Day 74-Friday October 15th. The Greek Next to Me

Still at Kardamyli Dive Center. The Greek next to me..
They are a gruff lot, the guy next to me is shouting and arguing passionately with his mates, sounds like politics. I suspect they are fairly radical in their thinking-Ha! Don’t expect a smile from a Greek, even if you are about to or just have given them money. They just don’t smile a lot to each other either. Despite the heavy onslaught of visitors to Greece they still seem wary and a little shy of outsiders, perhaps especially in the back country where we are trying to spend our time. We passed an old man who was waiting outside his village for a lift to the next town, it’s a common practice here, and he practically beat the truck and its driver with his stick when the driver seemed to refuse to take the old man. A little further on the same truck was stopped and the driver was busily castrating his goats-so I suppose that’s why he didn’t give a lift to the old man from his village.
We stopped and offered another man a lift but he declined since we weren’t going to where he needed to go. He said “Efaristo, efaristo” (thanks!) and touchingly patted his heart (a common sign of thanks).
As is common in Europe cars tend to win over pedestrians. The Greek behind got pretty mad at me for stopping on a right turn to yield to pedestrians in the cross walk-even though they had the green light to cross.
The Greeks don’t have a yield traffic sign and so just use a stop sign instead. You’ll find them, for example, at the entrance to each round-about but you will get that Greek behind you pretty upset if you do stop. Now it’s up to you to figure out which stop sign to stop at.
Mainland Greece is much wealthier than Crete. Have to talk with some mainland Greeks about what they think of Crete.