Teatru Manoel & so on

May 30, 2007

Do you think I'd get any smarter if I moved into this place?



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Grand Master Antonio Manoel de Vilhena, a Portuguese knight of the Order of St. John, had the Teatru Manoel (Manoel Theater) built in 1731. Its first performance was in January 1732. He called it the "Public Theatre", and knights were the performers in early productions. Later it was called the Royal Theatre (after the British took over, I'm guessing) and finally, in 1866, the Manoel Theatre, in honor of its founder. It's the oldest functioning theater in the British Commonwealth and the third oldest in Europe. For several decades it was superceded by the Grand Opera House (whose ruins I've shown in a couple of earlier photos), and during some of those years it served as a poorhouse and as a movie theater. Now it features live performances by Maltese musicians and singers, as well as by performers from other countries. For two nights last week, a Maltese opera was being performed.

I took this photo from the main floor, looking up at the boxes at the rear of the theatre:



The three boxes in the center on the lowest level are reserved for the president, the prime minister and (I think) the minister of culture and their guests. Two more boxes, one on each side of those three, are reserved for I can't remember whom, and two rows on the main floor are reserved for the press and -- are you sitting down? -- the two censors! Malta still has official government censorship. There are also boxes on the two sides, coming forward toward the stage itself. During the years when the theatre was a poorhouse, families were allowed to rent a box, for a penny a night, to sleep in.

Originally the theatre was built entirely of wood, and the boxes, stage and ceiling still are. (Except, that is, for the 24-kt gold decoration on the ceiling.) But the main floor and its original wooden benches had to be removed because they had become infested with wood-worms which threatened the whole structure. So now there are theater-style seats and tile on the main floor. There are two large cisterns of water (under the orchestra pit, I think the guide said) which serve both to keep the wood from getting too dry and to aid the acoustics of the theatre. It seats only 620-something, and only 570 or so of those seats are sold, with the others being those in reserve.

In the theatre museum, there are architectural drawings of the theatre, costumes which have been used in various productions, printed material related to the history and productions of the theatre, and these two items:



The large wheel in the foreground is the wind-maker. The guide cranked the handle for us and showed how wind sounds were made for opera and play performances. When she cranked quickly, it really did sound like a 35- or 40-mph wind. A slower crank produced a gentler wind. It looks to be a large, geared wheel with a canvas roll wrapped around it. The odd-looking item leaning against the wall is the thunder-maker. She said the sound of thunder far off could be produced by rolling the single wheel (on the close side in the photo) along the backstage floor, and nearby thunder was produced by rolling all three wheels along the floor. She didn't demonstrate this one, however. She also showed us the rain-maker (not in this photo), which functioned something like a rain-stick, except that the tiny lead balls were in a drawer at the top of the contraption--sort of like a very skinny grandfather clock--and fewer or more could be released at a time, for a lighter or heavier rain.

The Teatru now also owns adjoining buildings (or suites or whatever you call them) which include a cool-looking cafe in an open courtyard where the tour begins.

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We had rain today. Not a lot, but enough to wet the streets down. It happened while I was in the mall, having tea, a big chocolate chip cookie and Dracula at Stella's. As I came down the stairs to go outside and head for Vanilla Wifi, I noticed the wet pavement through the glass doors. It was very barely sprinkling still as I walked up the street. Otherwise the weather had been a bit chilly; breezy again, and pleasant enough in the sunshine, but chilly in the shade. After a mostly warmish to even almost hot week last week, this week has begun in a cooler fashion.

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Hey, Allen, mira pa'allá. And don't forget to tell Bubba there's a place just waiting for him in Sliema, Malta.



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The Bellowers have vacated the premises. Will my new neighbors be quieter? Who knows? (Late arriving news: the Bellower's brother and parents were at breakfast this morning, then--while I was still eating--I heard the Bellower himself talking to the lady at the reception desk. Ayayay. I guess they just changed rooms. As long as they're far away from me, maybe it'll be all right. My little hallway seemed quieter last night, at least.)

