Tutti Liberi Subito- Best of Travel 2015

Too much cheap bullshit has been blown into the bloodstream of the Internet about how you should be a traveler, and not a tourist, so much so that the original statement has lost much of its meaning. What does being a traveler imply, after all, besides some Instagram shots of the second most interesting thing in a city as the first one is just too mainstream these days.

Thing is, I do instinctively hate organized tourism without having been taught to do so. Always did, even before having anything to do with herds of tourists flocking like hordes of barbarians to the Eiffel Tower, Colosseum or the Houses of Parliament. Though frankly, the barbarians get bad press, roaming around in a time of general continental mess is more justifiable than trampling little old ladies for a selfie. One of my worst nightmares is the time I had to grind through the endless maze of the Musei Vaticani to make it to the Sixtine Chapel- and once there, listen to a multilingual choir of ’this is it?!’.

No, that’s not it. ’It’ is that time I arrived in Turin in a fine winter drizzle, which had been advertised by the ever ebullient Italian media as ’forti nevicate al Nord’, and had to wait about an hour for the most elusive of buses. Under the sheltering umbrella of another transportation victim, I could quite literally soak in the city’s motions and rhythms.

Or that other time when I was sitting in the back seat of a car in the most average of villages in Turkish Thrace, watching the most average of summer evenings unfold in a way which was both completely familiar and alien. Or that time I was sitting in a cafe in Vienna, sipping a kleiner Brauner and staring into the distance, not really reading my book but listening to the indefinite lull of German surrounding me and saying to myself how, given the right time and place, it’s actually such a beautiful language.

And that time I turned away from the palace in Knossos and gazed over the hills around it, noticing how they shimmered in the scorching Mediterranean sun, hundreds of mirrors used by the locals to ripen their crops even faster- modern world insanity meets Balkan solutions to everything.

Best of 2015- Cats

I was a cat fiend way before the domestic feline became the absolute ruler of the internet. I don’t know how it came to pass, but I just never liked dogs, albeit the first pet I recall was actually our mongrel Vuk (a dog named after a fox called wolf, what can I say), who was ridiculously afraid of thunder and lightning. The scent of his wet fur as he lay shuddering under my chair is still one of the definitive smells of my childhood- but that was Vuk, and he was followed by no other dog in my graces.

Next in line is a cat, Gombóc Artúr (Ignáciusz Bonifác, because he was, as all better cats, an aristocrat and needed an army of names), who got his moniker after a bird who likes all sorts of chocolate, whereas Artúr the cat loved all sorts of meat. But mostly, he was a great philosopher, one of those souls always at rest, always perfectly attuned to the universe.  He was then followed by small cats, large cats, lazy cats, sloppy cats, angry cats, despondent cats, loner cats, vagabond cats, deranged cats- a long line of majestic creatures leading to the minute tyrant of today.

This present ruler of the realm is slightly disgustedly eyeing me as I write this, because oh so obviously, I would be so much better off if I paid her considerably more attention than I do. All my attention, if possible, since according to my father she is a super evil scheming bastard condensed in a tiny ball of black and white fur.

She might be particularly cross that this post is not all about her, as it should be, but contains a random assortment of felines of whom she violently disapproves. Or would do so, if she were awake, but she just decided to give up on her grand plan to take over the world, and went back to sleep. Cats are fickle like that.

This cat in Arad is somewhat upset to be caught red pawed in a foreign garden

Our neighbour's cat doesn't give a damn about being caught red pawed in our shed

My friend Ildi's cat just realized shades of pastel suit him and became pensive

This Greek cat knows that all Greek cats must muse philosophically about the sense of life

This Greek cat is not certain what the sense of life is, but suspects it might be souvlaki

This Greek cat is severely unimpressed

This Greek cat is unhappy with the state of its country's economy and demands foreign help with feeding

This is the Minotaur of Knossos

This is the drawing of a cat, and my own cat thinks it makes no sense here whatsover

My cat's grandson pondering the tragedies of being a black cat

My cat's granddaughter being smug that she's not black

A cat in Istanbul proving that she's more relaxed than Greek cats

This Turkish cat likes milk, while knowing all too well that most adult cats are lactose intolerant

This Turkish cat is auditioning for the cover of Vogue magazine

This Istanbul cat wants to prove that ear hair is the next must have hipster accessory

This Turkish cat is being nonchalant while being outed as an LSD dealer

My cat was telling me I really shouldn't read instead of busying myself with her maintenance

My cat demands she be in Vogue as well

This cat in Szentendre will not be disturbed by your useless nonsense

This cat by the Turkish seaside likes everything that is blue

The Land of Resin Wine- Greek Holiday Part Three

Before getting into the thick of this post, which will cover the essential topics of what to see and what to consume on Crete, I might as well share my hopeless attempts of making sense of the Greek language, yet another mirror to the always changing Hellenic soul.

The attempt to google a definitive alphabet was the initial failure- well, there’s this version, and that, and some diacritics were used up to a point, but not any longer, then there’s different letters for the same sound, and the difference is historical and makes no logical sense whatsoever if you’re not a scholar of Ancient Greek. The very fact that they often use a year to pinpoint the start of Modern Greek, that of the fall of Constantinople, of course, which has nothing to do with linguistic aspects, is a bad sign already. The need to add the year to a present day Greek’s language resume has always amused me- it would probably be very difficult to provide customer service in Ancient Greek these days, though of course one could ponder the exquisite joys of yelling ’This is Sparta!’ over the phone to a befuddled Athenian who lost the password to her papyrus.

