Chapter Three: In Which We Celebrate Our Newfound Freedom by Going to the Dentist, the Hardware Store, and an Archaeological Museum

On our one-week anniversary in Crete, we awoke bright and early: it was our first day of post-quarantine freedom! We could leave the boat! The world was ours! 

I celebrated by doing what I always do when I want to explore a new place: hitting the pavement for a long sweaty run. There is absolutely nothing in the world that brings me the joy, the elation, and the belief in the goodness of the world and humanity as running. It’s something about the endorphins mixed with the sense of freedom that comes from just lacing up your shoes and heading out the door.

I ran by the sea; I cried out aloud “Beautiful!” and “Stunning!” as the 1980’s concrete sprawl of the marina gave way to a view so absolutely breathtaking that you must cry aloud even if it makes you look like a loon; I stopped mid-run to photograph the sea, the wildflowers, the sun coming over the water. I returned to the boat an hour later, surging with energy and belief in the purpose of the universe.

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Ángel, on the other hand, celebrated our new freedom exactly as all who know him well would expect: he rolled over and went back to sleep. 

But by the time I returned to Gradisca, Ángel was up and already preparing coffee. I bounded on board, high on life: I had gone running, my handsome Spaniard was making me coffee, the sun was shining, and all was right with the world. 

“Darling while you were out, I was able to fix the shower drain.”

I ask you: have such romantic words ever been spoken? 

It was such an idyllic moment that I hated to spoil the atmosphere, but I had a confession to make. Ever since our third day in quarantine, I had been keeping a secret from my husband. This secret involved one of my teeth. 

My teeth are, in a word, horrible. In a few more words, they are weak, porous, and made up of such an array of fillings, caps, and crowns that my dental X-rays glow bright white with more plaster and ceramic than actual teeth. On Day 3, I had bitten into a piece of the rustic Cretan bread (which is very hard and meant to soak up the olive oil and tomato juice that pool at the bottom of Greek salads), and I had promptly cracked off one of my crowns. 

I didn’t tell Ángel when it happened, because he lacks my practiced ease with having teeth regularly fall out of my mouth. Until I could get the problem fixed, I thought, it was better to tell him nothing and save him the worry.

I’m sure at this point, many of you may be wondering: why is Kate talking so much about teeth? Where are the beach photos? The boat tour? I want to assure you that yes, we will get there all in good time. But as somewhat of a connoisseur of dentists, I feel compelled to report my findings regarding Greek dentistry. 

In short: it was an absolute dream. After a basic Google search, I found what appeared to be one of the nicer dental offices in town, walked in with no appointment, they fit me in immediately and proceeded to sterilize and re-affix my crown, using very modern professional tools, all the while explaining the entire procedure to me in perfect English. In less than 30 minutes and a cost of 30 Euros (YES THE ENTIRE COST WAS 30 EUROS) and absolutely zero insurance paperwork, I was in and out with a newly secured crown. 

And while the purpose of this blog is certainly not political, it is worth noting that a similar procedure in the U.S. would have been several hundred dollars and involved appointment scheduling, insurance claims, and paperwork… I now leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, after our early success at the dentist, the rest of the week was a blur of walking back and forth between the marina and the hardware stores, boat chandleries, electronics stores, grocery stores, and cheap import stores as we began working to make our boat livable in a more permanent fashion. 

Looking back on these first few weeks, I’m realizing now that we are incredibly fortunate that when we bought Gradisca, she was berthed in the Agios Nikolaos marina. 

Agios Nikolaos (meaning “Saint Nicholas”) was once a fisherman’s village, and even though it has lost most of its quaint old-world charm in the last couple of decades as cement apartment buildings began to sprawl up its hillsides, it still retains a decidedly local flavor. While a small square downtown is packed with pricey tourist shops and most of the waterfront is made up of cafe and restaurant terraces aimed at foreigners, the rest of the town is made up of shops and restaurants in which locals actually shop and eat. This meant that we could easily trek back and forth between our boat and the less touristy part of town to buy the tools, boat parts, cleaning supplies, food, and other items that we needed to turn Gradisca into (first) a comfortable home and (second) a tidy, seaworthy vessel. 

