After staring at the ancient peeling walls, we started getting ready to head home to make it in time for dinner. Luckily, we had plenty of time, so I, being the most active one, talked our driver, namely Sergey, into turning off the national road to see if there was anything interesting there. By the way, taking this opportunity, I express my deep gratitude to Sergey for playing the role of driver: as it happened, Andrey and I don't have licenses, and Tanya prefers not to drive on serpentines (between the lines you can read “Sergey would never let her while he is in a condition to drive”).
By the way, it so happened that in the last post I didn't tell you about the olive oil, a canister of which is currently lying in the trunk at this point in the story (if we fast forward to today, there are only a few deciliters left at the bottom of the canister).
The canister was labeled extra virgin olive oil, or in our terms “olive petroleum of a special virgin.” It was only later I realized that the special virgin serves only to sell petroleum to sucker-tourists like me. Because the difference is noticeable only if you perform an immaculate conception pour it into a salad, whereas for frying, the petroleum of a regular virgin (virgin olive oil), or even a battered second-press wench, would have been totally fine.
Since I brought up this fertile topic, it's a sin not to tell you what kinds of olive oil there are.
The special organization IOOC suffers from a bit of a split personality, because their website header says “International Olive Council” (international olive council) and the greeting says “International Oil Council” (international oil council). Either this is the usual Cretan sloppiness, or they are disguising themselves as petroleum lords, because as we know, Oil is not only cooking oil, but also petroleum. For that matter, extra virgin isn't just a special virgin, but also “very pure,” hence the most pure Mother of God and all that. In any case, despite all these terrible terminology problems, the organization managed to adopt some standards, albeit rather vague ones.
- Extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) - the olives are pressed without heating, acidity does not exceed 0.8%. There is no chemically refined oil here. The taste is excellent, different regions and harvests vary just as they do with wine.
- Virgin olive oil acidity is less than 2%, taste is not bad either.
- Pure olive oil a blend of the above with chemically processed (refined) oil.
- Olive oil the same thing, but acidity is no more than 1.5%.
- Olive-pomace oil a blend of olive and vegetable oil made from leftovers. This is what restaurants often cook with — as if they'd waste tons of pricey olive oil on you.
- Lampante oil oil for lighting, kind of like what kerosene lamps ran on before kerosene was invented.
Buying the top three grades for frying, as I already mentioned, makes little sense. But I bought it anyway, 5 liters for 25 euros or so.
Oil producers, apart from the OOXML sorry, working too much, IOOC classification, slap phrases carefully crafted by marketers onto the canisters. But I will reveal all their secrets to you!
- "100% Pure Olive Oil" (100% pure olive oil) – regular oil of mediocre quality, because anything better has virgin or extra virgin written on it.
- "Made from refined olive oils" (from processed oils) means that the refining process was applied, i.e., improvement using temperature and chemicals.
- "Light olive oil" (light olive oil) – the same thing, but during the improvement process the strong flavor was removed. The calories don't change, because any olive oil has about 120 per tablespoon. A lot, yeah: that's exactly why you can pour it into your tank instead of gas.
- "From hand-picked olives" (from hand-picked olives) – machines pick worse, obviously.
- "First cold press" (of the first cold press) – hot pressing changes the chemistry of the olives. And the first one is the gentlest, as we know. True, such oil boils at 100 degrees instead of the 200-300 of subsequent presses, which for cooking might actually be worse. (Extra)Virgin Olive Oil doesn't have to be from the first press, there's no contradiction here.
- The oil can actually be a blend of oils from several countries, the law allows for heavy exaggeration: calling an oil Italian if only 10% of it is actually from there
Alright, we've cleared up the oil thing, so let's continue about the mountains. Turning off the main road, we started rolling along various small ones, and rolled so far that the car could barely squeeze between the walls of adobe huts (I don't know what they are, but it sounds cool, and clearly they're related to Cretan barracks). I was actually leading us to the cape, the very one that is so clearly visible from our hotel. Now I wanted to drive onto it and perform the reverse operation: because as we know, if you gaze long enough into a cape, the cape will gaze back into you.
Oddly enough, the plan succeeded: with great difficulty, along a crumbling precipitous road, but we made it. The result, however, was that I stepped on a thorn: and they are very nasty on Crete, even if you pull it out, the scratched leg keeps hurting. But on the bright side!
We photographed what we, let alone you, are not supposed to see. We photographed a secret NATO weapon! It turned out to be specially trained goats! Exactly so. The thing is, when we drove to the very end of the road, there was nothing there except goats and a "secret facility, photography prohibited" sign. Risking my health and the deprivation of my hard-earned euro-citizenship, I still decided to commit an illegal act and snap a pic of the goats. The fact that I'm talking about it certainly doesn't make me look any smarter. But what won't an artist endure for the sake of art!
Secret NATO goats
I uncovered their secret: they feed on stones, and therefore constitute a highly valuable resource in case of war, because if there's one thing Crete has in abundance, it's stones.
After some brief suffering while driving out of the narrow serpentine paths, we got back to the national highway, and by eight in the evening we were already in our dear hotel.