We slept well, and at breakfast asked Anastasía to call a taxi for us at noon. The bus station was too far away for us to walk with all our luggage, and we were planning to board a bus at 2:00pm for Chóra Sfakíon, a small town on the southern coast of Crete. Two hours was, of course, far more time than we needed to get across this rather small city, but we also needed to renew our Euro supply, which might involve a long walk to the nearest bank, and then we'd have to negotiate the purchase of tickets, so we planned conservatively. We had plenty of time.
The taxi arrived at the appointed time, stopping at the place where we'd been let off three nights previously, about where you can see sunshine lighting up the street in the picture. Dorothea told the driver, a man close to our own age, where we wanted to go. He asked her where she’d learned Greek, and when she described her ancestry, began to scold her for not learning it better. Why had she not gone to Greek school? he wanted to know. Dorothea—familiar with the Greek assumption of the right to scold whomever and whenever one pleases, and conscious of how hard it might be to explain the geographic and public-transit situation of Pittsburgh and its suburbs to a stranger—bore these reproaches with equanimity.
As it turned out, there was a bank almost across the street from the bus station where we were delivered by our stern and righteous driver. I induced a clerk to withdraw the Euros for me without having to entrust my ATM card to another potentially treacherous machine. True, he looked at me funny, and I had to sign a few papers, but the cash was delivered without much delay. And it didn’t take long to buy our tickets, so we had plenty of time left to wait for our bus.
We were thankful once again for Dorothea’s Greek, unsatisfactory though it might be found by the senior taxi drivers of Chaniá.