Um, forgot to mention: the inflight dinner didn't have that ferocious taste of MSG, unlike the American inflight breakfast. (I'd have to think about whether I'm confusing dinner and breakfast here, but in these flights the devil himself would break a leg.) The only similarity was the Coca-Cola, which I call liquid evil, and I've already gotten everyone at work used to it. That's exactly how I say it: “Splash me some blAck evil!”
We didn't fly for long — about three hours, probably. I have to say that the evil Andryukha took my window seat, and during takeoff he enjoyed the view of Riga, and during arrival — Heraklion. Then I discovered that my Sony Reader, which I was planning to use as an MP3 player too, wasn't reading the memory card. There was nothing left to do but close my eyes, but that didn't help me fall asleep — my back and neck simply despise airplane seats way too much. So Andryukha and I chatted a bit about students stealing ashtrays en masse from cafes. I don't remember why the topic came up, but either way, kids, it's not nice to swipe ashtrays, just so you know. Swiping stuff in general is not nice, and what exactly you swipe isn't all that important.
Next to me sat a teenage girl; she climbed onto the seat with her feet, covered herself with a blanket, and slept with a happy smile on her face. She got so into it that at one point, half-asleep, she reached over to hug me. I suppose she was getting comfortable using me as a pillow. And during landing, she didn't even wake up. Honestly, when pretty young girls hit on me in real life, even for platonic purposes, I don't really mind. It would be a whole different story if it were like in that commercial. Spare me from that.
Anyway, we landed at about 5 in the morning, maybe half past five. Andryukha was on high alert — he didn't see any palm trees. Everyone knows there have to be palm trees in a tropical paradise. Andrey is a simple guy — he didn't look up anything about Crete in advance. But Andrey has a programmer's mindset and is therefore logical: no palm trees — no paradise. What a relief it was for him when, right in the airport, we spotted the coveted tree, even if it looked more like a pineapple.
As for other events, the rowdy alcoholic, as I mentioned before, was escorted off the plane by the cops, and that was pretty much it. Our luggage took agonizingly long to come out, and when it finally did, it erupted from the baggage elevator onto the conveyor belt like lava from a volcano. There weren't many people in the airport; Germans and Brits, judging by fragments of conversation - some other bourgeois flight had arrived alongside ours. From where, I don't remember.
When we walked out of the airport, a TEZ Tour agency representative in the form of a cute girl in a yellow t-shirt showed us where to go to board the bus. All we had to do was tell the driver the magic word Hydramis, (Kheedramis), and he already knew where to drop us off.
On the bus, they handed out information and advertising brochures, plus some kind of voucher. Tanya snatched it up, so I never figured out what we were supposed to do with it. Probably hand it over at the hotel reception. In a dreary tone, another agency employee gave us the rundown. Overall - very sluggish and unconvincing, but it would be strange to expect perkiness from her at 5 AM, especially since even at that hour the cabin thermometer showed 27 degrees Celsius. Whenever I don't get enough sleep, my thermoregulation gets screwed up — I get hot and cold flashes, mostly hot. So I realized right there in the bus that I had landed straight in a frying pan in hell — it was terrifyingly hot. Luckily, that impression faded later on, and I even started to enjoy the warmth. But in that very first moment, mild panic took over. (I'm not so sure about my commas here, so let's just call them author's punctuation: whether I'm mature enough to use it is the real question).
So, we drove for quite a while — about an hour and a half. Gradually, it started getting light. Emerging from the darkness were: the sea with the lights of ships, rocky hills, known to flatlanders under the name “mountains”, scrawny bushes, and some bizarre-looking barracks. The Cretans, naturally, wouldn't exactly pat me on the head for such a characterization of their dwellings, but I have no reason to lie: barracks are barracks, plain and simple. Here, see for yourselves.
However, on the roofs of all these barracks, the black squares of solar panels and the thick metal barrels beneath them created a rather futuristic look. Considering the far from cheap price of a solar panel (thousands and even tens of thousands of $), the Cretan little houses turned out to be not as simple as they seemed at first glance. Either way, all these rocky hills, palm trees, and exotic structures did the trick: the mood became highly recreational and vacation-y, and even the heat was forgotten. I should mention that throughout the entire drive we saw a stunning sunrise over the sea, because the Cretan national highway runs along the whole northern coast, and that's exactly the road we took to get to the hotel. The thought even crossed my mind that they bring tourists in at 5 AM on purpose, so that the exhausted brains in their weary bodies would immediately soak up the beauty of Cretan nature upon arrival. Anyway, at one fine moment, the bus veered slightly to the side, drove about 200 meters, and dropped us off near a building. Even though it was built in the classic barak-style, it somehow evoked more positive emotions than usual. And most importantly — above the entrance, blue letters proudly spelled out Hydramis Palace.
Want to know what happened next? Stay with us, to be continued.