To end the hospital saga, we arrived there just after nine thirty to find the approach road jammed with cars parked either side a good half mile or more, cars in the car park and a nose to tail line ahead of us. God only knows what time people start turning up but the world and its mother were there, virtually every chair in the corridors was occupied and people just milling around like lost souls. Our man arrived at ten and pinned his rota up on the door of his office. We discovered we were number eleven so I fully expected a very long wait. However it was quicker than expected and it was we who held up proceedings for number twelve onwards. During our wait Doctor Maria walked by and Chris stopped her to ask questions, none of which she could answer of course without seeing my notes. She was quite amazed that we had never been given them and trotted off to reception to make a phone call to the secretary in the cardiac unit to look for them. They were eventually found, too late to be of any immediate use, and we are now waiting for them to be e-mailed or mailed to us.
The journey both ways was uneventful. There wasn’t too much traffic though two or three Greeks were driving in harebrained fashion which is only to be expected. It is a long drive and Chris was pretty tired on the return though we stopped at Gregory’s for a bite and a drink and stopped again just before Georgopoli for an ice cream and Chris had a reviving walk on the almost deserted beach. We noticed hotels along the way that were already closed and shuttered and the season has another week or more to go so it really has been a very bad year all around. Yet there is still talk, and plans, of more hotels being built which is simply crazy. The bottom has dropped out of the real estate market for a start and Greece which once provided cheap holidays is now expensive with places like Turkey taking over. It is a very scenic drive, mountainous towards Heraklion with lots of bends which is why one has to be wary of Greek drivers. Unfortunately the graffiti vandals have disfigured virtually every road sign on the way with their ridiculous political crap. Who knows what ‘13 Xania’ means apart from themselves and maybe the police if they’re an anarchist group which is more than likely? Greece is plagued by these small groups who still believe letting off bombs and plastering slogans everywhere is going to change society. Some of the road signs are enormous standing a good ten twelve feet high and about eight feet across, I’m not going to measure metric, too used to t’other, and some of the smaller ones have been so vandalized they are almost illegible. Apart from the disfigurement that must have foreign visitors tut-tutting and wondering what they have come to, it giving a truly bad impression, the expense involved in replacing these signs would be astronomical and the question is, would it be worth it? They would more than likely only be vandalized again and again. Where do these people keep their brains? That is if they have any!