mine was a lovely topfloor place with a view of the water. I had to go outside ont he roof for the bathroom and shower but otherwise not bad for the same price as my hostel. One thing about Greece is they can not decide on the anglicization of names so everything is speeled different ways. (Hania, Chania, Xania). Fortuently, through a year of the cyrillic alphabet in Russian classes and a decade of mathematical equations of sigmas and thetas, I can sound out any greek word enough to figure out the maps.

The Canadian and I had dinner on the waterfront and enjoyed a fresh fish sampler platter. I had a morsel of guilt as I bite into a smaple of Octopus, possibly our friend form this morning. I hesitiate to call my friend Canadian because she is actually from Montreal. Her native french speaking accent is thick and her english broken. She is about the fourth person form Quebec I have met along my travels and I find it fascinating that they do not really identify themselves as Canadians. In fact, they say things like, I have absolutely nothing in common with those people. No wonder they want to succeed. While, I may not have a whole lot in common with someone from lower louisiana, I am not sure I would see the need for their breaking off into a new country either. Just a thought.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 3:45 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.