Day 3 of TCW and Rethymno

Hey guys! So we were behind a day with our posts, I posted Day 1 yesterday and Doreen posted Day 2 just now. I am not quite tired yet, darn jet lag, so I will do my best to tell you all about today!

Today was day 3 of The Creativity Workshop. Or as Dr. Singh called it, the camel's hump. We woke up on time (yay!) and had breakfast in our hotel. Which, by the way, is absolutely enormous and has anything and everything you can think of. Today I indulged in smoked salmon with a fried egg. So delicious!

The workshop today was my favorite so far. Our homework yesterday was to collect 10 things that could fit in our hand, all together. We wondered why and today we found out! We placed all of the things on a paper and passed it to the person sitting to our right. Then we were told to create a play, making each of the objects have a voice. We had only 10 minutes of complete silence to create it. It reminded me of Mark Twain and his storytelling. Every year when we take the 5th grade to the Mark Twain House and Museum, we learn about how Samuel Clemons used objects on his mantle in his Hartford, CT home to tell stories to his daughters. 

After the workshop ended we hopped on a bus to Rethymno. Rethymno is exactly one hour from Chania and let me tell you, it's completely different. Sure, it has beautiful bright blue waters with breathtaking views and even has the Fortress of Fortezza with similar stories to the Venetian Harbor Lighthouse. However, the streets are smaller, the shoppes are not as "touristy," the cafes are cuter--hard to believe but they were!!

We walked around for a bit when we arrived at 2:30 to find something Italian to eat...Doreen was craving it! We found a brick oven pizza and crepe cafe. Check out the pizza I had....it was sooooo good!

We perused the shoppes a bit but then headed toward the beach. We sat on chairs for a bit and went swimming just so we could say that we've swam in the Sea of Crete, Aegean Sea! 

I think I had mentioned in an earlier post that a high school friend lives in Rethymno. Anna Maria met us as we left the beach and became our tour guide. She took us to the Fortress of Fortezza and told us much of the history behind it. It was built by the Venetians in the 1600's. I'll link the Wikipedia for it here!







We walked through the village after and came across an elementary school. It was cool to see! There were children playing football (soccer) in the courtyard and they were happy to let us photograph them showing off their skills.






Time here sure does fly by and before we knew it, it was almost 8pm. Anna Maria brought us to a gorgeous cafe on the water with views of the sunset. We ordered a bunch of plates of delicious Greek food (since we had a local helping us!!!) and all shared. Then Doreen and I speed walked to the bus which departed at 10pm. 

Another long day, but very much worth it!




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gramvousa and Balos Lagoon

Image
Before I even start typing, I'll be honest. Today is July 2. So our last two days of our wonderful learning experience will be typed as truly in the past as they are now just memories, but memories that will be with us for always. Tuesday was our last full day and our last day on Crete. We booked a tour, but nothing like the Samaria Gorge. It was called Gramvousa and Balos Lagoon. There was a photo I found when I first googled Crete and I needed to find the location and take the picture myself. How did I do? Googled photo: My photo: Needless to say, we were definitely in paradise for the day. Our day started by being picked up at 8:30 by another large charter bus. I had already checked out our route so I knew that we were not going to be climbing any mountains or taking any sharp turns over cliffs. However, we were the first two on the bus which meant we had to go along for the ride to fill the bus with other excited lagoon-goers. Cue TCW. One thing that we
Read more

Samaria Gorge

Image
We knew before we came that we would have two full days on Crete after TCW so we booked two excursions: The Samaria Gorge and Gramvousa and Balos Lagoon. On Monday, we did the Gorge. Here is a good site with all the information you would need about the hike:  https://www.west-crete.com/samaria-gorge.htm Our day started at 5am. We had ordered a wake up call from the front desk just in case. I was surprised that I popped out of bed as soon as it came through. I guess I was excited!  Since breakfast wasn't going to be open before our bus came at 6:10am, our hotel packed us a breakfast package. Really it was a Samaria Gorge package that included a banana, water, and two foot long baguette sandwiches. They definitely came in handy and were really quite good! Our bus picked us up in front of the hotel and was already full. We were the second to last pick up that morning. The bus was a regular size charter bus:  I was certainly not prepared for the ride up the mountain. Th
Read more

A Day In Athens...

Image
Going into this day I sang "this is the day that never ends....it will go on and on my friend!!" Lambchop anyone?! What was that show??? After dinner the night before we still had to pack, so we didn't get to sleep until about midnight, Greece time. We woke up at 4:45 am. Boarded the short flight to Athens at 6:15 and landed at 7. by 7:15am we were in our private taxi car with our driver, Spiros. George's Taxi Tour was the company we hired for this day tour and we are so thrilled that we did. Spiros spoke English and took us to all of the must see spots in the time we had.  Here are a whole bunch of photos from our day. Make sure to scroll all the way down!  A summer camp of students walking down the street:  The Stadium: We returned to the airport at 2:30pm and boarded our long flight to New York at 5:30pm, still Greece time. Then we flew for 10 hours! I only slept for about 2 hours on the pla
Read more