Crete started with another issue with the hostel room, but ended with wishing I’d never left. ’SO YOUNG’ hostel itself was gorgeous and the people there were incredible, to the degree that I asked everyone there how they’d get the position and how I could as well. This time I was prepared, I asked what they had available for the night as they had double booked and whether it would be cheaper book BOOK WHAT???, to which the answer was yes. It was fine and that worked for me. I was planning to explore a bit, but I’d done enough big girl things today, and I wanted mousakas and a bottle of wine. After I had achieved this, along with a beautiful addition of Saganaki (at Chagiati, opposite So Young Hostel), I went shopping for my cheap dinner options for the week. This took longer than I thought as I was slightly tipsy and having to google translate most things from Greek into English (until I realised I should do it the other way around to find what I actually needed), but I ended up paying around fifteen euros for Pasta, Sauce, Parsley, Baby Spinach, Sardines, breakfast bars and an overpriced ice tea (I just HAD to have apparently). One of my favourite things to do is cook slightly inebriated, so the fact that I got to do this in a hostel in a foreign country made my day. The girl who was on reception when I arrived, who I later made quite good friends with despite me seeing her as overwhelmingly cool and platonically ‘out of my league’, was speaking Spanish to the girl I was sharing the kitchen with, and I got to flex my broken Spanglish, and make my first friends at the hostel. A cute, wholesome, successful day all around, despite my intentions of an early night with extended skincare routine.
The next day I took a slow and therapeutic shower, then got started on the reason I had come to Crete in the first place, my research project on mythological beasts. I’d wanted to see the labyrinth and Minoan palace of Knossos since I knew about the myth of the Minotaur, probably I testified with my obsession with bulls as the most stereotypical Taurus sun you’ll ever meet. Now, only the palace was in existence but I dressed in my most main character outfit of a white slip dress, plaid shirt, chunky trainers and red Marlborough branded bucket hat (which has been branded the ‘fag hat’ in varying degrees of affection) and toddled off for another day like the one at the Agora in Athens. Somehow I resisted every single shop on the route to the Venician castle and Port, where I’d planed to get the hop-on-hop-off bus tour around Heraklion, getting off at Knossos and (later) the Archaeological Museum (there were two companies that had busses leaving from this stop, but the ‘open tours’, NOT the Crete one, was the cheapest and perfectly fine). The views, ride and narration were perfectly touristic. I’d spent too long scared of the tourist busses lest any pick-pockets or nasty men see me as the tourist I was and take advantage of me, but I’d still always wanted to do it. Wind in my hair, sun on my affectionately controversial hat, being told everything I needed to know about the wonders of Heraklion - I arrived in Knossos, overwhelmed with the beauty of the place. I had an audio tour I’d got through ‘Get Your Guide and Clio Muses’, which was okay, but the directions pissed me off after an hour and I went along my own self-guided route. After the heat had drained every drop of energy from my body, I waited for the bus to continue my tourist tour, whilst eating the pasta I had made last night. I was tired, but it felt perfect - the perfect view, perfect timing to eat. I stayed on the bus, romanticising my surroundings, until the Archaeological Museum , where I wandered around taking notes until my feet were screaming. I took pity on my body and had every intention of a speedy return to the hostel, but ended up taking a lovely bimbl-ey walk back, chatted to my new french roommate, feeling a mix of sad and proud that the others had left while I’d been out on my early-start adventure.
The restaurant that I ate dinner at definitely deserves it’s own paragraph. The restaurant, Peskesi, was just something I stumbled across on Google Maps and Trip Advisor and, happy with the rating, I set off, to find a queue of groups being turned away at the door, told they would have to wait until the weekend until there was space. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered something like this in my life, but I felt like chancing it, because I was on my own. Luckily I caught the eye of a really cute guy who worked there and started the ‘Do you have any space for little old me’ spiel (which wasn’t really a spiel, I only got a table because it was right in the corner of the courtyard and I doubt many people come to a restaurant like this accidentally). After ordering a glass of wine from Chania, I realised I was seated next to the male section of a wedding party who spoke in a mix of German, Greek and English , only one of which I could sufficiently eavesdrop in, and thus arrived my evening entertainment (I don’t quite understand how men’s minds work). Chatting away to the man who had given me the table, and wanting to look impressive in front of him, I said I wasn’t sure what to pick, everything looked so good, blah, blah, blah, to which he suggested I get snails for the starter and order the main and anything else when I had finished. So I ordered the snails. It only sunk in that I had ordered a bowl-full of (essentially) roasted slugs for dinner when the arrived to the table and I had to ask the guy I had been trying to build a flirty rapport with how the hell I was supposed to open them. But hey, now I know how to remove snail ‘meat’ when its cooked and that I actually quite like them, especially when they’re drenched in seasoning, olive oil and rosemary and I can receive validation from someone I’d developed quite a crush on in the last twenty minutes. After this I ordered chicken with olives, vegetables and rice, simple and sophisticated, and a cheesecake to finish. Here I received a text from one of my flatmates asking when I was coming back to Glasgow. I hadn’t really considered that this was my last properly solo visit, and I felt nowhere near ready to return to the paranoia and problems of Glasgow and my flat. So this question threw me, along with very dry and reluctant conversation that not even the desert and Raki on the house could fix. But I wasn’t about to let a mini wobble ,which had only set me off because of what I had mentally applied to the situation, ruin my fancy meal and giddy excitement that I got from the meal, so I went for a Power-walk around Crete to walk diner off and self-cared my angst away when I got back.
