A few days spent hiding out from the rain in the old quarter of Rethymno allowed us to really savour the strange mix of real and tourist Crete that live together there. I thoroughly enjoyed watching little old kerchiefed ladies, burdened with the days shopping, waddle by disoriented groups of beefy German tourists. Glancing sideways through open dooways while walking the narrow streets of Rethymno one can still catch a glimpse of how the city may have been before mass tourism poured in.
As the clouds cleared out, so did we. Few cars disturbed us as we quietly picked our way through village after village in the mountains behind Rethymno. In spite of Basil's fluent Greek, the locals still insisted on trying out their german on us. One lady, overly concerned with our matrimonial state, proclaimed that we would soon be married. I guess she figured that any halfway normal looking woman following a man around a place like Greece on a bicycle should really be married to the guy. More concerned with where we might sleep, we smiled akwardly and pedalled on. "You'll see!" she hollered after us, "you heard it in Crete and everything you hear in Crete comes true!!"
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