"Look But Don't Touch" "What is it with tourists and ice cream? They had some this morning, then again after lunch, and now again with the four-dollar cones, I don't get it!" - My Life in Ruins Eventually I did go to Chania. Elena was exuberant. "Remember-" "I know, I know," I said. "Look but don't touch." Jeez, she'd all but told me to get a bucket of popcorn and set up camp on the beach with a pair of binoculars. She might not have been so excited if she kne...

Timless and Elemental "Many have felt that in the dazzling sun of Greece the psychological dark labyrinths of the mind are penetrated and flooded with light, that in this merciless exposure one is led not to self-exploitation but to self-exploration under the glare of necessity, that to 'Know Thyself' is for all Greeks, from ancient into modern times, the only preoccupation worthy of an individual. Beneath the blazing sun of Greece there is a sensuous acceptance...

Alabaster Bones "Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation." - Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) Once upon a time, a mighty king - or maybe a queen - ruled over Crete from a shining palace of alabaster, a sprawling labyrinth of workshops, magazines (storerooms) and royal bed chambers bordering a central square where 17,000 Minoans passed their days painting colourful frescoes of bull-leapers, making enormous terracotta amphorae to hold the honey and wi...

Alabaster Bones "Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation." - Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) Once upon a time, a mighty king - or maybe a queen - ruled over Crete from a shining palace of alabaster, a sprawling labyrinth of workshops, magazines (storerooms) and royal bed chambers bordering a central square where 17,000 Minoans passed their days painting colourful frescoes of bull-leapers, making enormous terracotta amphorae to hold the honey and wi...

"Always Smile" "The pride and the stubbornness with which the Greeks cling to the best of the old world points out the best in all of us. An epic history of invasion, occupation, deprivation. A powerful wanderlust tempered by a fierce need to return home. It's this uncompromising will, this sometimes incomprehensible strength and obstinacy that years later gives us this: an unbroken circle of tradition, family and food. And like Ulysses, one's eyes always on the...