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This morning while awaiting and then riding on the bus, I had an interesting conversation with another English couple. They had just arrived yesterday, though this is their fifth trip here. The woman asked if I was from New York, although the man thought that my accent was clearly Texan. They wanted to ask me about the West Coast, but I had to tell them that I hadn't been yet to the section they are planning to visit. They want to fly to Seattle, rent a car, and then spend about three weeks exploring from Seattle down to San Francisco. The man says he has used (he may have even said invented) a flight simulator upon which he has "flown" down the West Coast already. Apparently it's based upon satellite camera work. He liked what he saw so much that they decided to make the trip. Previously they have visited the Northeast. The wife has only just retired--I believe she said a month ago--and the husband must have retired just a bit before that. They live near the coast in western England, about 30 miles from Bristol.

All in all I've met quite a few kind and interesting folks while in Malta. The Maltese-Australian couple I met here at the hotel just shortly after arriving are here again now, after several days at a more resort-y area up the coast. This is their "home-base" until they return to Australia on June 27 (oddly, the same day I fly to London), but have already booked a week on the Greek island of Corfu in June and may book a few days in Rome or somewhere else as well. (They are spending more money than I am!) Their vacation time, all together, will be 7 weeks, they said.

Museum of Archaeology and the Silent Warriors

May 29, 2007

Consumer Flash!: Next time you're in Italy (or Malta), buy yourself a package of GS brand "Biscotti con Mais" (cookies with corn). The main ingredient is "farina di frumento" (flour of whatever-the-heck-frumento-is), but 21% is corn flour! And boy, do they make for good snacking!

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Check the hood on this beauty: it's a Ford. What year, I wonder?



And this photo is a gift for Deron. Parked in a dead-end passage between two multi-floor buildings, a lovely Alfa Romeo:



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Malta's Museum of Archaeology is small but a great visit. The first floor is about Malta's prehistory: the Hypogeum and the temple complexes at Tarxien, Haggar Qim and other places, with instructive panels to place what happened on Malta within the larger context of the spread of agriculture and the ending of the Ice Age. (Once upon a time, during the Ice Age, Malta was attached to Sicily!) On display here are artifacts both large and small from the various sites on Malta and Gozo, some -- at least -- brought in specifically for protection from the elements. There are several beautiful examples, carved on limestone, of the spiral and faux-spiral motifs so prevalent here. As one of the panels points out, not all of the carvings which look like spirals at first glance actually are. Some of more like Cs worked in together. A particularly nice example, on a monolith at least eight feet long, I'd guess, features two long horizontal lines, one above the other, of arcs or C-shapes: working together as they do, they suggested to me a line of horned animals moving across the stone face. I tried to draw it, but the drawing is pretty awful. Other stones are much more clearly abstracted shapes -- just spirals and arcs, as in one or two of the photos I posted from the Tarxien temples.

Right as one comes into the main gallery, one faces a large stone-carved cup, big enough to be used by the Fee-Fie-Fo-Fum giant at the top of the beanstalk. My guess is that it's about 30 inches across. It's not perfectly shaped, as there's a definite lean to one side, and it has no bottom in it now, though I suppose it might once have. But yes, it has to be seen as a cup, and not a cauldron or small cistern, because it has a handle on one side. Judging from the cracks running through it, archaeologists had to reassemble the pieces. This is my drawing of it:



The first large gallery, with so many examples of carved and pitted stones, also features several oversized photographs from early expeditions, allowing one to see what some of the sites looked like 80-90 years ago, when archaeologists were first working at the locations.

