We spent a few days in blissful idleness, so that's what I'll write about. Besides, my sister is wondering why we went to the lake when there's a sea. You can't live on the sea alone, just so you know.
The photos will be from sunrise to sunset, and they're not mine.
As for the pool, it was quite shallow: one meter on one side, 1.70 on the other. So I only swam there once, even though it's not that easy to swim in the ocean because the wind creates waves. I suspect they aren't as big as they could be because of the cape, but still. On the other hand, Andrey was absolutely thrilled that because of the sea's saltiness, you can actually do a "starfish" and not sink. You couldn't drown even if you wanted to, it pushes you back up. As for me, it's fun and all, sure, but because of this the water is so salty that you have to dive carefully — even a tiny bit of water in your mouth makes you gag.
I also had swimming goggles with me. When I took them out, the real fun began: the saltwater can't get into your eyes, so you can dive to your heart's content and check out the bottom. True, there is nothing special down there. Just a couple of types of corals (at least I hope they were corals), clustered in small groups of two or three meters in diameter. Fortunately, fish live among the corals, and that's already more interesting. Even here they are relatively colorful, though not quite as bright as in the tropics.
By the way, I didn't notice any lifeguards, aka water rescuers. Then again, nobody but me swam out very far, and even I tried not to go too deep, despite the warm water: who knows what kind of beasts are lurking in the depths. I'm kidding, of course; in reality, I just didn't want to make the hotel staff nervous for nothing: I had no pressing need to swim far away.
Speaking of sunbeds, there was a funny story. People supposedly reserve them in the morning by putting down a blue beach towel. When Andrey calmly moved someone else's towel to an adjacent sunbed and took the spot, Tanya was really stressed out. I said it was his own business. Later, Tanya even asked me to exert some influence on him. I didn't mind, but I replied that the issue with the sunbeds wasn't straightforward. It would be great if the people who reserve them actually used them. But at any given moment, barely half of them are occupied. From the standpoint of my rather simple ethical system, it's a piggish thing to do, namely — the inefficient use of public property.
Towels lie around on sunbeds for days on end: some people don't even take them away, you can come at any time and the lounger is yours. I don't understand double standards, which is exactly what I told Tatyana. She did say, however, that it's the accepted custom, and so I tried to persuade Andrey not to take other people's sunbeds after all. It didn't occur to me then to ask her why she thought so. But just now I found in the reviews for Hydramis that you actually aren't allowed to "reserve" sunbeds with towels there. God knows if it's true or not, but either way — reserving sunbeds in advance is no better than tossing someone else's towel off, just so you know. It's a different story if you leave for 15 minutes to take a dip or grab some water from the bar — then you can leave it..
By the way, if you sit at a table, they give you a glass, but if you go to the beach, it's a plastic cup. There are few big mugs, so they are only used for beer. That's a minus, even though the bar is 15 meters from the beach. When you're lying there doing nothing, you just want to keep doing that, you're even too lazy to go to the bar. Going into the sea is the only exception, because it gets way too hot at times. By the way, Andrey agreed with me that the heat makes you feel a bit slow, your "brains melt," as they say. By evening it gets easier, but by evening you start drinking alcohol in serious amounts, and so subjectively you feel warm all over again. An utterly unsolvable contradiction. And the saddest part is that the air conditioning in our room worked poorly, and even at night I suffered a bit from the heat. Compared to the US, it's surprising, of course — there the AC would freeze the room to the set temperature in 15 minutes flat, even if it were 10 degrees Celsius.
Since I've mentioned one of the few minuses of the hotel, I'll list the rest right here. First, the swings for the kids weren't painted. Second, the table tennis didn't have a net, and the table was all scratched up. I already mentioned the wristbands that bleed color. Basically, finding anything else to nitpick about is impossible, unless you're some super-aristocrat used to all sorts of marvels.
Lazy chatter, sun, sea, and grub. That's how we spent quite a few days, and in between I entertained myself by reading Gromov and Dyachenko on my Sony Reader. I played volleyball a couple of times, shot a bow. All of this is called animation — that is, entertaining the guests so they don't get bored. The people who do this are animators; more on them later. The guy helping out with archery was a lanky Russian who cracked pretty cheeky jokes with the Russian-speaking guests. Tatyana probably would have been inwardly outraged, but I was just surprised that management hadn't yet trained all the staff into biorobots. On the other hand, they are Cretans — they don't care, they've got that sunny Zen going on.
And volleyball was commanded by a colorful old dude, paunchy but muscular, and with a white mustache. I initially thought he was an animator, because he would always show up in the evening with a ball, blow his whistle, and yell "Volleyball!", repeating these actions every ten seconds as he walked past the pool to the court. As it turned out later, he was just an active guest; he also took part in the water aerobics led by the fakir. However, this way I'll soon mess everything up completely, because not only am I jumping ahead, but I'm also casually talking about things I haven't even mentioned yet. On the other hand, water aerobics is pretty self-explanatory, and the fakir led it because he needed the practice.
You're looking at all this in pictures, but I saw it in real life. The impression is amazing. For us folks who aren't spoiled by trips down south, it's all like another life — out of a TV show or a magazine. Like a mirage. And here I am, having traveled to the US and Crete in a single year — hope I don't drown in impressions. But since you only see a faint reflection, you're safe, and you can boldly look forward to the next episode.
