As I had heard, many Greeks do their best to be hospitable, to make you feel like an honored guest instead of a customer. And minor miracles happen in providing your lodging. The patron saint of travelers must have been looking out for us on our arrival. After tasting a cloudy, windy dusk at the Athens airport we were greeted by a black and drizzly evening in Chaniá. A young cab driver with a late model Jetta sped along wet, winding roads and dropped us on the street of our choice: ΟΔΟΣ ΘΕΟΚΟΤΟΠΟΥΛΟ, a narrow dead-end, from which he had to back out. We were looking for the recommended Amphora Hotel, but all we saw was a narrow street with a few lamps-no signs of life or light within the nameless two-story buildings. This was my introduction to the meaning of "Venetian streets." After a few false starts, we descended a stepped path, and Maryl questioned a passing woman about the hotel. She pointed to a wooden sign on a dark wall and said it was not yet open for the season. But would we like a room? She had a room available, for 3,000 drachmas (less than $15). After we carried our bags up two flights of stairs and sat down, I was too exhausted to consider looking for a meal. We nibbled on trail mix and the date nut loaf I had baked, then collapsed into bed. The room was so cold that even three blankets and the fire of two bodies were not enough to chase off the chill from my back side.

We meandered through the maze-like streets of Chaniá on Wednesday, a cold, cloudy day. The part of the city where we stayed, right along the harbor, seems frozen in time. Venetians built the city in the 14th century and occupied it through the 16th. They built an outer and inner wall of defense, a mole (breakwater), and lighthouse, all of which remain today. They laid out narrow streets suitable for people and carts, in patterns that radiate from central hubs, and lined them with two- and three-story buildings, some monumental, with features like engraved, arched doorways and enclosed balconies. Over the centuries the streets have not changed. Although some streets have shallow curbs and narrow sidewalks, they are still so narrow that you need to sidestep motorscooters and duck into a doorway when an automobile comes.

The shops, hotels, and tavernas of today try to preserve the distant past. Some retain only a few exposed blocks of an original wall. Others have a fully restored façade, the doors sanded and varnished, the bronze knockers reproduced, the stone engravings highlighted. Some ramshackle housing is built against the old Venetian wall; and there are signs that the Venetians, in turn, borrowed stones from Roman ruins. On some corners all that remain are crumbled walls of reddish brown rock overgrown with grasses. Cats prowl these lots, as they do throughout the streets of Chaniá, stalking food, waiting for action, or just perching on the stubs of walls. In one instance, a desolate corner was the site of a recent Minoan excavation we read about at the museum. But I also read that during World War II this city was bombed heavily by the Nazis; in a city that has evolved slowly, over centuries, it seems possible that some of the rubble-strewn corners and shells of buildings are the effects of that war.

At the end of that cold afternoon we stopped at an ouzerie to warm up with Greek coffee and Metaxa. The men inside (there were no women other than Maryl) were smoking cigarettes, talking loudly, and watching a news broadcast on a loud television. It was a combination that would repeat itself at several tavernas. In Greece, I came to realize, all the men still smoke cigarettes and all the tomcats still have their testicles.

The next day was sunny, but we spent the morning in the chill of the cavernous, stone-walled Archaeological Museum of Chania. It was my first of five such museums, and I got my first exposure to styles of Cretan ceramics and ancient Minoan larnakes (sarcophagi, painted with stylized octopuses and double axes). On a walk in the afternoon I noticed that the cloudlike masses on the southern horizon, just above the rooftops and Turkish minaret, were actually the snow-packed Λευκα Ορι (White Mountains), whose highest peak reaches 2,400 meters (8,000 feet). Although the sun kept shining, the winter chill returned by mid-afternoon, and the unheated room at "Rent Rooms Zeta" was not an inviting place to do anything other than curl up under all the available blankets and go to sleep.