scouting the Outpost, part 2

They make a special bread for Easter in the Outpost. It’s crusty and seasme-sprinkled on the outside, heavy and moist on the inside, dense with cheese and eggs and raisins. I was determined, on this second day, even more than the first, to like it, and everything else.

The hotel arranged an extravagant Easter party for all the guests (it didn’t have quite the sex appeal as the one I went to last year), which included roasted lamb and endless buffets of salads and sweets. The highlight of the entertainment program was “the dance with the cups,” during which one of the traditional dancers placed an inverted glass of water on a hankie on his head, and proceeded to stack up 25 more glasses, empty and upright, along with wine bottles and whatever else he could find, until the ceiling started to crowd him in. I don’t know if that’s how they do it in the Outpost, but I heard somebody next to me say, “That’s not a traditional dance -- it’s a circus act!”



Easter Sunday also included a visit to a convent that doubles as a cat sanctuary, a quick loop around a castle, and a thwarted attempt to enter an archaeological site. As this was the first day in the rented car, it also featured me, sitting in the driver’s seat, but instead of driving, saying “to the left, to the left” a thousand times, which, naturally, didn’t go over too well with the driver. (In the Outpost, they describe their own driving as “backwards,” a backwards description if you ask me, especially considering the lack of concern they show for the tourists, to whom driving backwards may not come naturally at all.)

In the resort town where I stayed, the streets after dark filled quickly, with local teens in low jeans, robust and underdressed European tourists, and hordes of dark-skinned “foreigner workers” of indeterminate ethnicity (who comprise 11% of the Outpost population, according to some statistic I read). At some point I walked down Jerusalem Steet and ended up outside Saint Catherine’s Catholic Church. Through its open windows, I heard a considerable Filipino congregation singing “Amazing Grace” in English.

Monday. I walked on a beach from whose foamy seas a goddess is said to have been born.





I toured an extensive archaeological site with a clever and satisfying design that allows one to climb, explore, try out different points of view, and conquer different fronts -- the sea straight ahead, the land to the back, and even straight down where colorful mosaics that have been walked on for thousands of years lay immaculate still, if prone.





Met a man at lunch, while waiting for food that never actually came, who announced maniacally, “Ah, Crete! Crete is a poem!” I loved the simplicity and spontaneity of his conviction, and although I didn’t want to feel homesick yet, I knew he was right. You can’t exactly live in a poem, but it is a thing of beauty just the same.