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Thirty years ago, the coastal city of Hersonissos was a fishing village with fruit warehouses. Today it is jammed with hotels, shops, restaurants and other services aimed at the tourists who now dominate the region's economy. |
The electronic glitches started in Crete when I tried to e-mail my first story back to the University of Cincinnati. Photojournalist Lisa Ventre and I were there for two weeks to cover the work of UC faculty and students helping Crete preserve its history and battle overdevelopment. We soon discovered Internet connections were not working at our town-hall headquarters or the faculty members' hotel.
The same problem arose throughout our assignment. Hotel personnel told us Internet Café hours were from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m., but every time we went during those hours, the café was closed. Another Internet Café looked promising, but had no place to connect a Zip drive, which carried Lisa's photos, or insert a floppy disk, which carried my text.
As I typed away on my second story, the mouse stopped working on our only portable computer. Nothing, not even the expertise of the UC team's computer whiz, could revive it. Using the touch-pad greatly slowed the writing process and made using PhotoShop nearly impossible for Lisa. And borrowing computer time at UC's city-hall headquarters became highly competitive as 24 team members scrambled to meet their deadlines relying on only two computers with printing and Internet connections.
Working at 2 a.m. one morning (this was not a vacation as my husband at home often called it), Lisa plugged the portable Zip drive into an outlet with no converter. The drive survived unharmed, but the plug was fried. Student team members also working late that night laughed with us because they had done the same thing at least once.
Days later, everyone assured Lisa that a nearby photo lab would be able to develop film within an hour. We needed photos to reach a newspaper in Athens overnight. When she dropped off the film, however, the lab announced it was not running any equipment because of the heat. The temperature had once again exceeded 100 degrees, with Crete in the midst of a two-week heat wave. At 7:30 p.m. that night, we got the photos to the courier service seconds before it closed.
Not even the cash machines seemed willing to cooperate with our tendency to hurry. After a week of living off the cash I brought, I tried to make a quick stop at an ATM before the tourist crowds hit.
The first one was out of money and would have taken a half-hour to reload. The second one I walked to also refused to dispense. I went back to the first, waited in a long line of vacationers, inserted my card and again left empty handed. After two hours, I still couldn't find an ATM that would accept my card, despite my bank's prior assurances it would work overseas.
Later when I consulted a Greek doctor for a sinus ailment that was slowing me down, he fortunately agreed to let me pay part of my bill with a credit card. (He had lived in the United States for a while and enjoyed practicing his English. "How about those Cincinnati Redskins?" he asked.)
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