Perhaps more exciting than the large stones are the small finds from the various sites: various tools of stone, bone or horn; pottery shards; and various carved figures. I tried to draw some of these, but couldn't get a result I was happy with. There are small animal figurines and, especially, figures of women or goddesses. Many of these exemplify what is, I suppose, the Stone Age Maltese style: enormously fat women, often with the most delicately (and simply) rendered small hands. The hips and legs are particularly exaggerated, making for small upper bodies and inflated lower bodies. One of them, which seemed to be a sitting figure, reminded me of a Victorian woman with an enormous skirt spread out around her. The statues are of various sizes (and could be quite large, if you'll recall the photo from Tarxien which shows the surviving lower limbs and skirt of a huge woman). The most famous of these Maltese women is the Sleeping Lady, found at the Hypogeum but housed at the museum in Valletta now. It's a small carving of a woman lying on her side, apparently sleeping, and again exhibiting the small upper body and the wildly inflated lower body. It's really quite charming, and a few other carvings of figures on beds have been found as well. Workers have also found a number of phallic symbols, the most unusual of which is a grouping of three. One can only imagine what kind of cultic or religious significance that might have had.

The museum itself is housed in a 17th-century building right in Valletta. This building replaced a 16th-century building, a couple of parts (an archway, for example) of which can be seen through transparent panels in the floor.

The second floor of the museum currently offers a traveling exhibition, the "Silent Warriors" of China. I suppose several variations of this exhibit may be traveling the world right now. It explains and displays several of the large-scale terracotta soldiers and horses which were found in the tomb of the emperor who united China more than 2000 years ago, along with related smaller objects. The historical panels accompanying the exhibition explain that the tomb is still being excavated, more than 30 years after its discovery. Scholars estimate that there are 7000 of these soldiers in the tomb, though only 1000 have been uncovered to date. They are amazing pieces of work.

According to the information given, the bodies of the soldiers were produced on a kind of assembly line, but the shoulders (?), hands and heads were produced separately and then glued to the bodies. Each head is different and may represent an actual soldier of the Emperor's army. Various hair-styles are represented, and the men have different features and expressions. The real armor apparently was pinned or bolted together, though it's impossible to tell from the terracotta statues if it would have been metal or wood or even hardened leather. Not all are armored. They wear what look like knee-length tunics (or dresses, if you will), below which trousers hang down for another several inches. Below that you have either leg or legging--it's hard to tell in the low light of the museum.

In addition to two full-size (or larger?) horses, there is also a very interesting small-scale statue of a horse with a rider, whose body is either unfinished or somewhat abstracted, atop him. This horse's head is a remarkable piece of work, not quite realistic, with some of its features looking geometricized, as with modern art. It's possible, I suppose, that it might have been painted, long ago, to show that part of what looks almost mechanical about it was actually some sort of complicated bridle or armor. As it is, it reminds me almost of the sort of blend of "life" and "machine" you see in science fiction movies or illustrations.

Along with the soldiers and horses, there are smaller pieces of art, representative of China in or around the same time: incense burners, for example. Oddly enough, one of the things which moved me the most wasn't a piece of art at all: it is, instead, merely the name for an earlier period of Chinese history and it seemed to me yet another reminder of the grace and style which has characterized so much of Chinese culture. This time period is called the "Spring and Autumn Period," and it lasted more than 200 years. It makes one want to go read some more Chinese poetry.

Again, I am presuming that variations on this exhibit are traveling the world. (This one leaves Malta in August.) If you get the chance, by all means go see it. The skill that produced these soldiers will astonish you. And archaeologists, by the way, have found the enormous section of the tomb where the emperor's body ought somewhere to be, but they have not found the chamber where he is, presumably, still lying in state. Who knows what they might discover when that room is located?

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The Mystery Deepens: The Bellower and His Family. This morning the Bellower and three people I presume to be his brother and his parents were having breakfast at the same time I was. The Bellower is older than I first took him to be, perhaps as old as 45. He is bear-ish: stocky, not fat; taller than I am, but not tall; very short crewcut. He looks like a former rugby player. But get this: he was sitting alone at a table with four chairs while his parents and brother were sitting at the next table, which would only seat three. Very odd. And I'm pretty sure the old man was speaking something other than English. So they may be yet another family with Maltese roots, but now living in England or Australia. The brother looks older, smaller, not at all like an ex-jock. The mother has short gray-white hair and is also smallish. The father is a bit stocky, shorter, sort of "old country"-looking. The Bellower himself actually seems to be capable of modulating his voice, though it's still one of those deep-ish voices which carries through bank vault doors. Sigh. (As I write, by the way, the Bellower and some/all of his family are in the room on the other side of me from where I have suspected the Bellower to actually be staying, with the television turned up loud enough to entertain the troops in South Korea, making the hallway practically echo. I seem to be the non-bellowing meat in a Bellowing-sandwich, with the lot of them on both sides of me. I can only hope they'll be moving along soon and will be replaced by other non-Bellowers.)