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Many of you will recall my environmentalism efforts of last year, and at first I begged Ángel to forego buying household items like pots and pans, hoping we would find these in a local thrift shop. But after two weeks of creative cooking using only the baby paella pan, I had to admit defeat: there simply is no concept of buying second-hand in Greece. There are no thrift shops or flea markets. The only markets are either farmers markets with a small adjacent section selling knock-off Gucci-t-shirts or tourist markets with stall after stall of leather sandals and blue evil eye talismans. My beloved thrift shops of San Francisco are a distant memory, and here we have decided that since we can’t buy second hand, we will try to buy one high-quality item and keep it for the long-run. 

We agonized over each purchase, balancing the constraints of (1) space (which was precious in our 1 bedroom apartment, but has taken on a whole new meaning in our 40 foot sailboat), (2) quality, and (3) our budget, which is much tighter now that we are embarking on years of cruising with minimal income. But after numerous trips and much comparison shopping (“But do you have a smaller one? … No, even smaller than that … Like the smallest you have ever seen.”), our little galley is outfitted now with a veritable United Nations of cookware: a French pan, German pot, Spanish pressure cooker, Italian water filter, American blender, and Greek coffeepot. 

And at the end of about two weeks of hard work, we proudly determined that, while we still had numerous tasks to get Gradisca ready for her shakedown sail, we at least had a very comfortably outfitted floating apartment. 

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But if you think that our entire first week of freedom was spent in the dentist chair or trekking back and forth from the marina overladen with shopping bags, you would be only partly wrong. Because we capped off our second week with a whirlwind weekend trip to visit the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete’s capital city of Heraklion, the crumbling Roman ruins in the town of Gortyna, and the Minoan ruins just to the south of Heraklion at the Palace of Knossos. I mean, now what really says “celebration” like a three-day trip devoted to staring at (and filming!) old rocks?

For a bit of background, both Ángel and I have a long list of personal goals to pursue during our years on Gradisca. I want to read and write more and become a more competent sailor. Ángel wants to master both French and Italian and learn about filmmaking. But above all else, we both want to use this opportunity to learn about the history of the countries and regions that we visit and it was this shared goal that found us waking up early, itching with excitement to visit the world-renowned Heraklion Archaeological Museum. 

Crete is often referred to as the cradle of Europe. WIth roots going back over 7,000 years, early Neolithic Crete was one of the earliest European societies. But what sets Crete apart is the Minoan Bronze Age civilization that flourished beginning over 4,500 years ago. Roughly contemporary with Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Mesopotamians, Minoan Crete is equal in complexity, artistry, and development to these other great civilizations.  

Much is still unknown about the ancient Minoans. Their earliest writing system (called Linear A) is still undeciphered, the precise purposes of their palaces (religious? social? Commercial? Some combination thereof?) still mostly guesswork, and there is as much myth and legend about ancient Crete as there is knowable fact. 

But it doesn’t matter. Because the incredible trove of artifacts at the Heraklion Archaeology Museum is better appreciated with the eyes and the heart than simply with the brain. Sure it’s mind-blowing to think of the millenia that have passed since these items were created, but it is far more enjoyable to just soak in the visual feast of pottery, jewelry, frescoes, painted amphorae, delicate jewelry boxes, playful sculptures, exquisite helmets, and so much more and to let the beauty of this ancient culture wash over you. 

Minoan art is unlike anything I’ve ever seen: it’s delicate but still powerful, imbued with the same intensity that I am coming to associate with Crete. Some patterns are jagged and mountain-like, others have softly eddying swirls that mirror the lapping waves, others a twining tangle of octopus tentacles or mesmerizing undulating arms coiled with snakes. There is a powerful sense of shifting, cycling, movement, but from this movement comes a very peaceful sense of balanced forces. 

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Many of the artifacts display scenes of vines, bees, olives, goats, bulls, sardines… and having now lived in Crete for about six weeks, it is incredible to see how these elements still remain a common part of the landscape. From the blue and yellow beekeeper boxes that dot the rocky crags as the bees collect pollen from wild Cretan thyme to the shimmering green-silver olive groves swaying like sea grasses in the breeze, to the homemade wine served in carafes at every restaurant, and the glistening piles of sardines on the fishermen’s boats, the imagery of ancient Crete looks a great deal like these images I see everyday. While some of the Minoan art remains shrouded in mystery, much of it leaves you with a sense of unbroken continuation between past and present that I’ve never felt when visiting ancient ruins.

