Mesimeri in Rethymno

The Greek word mesimeri means "midday" and it refers to the quiet time between 2:00 PM and 5:00 PM when the stores close and traditional Greeks take an afternoon nap. Since we're trying to fit in, we organized our day around this custom.

This morning we (actually, I; Kathy got up much earlier) got up a little after 8:00 and had a nice, leisurely breakfast. We had no pressing engagements, and Rethymno is small enough that we'd already seen the major sites. All we had to do was to buy a SIM card. Easier said than done.

We had earlier seen a store advertising the predominate Greek mobile phone provider, Cosmote. When we went out to find the store, though, we couldn't remember where it was. We did see several sights that we had failed to notice earlier, such as the Rimondi Fountain shown here. We asked about the Cosmote store several places, and finally found a generic provider in the Old Town. However, the store was filled with Greek customers, was completely chaotic, and the clerks really didn't understand what we were talking about.

This took us until almost 11:00 AM. We went back to our hotel (where we have WiFi) so we could use Google Maps to find the "official" Cosmote store. Along the way, Kathy was fascinated with the different coverings for the underground utilities. The official phone store was not far away, and was much larger. However, after waiting in line for about a half hour, the clerk told us they didn't have any SIM cards today; maybe tomorrow.  While we were out looking around, we happened across a Vodafone store. There, we had much better luck. It was still a small wait, but by 12:30 Kathy had her cell phone working with data.

After this, we walked down to the beach, south of town, and looked for a place to get a soda and a bite to eat. We were pretty hot and sweaty, but we finally found a nice cafe under some trees where we spent an hour and a half relaxing, having a little food and reading our books, next to some anti-capitalist graffiti.

Of course, by now it was 2:00 PM, the start of mesimeri, so we hurried back to our rooms to nap. The air-conditioning was a real draw too. We laid down and read, and I conked out until almost 5:30. Then we got up and left to visit the old Venetian Fortress on the top of the hill.

During the 1500s, after the fall of Cyprus to the Ottoman Empire, Crete was the largest remaining holding of the Venetian city-state. The Rethymno fortress was started in 1570, but finally fell to the Turks about seventy-five years later.

The building with the dome was originally the Venetian (Roman Catholic) Cathedral of San Niccol, but was converted by the Ottomans into the Mosque of Sultan Ibrahim Han. It's currently partly restored but isn't in use.

We spent several hours walking around and looking at different buildings. There were several smaller buildings with domes, like this one Kathy is standing in front of.

I liked the plants growing out of the buildings.

The view out over the town was spectacular in every direction.

Further down the hill is the Orthodox church of Agia Ekaterini (St Catherine), dating from the late 19th century. The doors to this were closed but there was a small gap where I could peek in and see the icons at the other end shining back.

My iPhone was able to get a better picture than my eyes could. We spent more than two hours walking around and exploring the top of the fortress. When the sun set, it was spectacular.

After that, we walked back to town for dinner. It was already 7:30 and some of the restaurants had opened and had a few people sitting at them.

We had a nice dinner: Greek salad, Mizithra cheese, hummus and moussaka. Afterwards, we walked back through the streets where the restaurants were now starting to fill up, and had some great gelato for dessert. Tomorrow, we catch the 10:00 AM bus for Chania at the West end of the island.