So try as I might, I still could not get beyond the hello and thank you, but I can spend a jolly good time ogling the Greek side of a menu and still not know what the hell I am about to order.

What to Eat and Drink. The drinks part is the easier one: don’t drink bloody continental lagers and ridiculously overpriced cocktails. Fix, Alfa and Mythos are great summer beers, plus there’s the usual array of ouzos and local brandy, going by the name of either raki or tsikoudia. In a slightly confusing touch, raki is indeed the soul brother of Romanian rachiu, so essentially grape brandy, and not of the geographically closer lying Turkish rakı, which is, logically, ouzo. (If you were not confused enough, raki and tsikoudia are known as tsipouro in other parts of Greece.)

Local wines can be a bit pricey in restaurants, but you can always opt for a decent house wine in a carafe or for the nec plus ultra of Greek drinks- retsina, resinated wine, most definitely an acquired taste, but totally addictive once acquired. Legend actually has it that in undiluted form it killed some Viking kings, which is no mean feat, but the only trauma I can vouch for is desperately asking around wine stores for a bottle of the miraculous golden fluid only to be told they have no idea what on earth I’m blabbering about.

The food part is, you’ve guessed correctly, slightly approximative and a tad confusing- but delicious. One has a general idea of what Greek food is, along the lines of tzatziki, Greek salad and moussaka, but the rest of what can be found on the Greek isles comes from the most diverse of sources- quite often old overlords of each particular island, in our case the Venetians (those people did potter around quite a lot in the Mediterranean) and the Turks.

So you can quite often find pasta meals included in the Greek food category without a second thought, and the bean dish which I have always known as Turkish kuru fasülye is also a local staple. Otherwise Crete has all the strengths of the region- wonderful olives, fish and cheeses, and generally all kinds of fresh vegetables and spices. The desserts are of the more Turkish honey sweet variety, like kataifi, but I also encountered small cheese pies which bear a ghastly resemblance to the Hungarian csőröge.

The where to eat part should come as a surprise to no one: try to wander away from the obvious tourist routes and go for tavernas that have at least a couple of locals mingled with the crowd. Because every rule has an exception, one of the best places in Heraklion is located in the very heart of the city, in the Agio Titou square, and happens to be a Turkish fast food- Izmir Kebap. Yes yes, only a hopeless idiot would go for a Turkish kebab place abroad (and not in Turkey), but trust me on this one, it's worth the risk of sounding daft a million times.

What to See. I’ll have to start with a warning: I am most definitely the anti social type of traveler who avoids tourist attractions like the plague. The only such place I ventured to on Crete was the Minoan palace of Knossos, and I paid for it dearly, having to put up with the oafish behaviour of barbaric hordes of tourists. It would probably make the whole visit a lot more comfortable if everyone wishing to enter would be submitted to a quick test of Ancient Greek history and mythology, and only those who passed would be allowed to enter. The rest could eventually be signed up for a short chase by the Minotaur and then sent on their way to never return. This would of course be financially catastrophic for the island of Crete, so there we were, among people who don’t even look at the place, but snap non stop selfies to be immediately uploaded to Instagram: Idiot with Vase, early 21st century.

Idiots put aside, the place is absolutely wonderful to anyone with a genuine interest in Ancient history. It’s not a spectacular place by any means, but I was excited giddy at the thought of Minoans building such a complex structure at a time when my part of the world was inhabited by wild deer and possibly one or two inebriated Thracians.

Heraklion is basically a humbug, but one can spend a pleasant enough evening walking the whole length of the pier in the Venetian port, occasionally spotting plane and boat action and listening to the distant roar of an open air concert performed by what could very well be the Cretan cousin of Avicii. (That man will haunt me to my grave.)

The old cities of Chania and Rethymno are much more exciting though, with lots of nooks and crannies to be explored- a belated thank you to La Serenissima and the Ottoman Empire for making the Mediterranean an exciting place for future generations by their constant meddling, bickering and conquering this and that, thus producing a fabulous mixture of cultures. This was most probably lost on their contemporaries, who saw them as the never ending nuisance that they were, but time has this gift of painting over the ugly parts. Another exciting escape on the northern shore is Agios Nikolaos, which is postcard pretty and claims the fame of featuring in the BBC series Lotus Eaters, and generally being a darling of the European jet set in the 60s and 70s. 

All these places on the north coast are connected by the famous E75 European route, which begins to the east of Agios Nikolaos, in the town of Sitia, and goes all the way to Vardø in Norway involving two ferry crossings in the process (Chania to Athens and Gdynia to Helsinki) and also passing through the fair city of Budapest. 

There's of course so much more to see and do, but one week is definitely not enough for an island the size of Crete (another useful tip here, I'm on a roll), especially if you want to give yourself time to enjoy the beaches as well. And yes, because we shun the mainstream, we did not make it to either Elafonisi (the Barbie pink beach) or Vai (the palm tree beach), but Crete is just too good not to go back- so probably, one day, we'll simply have to give in.