The next day called for a relaxing Hostel day - getting back to meditation and journalling, tanning, reading, talking - a cycle of which continued into the early morning, when I realised I had a boat trip to the island of Dia booked for the next day and I hadn’t even started to pack yet. This was easily remedied. I didn’t stress about it like I had in Athens, and the boat trip the next day was beautiful. I was proper sailing; I sat on the side that was tilted upwards with my feet dangling off the side when a girl next to me was sick about ten minutes before we arrived. And then I was snorkelling for over an hour without realising - the only thing above water that I was aware of was that my ass was floating above the water like a mini floatation device, in-front of people I’d only just met. Did I care? Fuck no. They were living their own lives dealing with their sickness and taking instagram pictures, the only person checking in on me was the captain, who’s job it was to look for my floaty butt and check I hadn’t drowned.
After packing and a long sleep, It was time for my departure. The taxi driver spent most of the time talking about economy - Crete is apparently not a place to live, but I’d spent the whole trip thinking about how calming and beautiful it must be to live there. I found my way through security but got pulled up for the (sealed) olive oil I’d just bought, which the lady at the airport shop had told me it was okay to take through as long as it was sealed. I was holding up the queue and had to produce a handful of very crumpled receipts in Greek to prove my story.
Heraklion is a nightmare tin-pot airport. Period. It’s such a beautiful place but I should have taken the taxi driver’s annoyance as a warning about how much of a nightmare it is to fly out of at the weekend - 140 + flights between 06:00 and 24:00, trust me, we counted in the traffic. A very fragile Hannah went into girl-boss mode to get to the gate, reading a book by Carrie Fisher, which felt ironic as I help off the symptoms of my own mental health. As I boarded the flight, I received an email from Aegean, ‘We’ll have to rush…’, telling me the flight was going to be late and all of the layover time I had given myself to self-regulate would be taken away. It was completely out of my control. Four words which are enough to bring girl-bosses, man—bosses, and they-bosses to their knees. All I could do was stave off my rising panic attack for the hourlong flight and sprint in my crocs to the gate. Then the bus back to the terminal to get to the gate wouldn’t set off. Somebody had a pram that had been lost or needed help loaded on the bus, and all I could think (apart from a string of varying curse words amongst hyperventilated breaths hidden behind a mask where all I could smell was my coffee breath) was how much I wanted to be that child. Blissfully unaware, being loaded on and off transport strapped in to my little safety bubble of a pram by two caring parents. It reminded me of holidays with my parents and how it formed the way I had dealt with the airport; the masked irritation and panic, the solution searching and delayed freak-out until I had my own space to do it in, finding loopholes like stuffing four jackets together to get through the baggage drop. The gift of dissociation allowed me to process these thoughts once I’d auto-piloted myself to my seat, wearing obnoxiously large sunglasses covering puffy eyes and a mask that co-ordinated with my sundress to hide my red cheeks and slightly snotty nose. Now I was dealing with all of that myself. I was both the kid in the pram and the caring parents.
Am I just wanting to be looked after? Self-advocation had been intense, and I wanted a hug. I’d look a bit weird giving myself a hug on the plane, but I still took care of myself by getting to the flight and writing on the plane to calm down. I can crave both types of care; from myself and from others! I can be both; calmed and caring, or dramatic and dead-behind-the-eyes! The puffball princess reading Homeric Hymns in the Agora or with obnoxiously large sunglasses writing a blog on the plane, and the panic attack princess. It’s not glamorous 24/7, as much as I might want it to be, but it’s okay. Which is better than it’s been at other times. So the Aegean wave tried to wipe me out and knock me off of my board again, but I don’t really know how to surf, so being in the water is almost as much fun anyway.
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