Le jour où j'ai presque fait comme le petit prince...

I'm back in Switzerland, with my cores and all my material... and with a lot of memories and things i can only smile to. ... and a bit of melancholy too.
The greek mountains made me feel so alive and powerful. When up in the mountain, looking down over the doline where we were staying, i always felt like i could open my arms and fly high and above. I felt like everything was possible and like i was completely alive. I guess the fact of being outdoors all day long in rather pure air helped with that too. I'm gonna try to keep that feeling here too.

We left the mountains 2 days before our flight was scheduled. Before leaving, we threw away all the garbage we collected during the 3 first days of fieldwork up in the mountains (when we still had bags to carry and collect them). Yeah... there's a lot of junk up there, sadly. I don't know what cretans have with just throwing their rubbish out in the wild... like it'll disappear or stg... they also throw things in streams that lead to the sea, which is ridiculous.

Garbage found in the mountains during 3 days. A lot of plastic bottles and cans

We spent the 1st afternoon in the big city at the foot of the mountains, buying a few things and taking pictures. I got another chain of goat bells to tinkle somewhere in my home... Bells are just so beautiful to listen to... I hope one day i'll have a porch or a balcony where i can hang rows of them, intertwined with tibetan prayer flags and then listen to them jingle in the wind. :)
After that we headed to the beach one last time, then to my contact's home. The next day, after sleeping till midday (almost) we headed towards the capital city to pick up my core export permission. We had to meet a biology phD student at the local Uni who had picked it up from the forest service. Well we sort of got lost on the way there, and ended up almost an hour late. But it doesn't matter, we were in Greece, and people are totally not strict on hours and such (and there are no strict traffic rules either, and people are not too stressed on the road... i mean they do want to double you and go fast, but if you're stopped in the middle of the road cause you don't know where to go or doing something a bit weird or not so authorized nobody will honk you to move or anything). Then we ate some chocolate (like almost every day... haha), and headed towards our hotel in town.
That night we went to the cinema to see a splendidly boring film called Bel Ami (with Robert Pattinson), which was totally dull and pointless and ate greek fastfood (which is still totally more healthy than regular fastfood).
We then went back to the hotel, and got lost on the way back, but made it, and slept a mere 4.5 hours before getting up at 4.20 to go to the airport and catch our flight at 6.30. The trip back took a full day, we went from the island to Athens, then from there to Milano and then took the bus from the airport to the city center, and from there the train home. Nothing too eventful happened during the voyage. However, we got to see the beautiful moon when boarding the plane when leaving the island, a very thin crescent with a planet looming above. Then we saw the sunrise, so beautiful, and almost saw a 2nd sunrise in Athens (but we got there a bit too late and the sun was already a little above the horizon) (that's for the title of the post). The clouds were so beautiful from the plane.

The beautiful clouds when we approached Athens

The plane ride to Milano was rather bumpy with a lot of air holes and a guy that changed places to sit next to us, smelling strongly of perfume (burk).
So i'm home, and have only opened my suitcase to extract the honey i received (that leaked in my suitcase haha), and retrieve my cores. So now my whole room smells of Cupressus wood (which i dislike; i would prefer the smell of my own tree, but it's too discreet for that).
That's all for now.

Sunrise on the Mediterranean