We live as long as we fly
Having finally found a parking spot for the car, we started trudging up through the recently rebuilt St. George's Gate. While walking, we heard intense music — a pretty weird thing in the middle of a deserted tunnel with a staircase, which is exactly what St. George's Gate is.
Wherever there are Rambo's copyrights, those are his photos. The rest are mine or from Flickr.
The next day we headed straight to Heraklion right in the morning to see the Palace of Knossos, but along the way we decided to drop by a monastery mentioned in the guidebook. It's called Arkadi, and is extremely famous for being the focal point of the 1866 rebellion against the Turks (these nasty restless guys again). As we already know, by that year the Turks had possessed Crete for two centuries already, despite constant bloody uprisings. In 1866, a downright revolution began, and they chose the monastery, located 23 km from Rethymno, the then center of power, as their headquarters.
We reached Heraklion, spotted a sign for the Knossos Palace with some difficulty, and turned toward it. It turned out to be close by, and on our approach, a local started waving his arms at us, inviting us into a parking lot. The parking lot turned out to be paid, but it had a toilet and a drinking water dispenser (not a fountain like in the US and Arkadi, but one with cups, like in an office, so I wasn't lying in the last post). Then the guy showed us which way to go to the palace (about 100 meters). Along the way, we came across several more paid parking lots, and right by the palace itself — there seemed to be a free one. So this is a cute little scam the Cretans pull. We aren't mad, especially since the parking was cheap, and hey, it had amenities.
Now about the Dyachenko spouses, who write together. Reviewers usually emphasize that the Dyachenkos write "social science fiction", that is, the kind where there are a lot of all sorts of reflections and people, but little action, technoid or magical fetishes. It seems to me that since you are writing entertaining books, everything should be in moderation — "philosophy" and toys for big kids in the form of blasters and fireballs.
Of course, descriptions of certain feelings and relationships turn out awesome for the Dyachenkos (at least in text form — I really don't know what would happen if you acted like the characters of their books in the real world). That's why they exploit this on a massive scale — everyone does what they do best. The main thing is not to get overly carried away with the same thing, otherwise it'll turn into endless chewing gum. So far, the Dyachenkos somehow manage to avoid this danger — even though the sci-fi ideas in their books aren't super-massive in scale, and there usually aren't that many of them, they are presented elegantly and don't look alien relative to the social component.