I have to apologize: after the fourth day in Crete, I couldn't keep up with the blog, I just had zero time and less than zero of energy to write anything on the laptop. And the week after in Italy didn't help, essentially I spent a week eating, and I didn't turn my laptop on for more than 10 minutes.
Then I came back to Dublin, but again too many things to do, I went to some other gigs (which I'll talk about the next few days), and again no energy to do anything else...
But I don't like to leave unfinished jobs, so lets start from where I left.
The good thing of writing this post after 3 weeks is that now at least I have some more photos to show you, even if from the my 5th day in Crete I've nothing really exciting, unless you get excited with rocks and history.
Anyway, the fifth day was totally dedicated to the culture, and to goats. We started the morning in the Archeological Museum of Heraklion, nice museum, but that's the only thing I could actually say about it.
After that we headed to the ruins of the ancient palace of Knossos, probably the only well kept place for tourists.
It is an interesting place, especially if you are into history like my girlfriend, but even if you are not, unfortunately it's packed of tourists, especially the kind of tourists that do not understand that they cannot do whatever they want, and if the guides say don't climb the ruins, don't feckin do it.
I've also have to say that the tourists guides are like hookers here, like piranas when they see meat, they'll surround you with depliants and with their offer to guide you through the palace for a very good price (for them obviusly).
I generally don't like pushy people, actually they make me a bit nervous and they awake the "rude Alessio" in me, but apparently being pushy in this island is the standard.
Yes, I took a lot of pictures here, but I took them with the idea of showing them to my mother, so don't expect amazing photos, they are grand for my mum, not for me.
After Knossos we did our lunch break to the Cretaquarium, a nice acquarium in a not so nice area (it was build on an old military base), and after plenty of insanely big fishes and a cheap but good lunch, we drove to Phaistos, or at least that's what I thought I was doing.
In fact, the Phaistos my GPS was pretty sure about, it wasn't the Phaistos I was looking for. If you use a free GPS software, and you use OpenStreetMap's maps, it's grand most of the times, but sometimes it could lead you to a different place. After a quite confy road, it told us to turn to a small road, I wasn't sure about this detour, but I don't know the road, how he could be wrong, right????
He was waaaaay wrong, he led us (I know I should use "it", but I like to humanize objects, so I can offend them more easly) to a feckin place in the middle of nowhere, after 10 very, very, very long kilometers on roads made out of rocks and goat shit. I don't know how the tyres survived to that road, but I'm glad they did it somehow. After a few swearing, and a few stops due to flocks of goats, I stopped using that damn thing and I used my brain. After another 40 kilometers, and many changes of directions, we finally arrived to the actual Phaistos, which is NOT ABOVE A FUCKIN LAKE as previously shown on the bleeding map.
Honestly I was hoping that, after that insane road to get there, Phaistos was a place that would blew my mind. In fact, while Knossos is quite well preserved, Phaistos is more like the poor brother of it, it's ok if you are passing on the way to Matala, but otherwise you can skip it.
Obviously on the way back we found the road we supposed to take do in first place, and obviously it took an hour to get back to Heraklion, not two.
Feckin GPS.

Down here some of the most decent photos I took that day. I hope my mum likes them.

Phaistos

The full set for Knossos is available here, while the one for Phaistos is here