On most days of the week I like to consider myself as being a fairly evolved girl who doesn't get fazed by much, in terms of public behaviour that falls beyond my own standards of appropriateness. Public displays of affection? It's safe to say that a year in Paris has desensitized me to almost all acts of this nature (although I still draw the line at anything that borders on a public act of procreation). Public displays of drunkenness? Working as a bartender inevitably means being the constant witness of people at varying degrees of intoxication, and so there's not a lot of drunken behaviour that could surprise me. Public displays of emotion (be it crying, yelling, or generally making a scene)? I've bore witness to more tears and drama standing in line at the Monoprix on Avenue Secretan than an entire season of Jerry Springer could produce. However, if there is one thing that still manages to fluster me, it would be public nudity. I don't think I'm a particularly conservative person, but there are very few circumstances where I think that nudity amongst strangers is "normal".

In the first three weeks of this trip, I've seen more exposed flesh than I can remember ever seeing in my life (gym locker room and public bathhouses included!). It all started two weeks ago in Munich when I was out for a stroll with M.; it was a fairly hot and sunny day and we were wandering through a pleasant city park, when we came upon an area of the park where the nude sunbathers congregate. Apparently, for Europeans this was nothing exceptional (M. later confirmed that he hadn't even noticed the naked bodies in our midst), but my Canadian/Catholic-instilled prudishness came rushing to the surfac, and at that moment, all I could see were naked bodies (they were a minority among sunbathers, but a very visible minority; ha! perhaps my best/worst joke yet!), and the only thing that was going through my mind was "please please please put some clothes/sunscreen on!!!" Today, during a late afternoon walk on the beach, I spied several lobsters vacationing Europeans whose luggage must have been lost in transit, as they had not a stitch of clothing on them. Beyond my own squeamishness around public nudity, I can't help but to wonder what compels people to strip down in public places; I mean, seriously, is it so important to have a tanned penis? In any case, I take comfort in the idea that once I leave Greece, I probably won't be seeing any more nude sunbathers, or sunbathers in general...I suspect that sunbathing in the Middle East involves very little exposed skin.

I arrived in the land of Aristotle and Aphrodite on Saturday night, and was greeted at the airport in Heraklion by overwhelming humidity (good hair days are beyond the realm of all possibility at this point), and G., my couchsurfing host extraordinaire. After two days of eating (or more accurately, feasting, as G. is a fantastic cook), drinking (wine and raki, the Greek equivalent of grappa), and being merry very late into the night in Heraklion, I made my way to Chania last night, a very pretty town in Crete. Today has been a pretty uneventful day, mostly spent wandering around the old town and on the beach. I'm planning on taking a day trip to the Samaria Gorge tomorrow morning to attempt the 16KM hike, and then will probably head to Athens on Thursday or Friday. Up until this point in my trip, all of my travel days had been planned long in advance in order to get the best deal on tickets, but from here on in, nothing is booked until I fly back to Munich. As long as I make it to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv for 3AM on October 23rd, the next six and a half weeks are pretty unplanned, and I figure I'll just go wherever the wind takes me, so to speak.