Frappes are an iced coffee drinks usually made with Nescafe. Seems easy enough - you drink a drink, right? While that's true, there are some frappe faux pas you should know about before you do something silly (at least to the Greeks.)

As the cool wet winter loses its battle to the intense Cretan sun, natives and tourists alike turn to the foamy iced frappe to keep them going. Being coffee enthusiasts, we gladly joined in the frappe fray. We were surprised by how tasty something made with instant coffee could be. We slurped our way through the first iced glass.

"That was nice," we thought, "let's have another." We summoned the waiter to the table and asked for another round.

His brows drew close together and he pursed his lips. "You want two more?"

Even in a different culture, the social cues were telling us we'd gone astray. We had clearly leapt outside the bounds of convention. This waiter was working hard to process our request.

A little meekly, I confirmed, "if it's okay, yes, we would like two more frappes in the same way."
His eyebrows reached up as he apparently concluded that while we were clearly weird, we were probably not dangerous. Away he went.

We did drink that second round, but it was the last second round we ever drank (publicly, at least.) We soon learned to slowly sip the frappe, "as slowly as the ice melts," our waiter patiently explained. Much later, I asked a native friend about our coffee gaffe. He laughed and said, "You drink you're coffee and you're done. Maybe later you can have another." If you absolutely must have a second round - here's a tip: go to a different cafe.

Olive picking is winter work. Cretans begin picking in October or November and finish around January. The most common local variety, koroneiki, is small - about the size of a dried cherry.

Even before we arrived on the island I knew I wanted to pick olives, an exotic experience for a Midwestern girl. I mentioned my wish to every Cretan I met and while most thought I was odd, one offered to make my wish come true. The two November days I picked were sunny and windy.

We laid out tarps under trees as young as 30 years old and as ancient as several hundred, wrapping the tarp tightly against the trunk and weighting the sides with big rocks. Then we used what looked like a child's sand rake to 'comb' the olives from the thin branches. My guide countered my need to pick the tree perfectly clean, "We must leave something for the birds."
There are two primary smell sensations I'll always associate with olive picking - old oil (from the tarps which had been used for years) and thyme. The thyme bushes were everywhere and one couldn't help but crush them while trampling across the olive grove. Lovely!

Once we'd picked 3 to 5 trees, we dragged the loaded sheet to a box with a large tube coming from the bottom. We dumped the olives into the box and they fell out the hole into sacks. At the end of the day, we loaded the sacks into the truck and were off to the mill.

The mill looked like a garage from the outside. Inside, there were numbered stacks of sacks. Some stacks had fewer than a dozen bags, some towered over me. Each stack belonged to an individual, who would return after a day or two to retrieve the oil from his pressing.

The olives were washed and a vacuum sucked off the loose twigs and leaves, which could alter the taste of the oil. The clean olives were then fed into a temperature controlled holding unit, where they were crushed and stirred for several hours. The stirring encouraged the oil molecules to coalesce.

When the mash was ready, it was fed through a tube into a centrifuge, where the oil was separated from the solids and the water in the mash. water went through one tube, solids through another. The oil, the whole focus of the endeavor, was put through a filter or three. The last one was a water filter to 'wash' any remaining residue from the end product.

The final oil was pumped from a tube into vats marked with an individual batch number to indicate which grower owned that oil. The mill takes a percentage of the oil as payment for processing. That oil will be sold to a cooperative or bottled and sold by the mill.

At this final station stood a robust old man - 90 years if a day. He saw that I was touring the mill and called me over to tell me about his station and the quality of the oil currently pouring in a green river from the tube. He tore a slice from a loaf of bread nearby and placed it under the minutes-old running oil.

It was beautiful!