Summer 2021 - Paris and Crete

Paris 2021

My friends Géraldine and Nicholas have welcomed me in their home for Christmas, so I flew into Charles de Gaulle airport on the early morning of December 23, took the train to Gare d’Nord, and spent a couple of fun hours walking around one of the main shopping areas of Paris, gathering presents. I discarded a lot of weight from my backpack before leaving Pantelleria, so I didn’t feel the need to find a place to leave my luggage, which meant that I was like an elephant in a china shop whenever I entered a magazine, but at the end I completed my shopping and headed to their home, in Triel-sur-Seine. The boys, Theo and Lucas, met me at the train station and a few minutes later I was exchanging hugs and stories with my good friends. Marcel, Géraldine’s father is also here for Christmas Eve, so we will make a happy group of six.

I had spent the night cramped into an airport bench in Milan, so as soon as I sat down in the living room I was asleep, warmed by the sense of relaxation when you get home after a long trip.

Christmas Eve was a fun time of preparation. First of all Marcel woke up even earlier than I did, to go by a few baguettes of fresh bread and brew some coffee. We had a good chat while the rest of the family started to mill around. I took a walk, crossed the Seine, and went to the Carrefour supermarket to buy a plug for my computer (the French plug has a male ground electrode, so my Italian plug would not work). Later Nicholas went back to Carrefour to get some last minute necessaries, while Géraldine, Marcel, and I went to buy legumes to the big Farmer’s Market.

Finally everything was ready, and we opened the celebration with an excellent Champagne and appetizers of Pate de Fois Gras. Then came the main dish, escargot, followed by a risotto with scallops in Hollandaise sauce. Yum! I must say here that this was a true risotto in the sense that it was creamy and fluffy, and not just your regular rice dish. Nicholas must have spent a good hour cooking it and folding it slowly to achieve the perfect consistency.

Christmas Day is the real big celebration in France, so we all woke up early to feverish activity (well, Géraldine and Nicholas jumped into action while I did my best to stay out of their way). Overall cleaning and vacuuming, added leaf to the dining room table to accommodate two new guests, Christmasy table cloth, setting the table, and putting the 2-kg roast in the oven. The new guests were Nicholas’ parents, Geneviève and Jean-Claude, who arrived around 11 am from Orleans, full of energy and good cheer. Here are a couple of funny facts, all three of the parents live in Orleans and all three were born in 1940, so all of them are 82 years old. There must be some truth about the European lifestyle being conducive to old age, because all three are in very good health; I will have to think about them next time I feel like complaining about an aching back.

Shortly after they arrived, we opened presents. It went pretty fast because everyone received his/her presents and then we all opened them at the same time, looking at the other person and saying Merci Pere Noël, without having to take pictures of every single gift. We did take a family picture to celebrate the 2021 Christmas, and with that we went to the table for the Christmas lunch (remember that in Europe the midday meal is the heavy meal of the day). Geneviève brought along her specialty, fois gras de canard, which was absolutely delicious as the opening dish. Then came the roast, which had been cooked to perfection, accompanied by mashed potatoes, mashed carrots, mashed something else I cannot remember, and steamed green beans. Then of course we had to have stinky cheese, dessert, and coffee. Wow, what a meal!

For the next two hours we sat contentedly chatting at the table, after which Géraldine and Nicholas started to agitate about dinner! Oh, my God! I made a feeble protest, which was cut short by Géraldine reminding me that I was probably going to have to live on tomatoes and cucumbers while in Greece.

The following morning the three grandparents took their leave and headed back to Orleans. By the way, in their family grandma receives the name Mami, and grandpa is called Papi. Since there were two grandfathers the kids had to distinguish them as Papi Marcel and Papi Jean-Claude (and even the great-grandmother is Mami Lin). They liked our system of giving different names to the different grandparents, such as Nana, Papa, and Opa.

I was worried that in the last moment Air France was going to ask for me to get a negative Covid test at the airport, so I said goodbye to my beloved Géraldine, and Nicholas and Lucas drove me to the airport at 15:30. It turns out nobody asked me for nothing, and by 16:30 I was already in the boarding area, patiently waiting for my 21:00 flight to Athens. By now I am a specialist on “hurry up and wait”!

Crete 2021

I landed in Athens at 1:00 (yes, that is 1 am), and again sat at the airport waiting for my 8:00 flight to Heraklion in the island of Crete, where I finally landed at 9:00. A still had to walk for about one hour from the airport to downtown (only to later discover that I could have taken the 1 euro bus), but by 10:00 I was installed in the small flat I will call home for the next four days. I spent that day walking through Heraklion, which is a very pretty and lively city, and doing the basic shopping. I am still in touch with my inner Italian, so my “basics” included things like beer, wine, pasta, risotto, and olive oil (plus coffee, sugar, milk, salt, veggies, garlic, and onion). I am sure I once again bought too much, but I live in fear of going hungry.

