So my best friend from work (whom I affectionately call Doppleganger because we always manage to have eerily similar thoughts going on in our heads) and I went on vacation to Crete last month. It was a much needed vacation - our workplace (a private ESL institute) does not believe in weekends or public holidays and you’re only allowed an unpaid seven days every six months. We somehow managed to time it so we left Seoul just as the weather turned to crap (apparently it rained the entire time we were away). The gods smiled upon us, or so we thought.
Our flight there was uneventful but exhausting. Fly to Amsterdam (11 hours), hang around for a couple hours or so (in Schiphol Airport we found a waterbottle with a monkey clutching his crotch), then fly to Athens (3 hours). The biggest inconvenience was that we flew into Athens at 1am but our flight to Crete wasn’t until 9am. Any possible sleeping surface was already occupied by the time we got there so we ended up sleeping in a quiet corner next to the airport’s chapel. Not comfortable by any means. Our flight to Crete was about an hour. By the time we landed in Heraklion we basically had to scrape ourselves off the floor and into the rental car.
“This is a very odd car,” Doppleganger remarked after a few minutes of driving. “It won’t coast when I press the brakes, it just kind of jerks.” We weren’t very concerned - we were too tired and the scenery was so amazing - the combination was a bit overwheming, actually. But after about half an hour she turned to me in mild consternation. “Do you smell something burning?”
I poked my head out the window and sniffed. Yes, that was something burning. “And, uh, I think that’s smoke coming from the back of the car . . .” Doppleganger continued. Just as she said this, a dull thudding noise started to repeat itself from one of the back tires.
She stopped the car, and I opened the door to check on the situation. “Maybe I should call the car company. Is that a dead goat? Holy shit, it’s a dead goat.” Indeed, right in front of me, lay a goat that was most certainly dead. We’d been in Greece for not quite two hours and already we were confronted with dead goats and troublesome cars.
The rental agency seemed nonchalant about the whole thing, telling me that the thudding sound was normal. Uh, okay. But as I got back to the car, Doppleganger looked sheepish. “I had the parking brake up this whole time. Do you think that was the problem?”
“What?” I was dumbfounded. “When did we put the parking brake up?”
“We didn’t. It was up when we got in the car.”
I groaned. We’d been in a very flat parking lot when we’d received the car. Why the hell the dude had had the parking brake up was beyond me.
At any rate we managed to get to Rethymnos without any more incident, though we did circle the town for about half an hour trying to get our bearings. The only knowledge of Greek we had between us was the class I’d taken in Ancient Greek back in undergrad, which wasn’t much. I could barely read the signs correctly. But somehow we did find the street we were staying on, where we then proceeded to collapse until dinnertime (on our beds, not the street). We’d arrived on Easter, which meant people were roasting whole lambs on racks for dinner. Lonely Planet recommended a nice restaurant for us, where we devoured intestine soup (it was actually really good) and roasted lamb.
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Uh, so I have to go to work now. 
And I’ll be away for a day because the Irishman and I are taking a short trip out of Seoul, so I’ll have to continue this on Wednesday. See you then. 