Some of the art feels so strikingly modern that you can’t believe it’s from 4,500 years ago. And we learned that, in some instances, that’s because it’s not. While much of the pottery, jewelry, and other physical artifacts have survived over the millenia, many of the frescoes were in such poor conditions, that the iconic images we see today are really interpretations from the 1920s. Sir Arthur Evans, who led the archaeological excavations at the Palace of Knossos commissioned the Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron and his son to “restore” the frescoes, but in many instances this turned into more than just a restoration. The famous “Ladies in Blue” for example was designed almost entirely by Gilliéron’s son as none of the women’s faces survived and all are imagined by the later artist. Perhaps the strong influence of art deco design (one of my favorite artistic styles!) is why I absolutely love these frescoes, even though they are a bit of a historical farce. Again, like I said, it’s about appreciating with the heart.

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Now truth be told, I say all this after we’ve been in Crete for almost 6 weeks and I’ve had time to reflect. At the time that we visited the museum, I wish I had been basking in this serene sense of cross-millenial continuity. Instead, it will surprise absolutely no one to learn that in our second week in Crete, Angel and I were still getting the hang of relaxing and tuning into the zen energy flow of this island (spoiler alert: we’re still getting the hang of this). Instead of just experiencing this artistic and historic trove, we were not only trying to cram absolutely every important name, date, and place into our memories, but we were also trying to film these artifacts so we can use the footage to make videos about the history of Crete. I mentioned that Ángel wants to learn about filmmaking and we both want to learn about history, and from this was born the idea of making history videos on YouTube. But as usual with Ángel, he doesn’t want to just make simple videos shot on our phones so while we are complete amateurs, we are already kitted out like pro photographers complete with camera, microphone, gimbal, drone, and GoPro. Now we just have to learn to use them…

We brought our giant camera setup to the museum and I can only imagine what we looked like to the museum employees. At this point, tourism was still banned in Crete (we were only allowed in because Ángel is an EU citizen and we owned property, i.e. our boat, in Greece) so the museum was EMPTY. Each room had 3 or 4 bored museum employees whose purpose was just to watch us and make sure we didn’t film any of the unpublished artifacts. We saw a grand total of 4 other museum attendees the whole day. 

So in this absolutely silent museum we performed for our tiny audience of museum workers a play that I now imagine as “Kate and Ángel Bring Over-the-Top Lunacy to Crete”: 

[Enter stage left, Kate and Angel, each wearing a mask. Kate is dressed for the occasion wearing her favorite museum-going scarf that her father bought for her at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Ángel is balancing a ridiculously large camera on a stabilizing gimbal so professional that he looks ready to shoot someone’s wedding video. It goes without saying that both look completely ridiculous.]

Kate: “Oh my gosh, it’s the Phaistos Disc! We have to shoot this. It’s one of the most important artifacts because the dozens of different inscribed pictograms are one of the earliest forms of writing in Minoan Crete.”

[Ángel proceeds to hover around the glass case with the disc, filming it from each angle. After ten minutes (yes, ten FULL minutes) of zooming in and out, he reviews the footage.]

Ángel: “The bokeh in this shot is pretty good.”

Kate: “Oh my gosh yes it’s amazing.”

Ángel: “We can use this when we discuss the different Minoan writing systems.” 

[Bored museum employees mutter in the background]

Kate: “That’s a good idea. And should we get some shots with movement in them for the voice over?”

Ángel: “Yeah, walk toward the disc.”

[Kate attempting to look like a casual museum-goer, walks toward the disc, peering at it dramatically and squinting to read the inscriptions. She cocks her head thoughtfully. She nods as if contemplating the great mysteries of life. She is about as subtle as Wile E. Coyote pretending not to notice the Road Runner.]

Kate: [breaking character from Pensive Museum Goer] “Did you get it?” 

Museum Employee to Other Employee: [Bored, in Greek] “This is the lamest thing I have ever seen.”

END SCENE

And this continued. For over five hours. 

I would share with you some of the footage we shot that day, but in a truly fitting finale to our debut as amateur filmmakers, some of the settings on Ángel’s camera were wrong and all the footage is tinged with an icy blue so that we look like we’re in some sort of alien spaceship. We’re hoping we can clean it up in post-production and use some of the less cringe-worthy scenes in our history videos, but we’ll see. 

In the meantime, we’re learning a lot. Both about camera settings and how to use all our fancy equipment, but more importantly about how to not let our ambitious plans ruin the opportunity to really connect with a place and be present. These lessons have been hard-learned as I’ll share with you more in Chapter 4. So stay tuned, friends, because your favorite loons are just getting started.

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