rhodes town day three

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So here I am in the old town of Rhodes, which is the biggest, most well-preserved medieval town currently inhabited in Europe. It is incredible. Narrow streets paved with small round stones standing up very close together; storefronts that look exactly like a house; Byzantine, Greek, and Turkish architecture everywhere. We arrived here late on Thursday night after a wavey ferry ride and got lost for an hour in the labyrinthine Old Town. Our pension owner was kind enough to wait up for us, and as the two-bed room with a shared bathroom we'd reserved was out of comission, we got a room with a big double bed and its own bathroom, for the same price. Nice.

The place we're at is very nice; Pink Elephant Pension. (A pension is like an inn; the ones I've stayed in are in nice old buildings with lots of character, run as a labour of love by Italians or Germans who have come to Greece after their "retirement". Cheap and comfortable, very unique. A good way to go.) The owner, this nice Italian lady, brings us this wonderful four euro (!) breakfast with bread and cookies and yogourt and fruit and tea and orange juice. And not just the powdered Kool-Aid shit they feed you everywhere else in Greece, but REAL ORANGE JUICE! God, you don't know what you love until you miss it. Real coffee too, not just the Nescafe they love so much here.

Over the last couple of days, Kathleena and I have done day trips to Lindos (a whitewashed little town on the southeast coast with a nice little beach and it's own acropolis atop a hill that affords wonderful views of the surrounding coastline and hills. awesome, but touristy), and today to Glyndos beach; we'd read that it was one of the best in Rhodes, but I think we ended up at this gravelly resort beach instead. So it was okay, but beach is beach with sun and sea, and that's never ever bad.

On the way down from the Acropolis in Lindos on Saturday, we stopped in this pottery shop; we were drawn inside by the most unique, wonderfully shaped and coloured pottery. I bought a gift, for someone. They will love it. The shopkeeper, a corpulent man listening to jazz in the back of the shop, was very friendly; we must have talked (or rather, listened) for half an hour, to everything from his love of Manhattan, the medicinal properties of raki, to winter clothing advice, of all things. Apparently you have to "feel the cold, but never get a cold." In order to do this, you must always wear a hat, a scarf which must hang unknotted around your neck, two nylon shirts over a thin cotton shirt, good woollen socks and good shoes.

Imagine. A Greek giving cold-weather clothing advice to a Canadian. But that's what they're like; I'll get more into that in a later entry.

We have had a great time absorbing and being absorbed by the old town here in Rhodes. You can walk down road that look the same as they did six hundred years ago, see buildings that were built by the Knights of St John. The way the Knights worked is that they were divided into groups called "tongues" based on their country of origin. So in the Knights' street along the north wall of the old town there are a bunch of medieval buildings that housed each individual tongue; the English, French, Italian, Aragonian, Provence, Spanish, etc. A lot of history here in this old fortress town.

So we were wandering down that street, and took a turn through a couple old empty buildings, went up some stairs and ended up sitting in at this rehearsal of this Italian five piece band. They were playing instruments that would have been the norm about five hundred years ago; the instruments that flutes and guitars and cellos evolved from. They played this wonderful baroque music and didn't really even notice us, just let us sit and listen. I made a video with my camera (Thanks Papa!) There's wonderful things hidden everywhere.

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