The following day I devoted to visiting the archaeologic site of Knossos, where old King Minos had his palace. Minos is intimately linked with the story of the Minotaur, whose legend, as described by Wikipedia, is X-rated, but in its bare bones tells us that Minos’ wife, Pasiphaë, gave birth to Asterius, who was called the Minotaur. He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human; and Minos, in compliance with certain oracles, shut him up and guarded him in a Labyrinth near to his palace. As the unnatural offspring of a woman and a beast, the Minotaur had no natural source of nourishment and thus devoured humans for sustenance. In the meantime, the Athenians killed Minos’ son, so he waged war on Athens, won, and forced on them a tribute of seven young men and seven maidens every few years to feed the Minotaur. Here is where Theseus enters the story. The daughter of the King of Athens, Ariadne, was selected to sent to Minos, and upon hearing these news Theseus volunteered to come along and slay the monster. Ariadne gave him a ball of thread, allowing him to retrace his path, and thus armed Theseus entered the labyrinth and with his bare hands (or maybe a hidden AK-47) killed the Minotaur, rescued Ariadne and the others, and lived happily ever after.

Alas, although the remains of the palace of Knossos were discovered, there is no archaeologic evidence for the existence of the Labyrinth. Knossos was excavated by Sir Arthur Evans, the Director of the Oxford Museum in the early 1900’s. He was a hot shot, but was also necio como Ronnie, so he reconstructed the palace with lots of concrete to suit his pre-conceptions, and by now the line between reconstruction and original has become blurred. One thing to say for Evans, though, is that he was a meticulous excavator, so the richness of well-documented artifacts recovered from Knossos is absolutely amazing.

Not that you would know it from the site itself, but I followed up with a visit to the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, which is where the Minoan artifacts are in display. Half of the museum was closed due to Covid (sadly, the part with the frescos), but the pottery, metal work, and stonework that was on display left me speechless. The Minoan civilization starts in the prehistory around 3500 BC, with the complex urban civilization beginning around 2000 BC, and then declining from c. 1450 BC (because of the eruption of Santorini, which triggered a devastating tsunami that hit all ports of the Mediterranean?), until it ended around 1100 BC, during the early Greek Dark Ages. In its zenith, from 2000 BC to 1500 BC, it produced beautiful pieces of art, it boasted two as-yet-undeciphered alphabets, and it dominated maritime commerce all over the eastern Mediterranean.

On the happy note of a tsunami wiping out the Minoan civilization I went to bed.

Mon Dieu! Il pleut des cordes la dehors!

The following day, December 29, I woke up at 7:05 am listening to the crashing rain, and was pondering about the plans for the day when, at 7:08 am, my bed was rocked by a mild earthquake. Well, this is Greece after all, at a complex junction where Africa is squeezing the eastern Mediterranean like a nutcracker. I checked the USGS website and indeed, at 5.7 quake with epicenter just off the south coast of Crete (Heraklion is on the north coast, maybe 40 km due north of the epicenter). Fun!

Today I took the bus to the east end of the island, with the idea of admiring the landscape all the way there and back. Crete is a very beautiful island, and the small towns along the shore are eager and ready to receive tourists. Too bad I am the only tourists now that winter has arrived. I half-heartedly did my job as a geologist and glanced to the mountains that from the core of the island, but I could not get very excited looking at thick sequences of limestones. Cretaceous, I assumed … Crete > Cretaceous? Wrong! The Cretaceous takes its name for the French word for “chalk”, and was defined by French geologists in France. So what are the rocks in Crete? Well, they look like limestones, and go from being flat and undisturbed to being really screwed up. And then we got to the east end of the island and I saw … tectonic slivers of serpentinite and pillow lavas. An ophiolite, which to my Californian mind says subduction zone. Fortunately I could always ask Google, which I did, only to find out that Cretan geology is a real mess! The geologic map looks like it was drawn by Pablo Picasso at the height of his cubist years, and the stratigraphic column looks like someone stacked every odd book they could get their hands on. To European geologists Crete is nothing but the piling up of one nappe after another (presumably by gravitational spreading), with rocks ranging in age from Lower Paleozoic to the Paleogene (yes, I realize that there has to be some Cretaceous somewhere in there). For a California geologist it looks more like an accretionary wedge, where one exotic terrane was underthrusted beneath another as they got caught in a migrating subduction zone. I am glad I am not a Cretan geologist!