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Here's my sketch of the plaque I wanted to "draw" the other day, the one that makes reference to Fascism and Nazism. Other than those two words, in the final line, there are what seem to be the word against (kontra); a reference to the Maltese (Lill-Maltin) and English (L-Inglizi), presumably working together, against Nazism and Fascism; and what seems to be a reference to a convoy (konvoj), although that may be totally something else. Maybe something like "In Memory (or Honor) of the Convoy of Santa Maria. . ." Your guess is as good as mine:

Another lazy day

May 28, 2007

Late this afternoon (which was morning, Dallas time) I talked to my mom on the phone. She had just come in from a late-ish walk a few minutes earlier. I bought a phone card and called from an Internet cafe/international call center not too far from the hotel. It may have been the first time I have used one of those calling cards, and I'm sure the guy who told me how to use it thought I must be a relic of the Stone Age. Mom is doing well and is looking forward to the arrival in Dallas, in a week or so, of my little sister and her family, coming from Florida. Mom was planning to get together this afternoon (Dallas time: I think it hasn't happened yet as I write, after sundown here) with the Duncanville branch of the family for Memorial Day. Greetings to all!

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I'm reading Dracula which, believe it or not, I've never read. While on the ship I borrowed from the ship's library Bram Stoker, a biography published in 1996, and found his life an interesting tale. I had no idea how serious his involvement in English theater had been. The author (Barbara somebody) seemed to strain too hard at delineating the idea of Stoker as a perpetual juvenile who needed a hero to worship and serve, but overall the book seemed solid to me. By the time I disembarked to fly to Malta, I was reading (and had not finished) the ship's library copy of E.M. Forster's Howards End, which I haven't seen in a book store here. I may have to wait till I get to England to buy a copy and finish it. I'm also still reading Ted Hughes's selection of Coleridge's poems. I read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" a few days ago--it has been years, maybe decades, since I last read it. It's a fine poem. I'm looking forward to re-reading "Christabel" soon.

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Some of you might enjoy a couple of photos of Sliema under construction (or destruction, if you prefer). Buildings are going up, or being remodeled, everywhere, it seems. A walled city like Valletta is pretty well finished--buildings can be refurbished, but are unlikely to be torn down, I would think, given that Valletta is a "World Heritage City". But Sliema is newer and not sacrosanct. Some of the buildings seem to use cinderblock, which is then coated in something that makes it look more or less like limestone; and some of the buildings probably really are limestone. I'm sure that building this sturdily makes the buildings more secure, in the event of volcanic eruption (remember that Mt. Etna in Sicily is not that far away, nor is Vesuvius in Italy) or earthquake (Turkey, particularly, seems to be an active zone, and I don't know how far the shocks waves spread), but I suspect they also help to give the people some peace and quiet, living as so many of them do in multi-story buildings, surrounded by other people, above, below and to both sides.

On this wall, you can see where stairs, walls and floors were, in the building which is now gone:



And this photo shows a wall with tile still remaining from the old structure and what look to be the holes where supporting beams were mounted:



It may be (I simply can't remember for sure) that these two photos show adjacent sides of one square, but both are definitely from a little peninsula called Tigné Point, where a lot of work is going on.

If any of you want to price properties for your summer homes, one of the big realty firms here is Dhalia.com.

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"Hey, be careful opening those balcony doors!"



Fortunately if you fall, the ground's not far enough away to kill you.

