Market day. The farmers' market is on the eastern side of the old town and it's easy enough to spot. The double row of stalls must be nearly half a mile long, featuring mainly fruit and vegetables. Huge green bunches of herbs, tomatoes, oranges, lemons, carrots, potatoes, radishes - and much more. There are walnuts and almonds, dried apricots and figs, fresh soft cheeses and yoghurt. At the far end are several stalls with cheap cutlery, plastic dishes, handbags and clothing. A glass case outside a butcher shop displays chickens and we buy one, thinking chicken soup, stir fry, sandwiches. The butcher singes the remaining feather bits with a torch and then takes a cleaver to it - saving a great deal of work later with J's Swiss Army knife. Then, with soup in mind, we acquire some potatoes and carrots, a large bunch of parsley and a small cauliflower, as well as tomatoes.
Interesting how much more secure it feels in Chania compared to Athens. In Athens I was reluctant to take the ipad mini out to use it as a camera. It would have been so easy for someone to grab it and run, as a shopkeeper suggested to me, disapprovingly. In fact we did see a man, not young, racing away from the central Athens market on Athinas Street with a joint of meat he'd stolen, pursued unsuccessfully by two white coated butchers, one brandishing a stick. Comic in a way, but there's a Dickensian desperation about stealing meat, as opposed to, say, an ipad - and no doubt it's a practice the butchers can ill afford to encourage. Unemployment in Crete is about 20%, lower than the national average, though youth unemployment is horrifically high everywhere.