26 Sept 10.30 Chania Bus Station
Chania bus station is where I want to spend my last years, alongside all the local old timers for whom it functions as a rest home with all facilities. Lovely, wholesome Greek meals at affordable prices, great greek coffee served by chirpy young greek girls at one euro a cup, to be consumed on comfortable chairs in nice new air conditioned and well lit surroundings.
Yes, Chania bus station is no longer the chaotic, diesel smeared, fume infused bedlam it once was but is now a new well designed dining room for the elderly with the added attraction of an ongoing cabaret of foreign travellers passing your table. Hilariously overladen and equipped Germans, leggy Scandinavian blondes, fecund Dutch families with many blank faced offspring, and, today, a group of muslim women playing cards all dressed in rain gear (yes it rained down a tropical storm this morning), plus a couple of old hippies, so ethereal through vegan diets and consciousness altering drugs that you can hardly make them out.
And, of course, there is always Sweet Corner. Whenever we are in Chania bus station waiting for the bus to Paleo or back to the airport Jane will usually do some useful work online while I will waste a shallow hour or so that I will never get back observing and taking photos of large people arriving at Sweet Corner.
Sweet Corner in Chania bus station is the most stunningly vivid, brightly hued, hyperreal display of glistening cakes, buns, tarts, pies, I have ever seen.
Its like a Hindu shrine to every earthly manifestation of sugar, fat and flour that can be imagined. I have watched large people arrive at Sweet Corner many times. They go into a sort of weak knee’d fainting swoon, often clutching each other for support as they make their tremulous choices. You can almost see their insulin levels and glycemic index beginning to dance, swoop and dive as their bodies attempt to ready themselves for the coming massive onslaught. Sweet Corner is a site of pilgrimage for those who like it large and glyko. (Greek for sweet, which to the rest of us means very, very, sweet.)
I take some photos of the glykorati and after an hour or so of this sort of sniggering wankerthon the bus to Paleo is announced and we board with the other gently aging flotsam, international jetsam and fading intelligentsia that are drawn as moths to the Paleo sun every year.