Eerie silence lies still as stone in the cold corridors of Chania’s night. I have been finding myself walking later and later, getting lost in the maze of houses and making my turns when a faint sound catches my ear. The sound will lead you to some quite interesting places in the quiet hours of the night.
There does not seem to be a commercial/residential divide in the muddled patchwork of construction that makes up the heart of town. As I walked this evening I passed Minoan ruins crumbling into the hillside and, right next to it, a discotheque with pulsing dance music and seizure inducing lights pumping out into the streets. Houses are stacked upon the remains of a Venetian wall and bars are built into everything from old dock houses to what feels like janitorial closets.
Bouzoukia is a traditional Cretan ‘bar’ but it is really more like a small café. They are in the most peculiar places but always draw a crowd of Greeks seeking some traditional music. I ventured in to listen. The band was three men: one playing a traditional Spanish rhythm guitar and two playing bouzoukies which are like twangy banjoes. The bouzoukies have eight strings but the strings come in couples, one heavy and one light string per note, so the sound is more full but relatively simple. The most enlivening part of the bouzoukia is that the entire bar is part of the entertainment with people dancing, clapping and singing.
The discotheque is something else. The other night I was out wandering about and slinging my komboloi* when I heard a soft pulse coming from a nearby basement. As I went closer it became clear that this was an all-night dance bar. It was so smoky inside that my eyes burned but the music was motivating and the crowd was very entertaining. It was packed from wall to wall with people at 3:00am; I finally found where all the young people are. It isn’t really my scene but after finding this first one, I started to notice them all over the place.
I forgot to mention the komboloi: every man on the island has a string of beads and they sell them everywhere. Some are cheap plastic ones, like mine, and others are silver, gold, ivory, jade, amber, or whatever you can imagine. They are on a loop of string and half of the string is bare so that the beads can slide back and forth. Like I said, men swing them around all the time. It is a manner of style to click and seamlessly swing them from finger to finger, a subconscious art of sorts that really gets addictive. I hear it is good for those trying to quit smoking but I feel like I need to pick up smoking just to quit manipulating the komboloi.
I am a bit restless in the limbo of the island winter. There is no holiday from an overextended vacation. Mountains are on the horizon; the white caps are calling me. My feet are itching to conqueror some rock.
Party on
