CAR-KNEE-VA-LEE

Found:  One Castle Turret from last year

Exactly a year ago, I had just had my last day of work in London and we had spent the weekend packing our old car to start the drive down to Crete. I well remember the freezing cold wind and K clearing out the top box removing wellingtons and warm coats to put up in the loft - “because we would not be needing foul weather gear in the Southernmost tip of Europe”. How much we have learned in that year, and how we wish we had brought all those things with us! We still hope to get back into the loft in the UK and retrieve our winter layers because Crete has had the coldest, wettest winter ever and we know that if we get all our belongings with us, it is almost bound never to happen again!!!

It is hard to believe that we arrived in Crete a year ago on 'Clean Monday', the Orthodox equivalent to Shrove Tuesday and, by now, we should have cleared all the rich, fatty foods out of our store cupboards in order to to spend a healthy, lean 50 days (!) living on lentils, beans and fresh vegetables. These things are all so good here that it is actually not really a hardship and apparently, we are allowed to eat meat on Sundays – so things aren't really that difficult.

Carnival Weather at last!

We had never really experienced Carnival, so K and I set off with lots of party food and some fancy dress in the car on Saturday morning and not at all sure what to expect. We had heard that the music and impromptu musical instruments (air horns, trumpets and whistles) made things very noisy indeed and too much for lots of us oldies. However, the atmosphere on Saturday in the town was very jolly and a few fancy outfits appeared walking up and down the streets which increased as the evening drew on.  As night fell,  the music got louder and there was lots of activity in the town square where we were all drawn into long lines of Greek dancing.  It was a big crush, but despite all the jostling, very good natured and not a bit of trouble anywhere.  The aim of the evening was to welcome the Carnival King and teams from the previous year gave last year's Carnival costumes a second wearing. On the way back from our perambulations, we bumped into our friends Kate and Luc looking magnificent.

Luc and Kate in last year's attire for Saturday night

Sunday was the big day itself and we set off for a walk along the sea front and were relieved that it was so lovely and sunny. Anna and I decided that it was a bit like working at an enormous complex of film studios where dragons with long horned tails collided with spacemen and court gentlemen and ladies thronged along the pavements with sailors, pirates, smurfs and cowboys.  Roman centurions jousted with doctors and nurses, and little girl fairies were holding hands with dragonflies. We just sat and drank our coffees while the whole spectacle unfolded before us. My home-made decorated hat and carnival mask looked a bit tame compared with all this, but everyone had made an effort – so it was good to join in.

Three coffees please!

At 1.30 all the roads were closed by the police, and things began to quieten down as everyone made their way to the main road for the carnival route. We bumped into our friend who had been up there taking photos, but even though he was much taller than us, he had not been able to see anything and said the noise was horrendous - especially the thousands of whistles.  We realised that we would get a better view of all the floats and teams on the big screen TV in our local cafe/bar - Galero. It was easily the best place to be, and about 25 minutes after each team had strutted their stuff in the carnival parade, they all arrived back from the throng walking past the 'Galero' in gangs of red, gangs of green, gangs of blue – amazingly costumed and all in very good spirits. Demitri our friendly waiter at the Galero had taken on a piratical persona for the day.

The Galero did a roaring trade, especially when the parade was over!

The scale of Rethymno Carnival was enormous. There were 46 teams entered – each team had at least twenty to fifty members. Our friends, Kate and Luc were in a team of 600 – all dressed as rabbits! The costumes were wonderfully made and we wondered if the production of these outfits contributed the total annual income for a factory or seamstress. Kate and Luc tell us that there is a great social life involved to belonging to a team with lots of opportunity to meet people at parties before and after the Carnival is over.

Rabbits Galore - 600 of them - including Luc and Kate

After an hour or so, many of the carnival teams had walked back and congregated where we were and the pavements were heaving. By 7.30 p.m. every cafe and bar which had opened especially for the day was full to bursting and we repaired home to finish up party food and collapse on the sofa, but parties of characters were still roaming up and down the narrow streets and we kept peeping over the balconies to catch up with the fun.

Not sure what these people were portraying...

So, today is 'Clean Monday' – the day for going on family picnics and flying kites. On our journey home from Rethymnon to the village, every road junction was filled with stalls selling brightly coloured kites and the wind was blowing wonderfully! The weather had been perfect for everything all weekend.

These costumes looked great against the Venetian buildings 

The last blog promised a report about the rest of the week, which had been a very busy one – with three trips into Rethymnon. Art School on Tuesday was wonderful. All of us have been finding the winter time hard going and need the time together to exchange views, friendship and enjoy each others' skills. We have had the extra inspiration by having a life model for the past few classes and on this day we were concentrating on making portraits. For fun, the group took a handful of damp clay and made a small portrait head to give us all the idea of the “all round” view of the person and then we took to paper and paint to produce our portraits. It was great and I would like to do a few more, if I can find someone to model for me. There are some fantastic faces here in the village but I do not know if it would be politic to set about drawing any of them! 

20 minute sculpture.  Line up of the usual suspects!

 The Archaeology talk about Crete versus Cyprus gave us lots to think about because the history and development have obviously varied considerably. It would be good to take a look at the artefacts – ceramics and jewellery mainly – to see how different the separate schools of art and crafts compare in the two island cultures. I think some museum trips are needed before too long to see everything first-hand - the slides illustrated beautiful designs in both cases.