My Big Fat Greek Pesach II

Six years ago, I spent Pesach on the Greek island of Crete, and I wrote a post about the fights over second day Yom Tov - see My Big Fat Greek Pesach. This year, I was once again in Crete for part of Pesach. But this time, I had a different sort of excitement. As a child, I devoured all the books of Gerald Durrell, who grew up in Corfu and wrote about the small but fascinating Greek wildlife and the charming but incompetent Greek humans. This Pesach, I didn't see much of the former, but I saw plenty of the latter!

The first warning that this was going to be a "special" experience was with Aegean Air at Ben-Gurion, where the check-in line took over two-and-a-half hours. The flight itself was uneventful, the stewardesses were pleasant. But when we arrived, our luggage didn't!

Pictured: Socrates, annoyed that his clothing is
in his lost luggage, wearing a sheet instead.After filing a report for the lost luggage, we checked into the hotel, where we had booked three rooms side-by-side for my wife and I and our children (some of whom are small and needy). But our room turned out to be a long and cold outside walk from our kids' rooms, past lots of other rooms in between! It transpired that in Greece, they see no reason for rooms that are sequentially numbered 331, 332, and 333 to be anywhere near each other!

To cut a long story short, our clothing arrived after only five days, and we were eventually able to switch rooms, so the end of chag was lovely. And when we traveled to the airport this morning to fly home, our flight was only delayed two hours. But Aegean Air had one final surprise in store!

Upon boarding the plane, my wife was surprised to discover that her sister's family had been given the exact same seats as us! One would think that it's rather simple for airline computers to make sure that people are not given the same seats, but apparently that's not the case with Aegean Air. Fortunately they found other seats for my sister-in-law's family, and we were finally able to take our seats. Whereupon another family boarded the plane, and it turned out that they, too, had been given the exact same seats as us...

Anyway, we finally made it home, thank God. THANK YOU GOD. I think I saw a news story about viral video footage of a man being dragged, screaming, onto an Aegean Air flight that was underbooked.

Sometime this week, I hope to be returning to my semi-regular writing schedule. There is a particularly fascinating topic that I plan to discuss, combining both rationalist Judaism and natural history, based on something that I saw in Crete. Here's a photo of it; see if you can guess what it is, where it is, and why it's there.