The flight from Athens to Chania took less than an hour. Renting the car was quick too. The Hertz guy delivered the car and left it with the A/C on.  BTW, I usually drive cars  with stick shift when in Europe.  Then I took the driver’s seat, put the car in the first gear doing this spiel with the clutch and gas pedals – the car didn’t move. Then I pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor. Nothing – the pedal was offline. I called the Herz guy saying that the pedal won’t work.  He gave me a strange look and quietly said, “Sir, it’s the engine. First you start the engine and then you drive.” I started laughing. At home I’m driving cars with quiet engines, and decided that the Hertz guy left the car running mistakenly taking the A/C noise for the engine’s. 

OK, the next goal was to find a small village were the conference hotel was located. To make the story short, I can give you an advise – if you’re planning to drive in Crete, say 20km have enough gas for driving 40km. You’ll get lost a couple of times, that’s for sure. Crete’s government is saving money on road signs. This may explain why Google included the following fragment in the local driving directions: 

Here’s my today’s  conversation with the hotel’s clerk.
– How do I get to the beach?
– I can give you the map, but there are no local roads there.
– Can you please just tell me how to dive there?
– Sure, it’s very easy. Drive a couple kilometers on this road, then you’ll see a base (???) and turn to the left to the Stavros Beach.
-Is there a sign for Stavros Beach there?
– No, just turn there to the left.

I found the beach after a couple of wrong turns – the beach and the water were really nice.

In the evening  all unattendees of the JCrete unconference went to the local restaurant. The food was good and the conversations were interesting. Between the second and third glass of strong Cretan wine,  one of the possible topics for tomorrows discussion became more and more vivid: The Startups.  I have something to say on the subject too. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

  After writing a couple of hundreds words in this blog I realized that it misses some technical Java related content. OK, here you go: 

System.out.println(“Hello Crete!”);

Don’t be surprised if in my tomorrow’s blog I’ll re-write this code snippet in Scala.