Crete: the land of 1,000 faces

This past week, I, along with the other 160 people in my program, traveled to Crete for a week-long "educational" field trip. I loved every minute of it.

Crete is know as the land of 1,000 faces. It has a pretty rough history, having been taken over by many, many empires. The only indigenous people that are actually from the island are the Minoans, a civilization dating back to about 1500 B.C. After that, Crete was just a conquered colony of one empire after another, each bringing its own flare and personality of people. This makes Crete a very diverse island. On the mainland, everyone looks fairly similar: brown eyes, brown hair, olive skin, similar bone structure; but on Crete, it's a medley of blondes, brunettes, red heads, green eyes, blue eyes, BLACK eyes, short, tall, thin, heavy, low cheek bones, large chins. People watching definitely was at its peak when I stepped off that boat.

However, I didn't get to do much people watching once my program started its schedule. We went to practically every Minoan archaeological site on the island:

Knossos, Phaistos, Gortyn, Arkani, Hania, you name it. Even for me, an archaeology major, it was quite exhaustive. Our professor lectured us at each site, inevitably drawing a crowd of tourists who got bored of their own cruise-line-assigned tour guides, following us around like lost puppies.

As for the Minoan civilization, we know very little about the actual society, and without literary sources, we can

only gather so much from the architecture. A Minoan archaeologist's catch phrase for anything that doesn't make sense is "it's probably of ceremonial significance." This phrase was uttered so much on the trip that it soon became a running joke. Why is the bus late? It's probably of ceremonial significance. How come there is an extra 2 euro tacked onto our bill? Ceremonial Significance.

While we spent most of our time at archaeological sites, we did venture into the modern world once or twice. We visited a beach town called Matala.

Matala was popularized by a bunch of hippies from the 1960s and 70s who expatriated from America to live in manmade caves (from the Roman times). While the hippies no longer live in the caves, they still roamed the streets. We had lunch there and explored the caves, which were cut into practically sheer cliffs. One of our friends fell, then got stung by a bee, and then dislocated his finger. He was having a little bit of a bad day...but it probably had ceremonial significance.

One of our other modern destinations was the monastery of Arkadi.

It has a beautiful church and rose garden. We spent 45 minutes just wandering around, admiring the amazing yet subtle architecture of the complex.

Most of the towns we stayed in were old Venetian ports. Within the old walls of the town, the streets were narrow and winding, perfect to get lost in. While they allowed for any unsuspecting passerby to drown in the sea of alleyways and back roads, they were easily navigable. If you happen to be lost, all you have to do is walk north (or the direction of the water) and you'll find yourself at the harbor, true for any Venetian city. From there it is quite simple to reorient yourself and find your hotel. Needless to say, I got lost many times.