First, I'll talk about the stores, and then about what we did after Heraklion. As it turned out, we didn't do much, so there won't be a separate post about it. Since posting pictures of grocery stores is silly, the story will be interspersed with official photos of the Cretan aquarium.
In Kavros, there are two stores and a gas station right next to each other. One of the supermarkets belongs to the local chain Inka. As we can see, Cretans couldn't resist the temptation to use trendy foreign words for their brands. Even though you'd think they have plenty of exoticism of their own.
The stores are relatively small, about the size of a Maxima 1.5 X. I haven't seen any stores larger than that on Crete — maybe there aren't any at all. As we remember, the island's entire population is only 623 thousand people, and the biggest city, Heraklion, has 137 thousand. Add a lack of space to this, and the absence of hypermarkets becomes perfectly understandable.
Inside, you'll find the usual European assortment, though a lot of it is made in Greece. Prices are higher than in Latvia, which means they are high even compared to Moscow, and certainly higher than in the US.
There was this funny thing: I bought a can that said "Soda Water". As we know, in America, that's what they call any flavored carbonated drink. Imagine my surprise when what was inside the can turned out to be just water, only highly carbonated. That is, the exact thing you could buy in the Soviet Union for 1 kopeck from a vending machine. For those not in the know, for 3 kopecks you could buy carbonated water with syrup. Rumor has it, near my house, where the so-called gas facility used to be, there was a machine that poured sparkling water for free, albeit without syrup. If that's true, it turns out that equivalents to free drinks for employees also existed in the USSR.
A 0.33 L can of sparkling water cost me a whopping €1.2. By the way, there are a ton of problems with the pronunciation and spelling of the euro symbol, which are covered on Wikipedia. For instance, the € symbol (Ctrl+Alt+4 on the Latin layout) gets written sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left. The name "euro" itself across different languages is even more fun — Latvia wanted to use "eira" altogether (feminine gender), but the European Central Bank smacked them on the head for it. It only helped for a little while — right now Latvia uses "eiro", because the word Europe in Latvian is spelled "Eiropa". The ECB disagrees — but you can fight them, which Bulgaria successfully demonstrated — they call the currency "Евро" [Evro], and even forced the central bank to issue money with that spelling, even though it craved a uniform "ЕУРО" [EURO] in Cyrillic too. Since I'm writing about Crete, I'll point out that in Greek it is ΕΥΡΩ.
Let's continue about the supermarket. Postcards were outside, completely unguarded, you just have to grab the one you want and bring it inside to buy it. The cashiers spoke English and German, behaved friendly/neutrally, but without those plastered-on American smiles. As for exotic stuff — there were just giant mountains of spices. The spices are geared towards tourists — locals buy them without fancy packaging, I just don't remember if they get them by weight or not. There was a very large alcohol section, now that's clearly for us. There were exotic liqueurs in bright blue bottles as well as local regional wine. I bought 5 bottles or so: later I drank them at a corporate party, at home, and I think there's still some left as a gift for friends, if my parents haven't chugged it all.
I was curious to try some local consumer goods too, so a few times I bought random stuff. For example, chocolate milk. In America, there's a whole shelf of flavored milks, while here there's only one brand of chocolate milk. Interestingly, the labels are exclusively in Greek: in Latvia, all labels are in three or four languages (the Baltic ones + Russian), and often there's English. So I bought yogurts at random. The yogurts are tasty (I think better than ours), and there are quite a lot of varieties. Sodas are similar to ours, but some seem a bit better; I bought them because I eventually got sick to death of the hotel's all-inclusive drinks. Interestingly, the coolest brand of lemonade is made from spring water sourced from the Samaria Gorge. The juices were just like ours — the American ones are better. I didn't see any chocolate-glazed curd snacks, by the way. Ice cream, on the other hand, was fancy and expensive.
There were also my favorite coffee drinks. Just as delicious as Cinnabon in the US, albeit in plastic bottles, not aluminum ones. There was an instant frappe — powder and water included. If I'd known what garbage it was, I wouldn't have bought it. I didn't buy bread and pastries, but they look nice; they don't have anything like our cheap, brick-shaped bread.
By the way, I bought a boatload of spices, and I'm using them up now. The spices are tasty and aromatic, but some are an acquired taste. I bought mixes so I wouldn't have to bother choosing and pouring the right ones into a specific dish. But a mix might contain one particular spice that you don't like, and then it becomes difficult to use. To be fair, most of it suits me fine — though packets for the exact same dish from different manufacturers can differ greatly. I like one spaghetti mix, but the other one tastes too strongly of wormwood. On the upside, my kitchen cabinet smells like a meadow in the summer, or even better — like a Cretan meadow, which is much richer than ours.
People here were asking what Cretans do for a living besides tourism. That's obvious — olive production. Try to guess in the comments how many olive trees there are on the island (no googling), and I'll reveal the answer told to me by a local in the next posts.
After visiting the historic center of Heraklion, we wanted to freshen up, for which purpose we started looking for the sea. Strangely enough, we spent about twenty minutes doing this, even though on Crete, no matter where you look, the sea is everywhere — the national highway runs right along it. But exiting it takes a bit of effort, which we finally managed to do by finding a turnoff to the old national highway. On our way, we were accompanied everywhere by brown Crete Aquarium signs. As everyone knows, a brown sign in the EU means a tourist attraction, and in Latvia they are heavily abused. But at least back home they point to various different things. On Crete, half of them point to the aquarium. By the way, if you haven't read about my visit to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, now is the perfect time. As for the Cretan aquarium, it's not bad, although sometimes they have monitors instead of aquariums with fish. They should learn the proper use of computers in tourist spots from the Americans — those guys are pretty skilled at their interactive gizmos. On the plus side, the Cretan establishment had sharks and enormous freshwater fish in a giant aquarium that you can walk all the way around.
Overall, Andrey and I liked it all. Tanya and Sergey sunbathed instead of visiting the aquarium, because they had recently been to a super cool similar establishment in Helsinki, and they weren't interested. Dropping by the Cretan aquarium if you get the chance is totally worth it, especially since you'll be driving past it anyway if you rent a car. The Helsinki one is worth it too - even though the prices there are slightly higher, they have a tunnel with a transparent ceiling and walls where fish swim all around you.