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There are any number of companies here offering "cruises" and bus tours to visitors. The cruises do various things: one of the shorter cruises goes up and down the harbors here in and around Valletta and Sliema and tells folks what they are seeing on shore. There are other cruises that take folks to Gozo (where I'll be in a couple of weeks) and Comino, which has only a few hundred residents. Mostly people go to Comino, I understand, to enjoy the beaches and maybe a barbecue for a few hours. Other cruises go all the way around Malta and/or Gozo. I'm almost positive this is one of the ships used by one of those companies:



One company, Captain Morgan, also offers bus tours to various places on the island, handy for folks who don't want to fool with switching buses or having to walk too far between sites that are a bit further from the bus stops. I may use them for a trip to the Blue Grotto and the temples on the far side of the island, but I'm not sure yet.

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I sat for a while on a bench at the harbor and drew this picture of one of the ships. You can see that my gangway is a bit off, as is the prow:



This drawing, along with others I've done here (as well as the little watercolor I did on the cruise), has gone into the mail: little bits of Malta for the nieces and nephews (who may not care at all!) I do, though, have one great-niece and one great-nephew who are "into" art, so they may enjoy the drawings, even if none of the others do.

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One thing that surprised me about Malta is the prevalence here of English language schools. Malta is definitely cheaper for tourists than England, and most people here speak English, so I suppose it makes sense for Europeans from non-English-speaking countries to come here to learn the language: but it's not something I had expected. I reckon it's a nice way to combine learning a language with a warm climate and oceanfront hotels.

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Because I'm staying here longer than most tourists do, I can afford to have a lazy day like today, a resting kind of day, and still have time to see the things I want to see. I still haven't gone through all of the main sites in Valletta, including the Museum of Archaeology, which has the terracotta soldiers from China in right now, nor have I visited the Teatru Manoel, one of the oldest theaters in Europe. One of the books says that, if you take the midday tour on Wednesday, you might get to hear a live performance as well as see the building. And there's the Armoury, which I might have to visit, just to say I've been there: and who knows? Maybe those lances and spears and arquebusts (or whatever those early rifles were) will be interesting.

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It's been blowsy and dusty again today. The nice thing is it keeps the temperature quite pleasant. I even wore my windbreaker to go out for a while before sundown. The drawback is the dust in the eyes and the wind tugging at things more than you might want.

A little this and that

May 27, 2007

It was one month ago today that I got in the rental car in Duncanville and headed off for Galveston to board the Grand Princess the following afternoon.

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Congratulations to Marietta Fuess and Helen Bell, my co-workers over a number of years in El Paso ISD. Both are retiring and beginning their next lives: Marietta at the end of June, I think, and Helen within the week. Congratulations as well to Kayla Anderson, who will be Marietta's successor and guru of all things librarily technical for the EPISD librarians. And a big round of applause for Esther Arriola who will help Kayla ease into the job smoothly.

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This photo goes out to Dave Larsen, also of El Paso, who is the world's foremost adorer of all things pigeon. I snapped this pigeon (I mean, I took its photo, Dave--I didn't snap its neck) while lunching at the plaza in front of the National Library in Valletta today:



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St Catherine of Italy Church had another concert this morning. Today there were three musicians--harpsichordist, flutist, and bassoonist--although all three played together only for one of the five sonatas. The featured composers were Telemann, Handel, Mozart, Vivaldi and Marcello. The crowd was smaller, but the music was equally lovely. This is my impression of one of the wall panels and the painting of the crucifixion that hangs within it:



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I am not Catholic and have not been keeping up much with news. Someone is being beatified or canonized this week, I gather. The friendly woman at the Hollywood Grocery in Valletta (which I frequent) reminded me that she would be closed four or five days this coming weekend because she is going to Rome for the ceremony/celebration. Perhaps one of you know who it is and can tell us all by leaving a comment.

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Are there loud car-stereos in Malta? Unfortunately yes. But mostly they are playing dance music of some sort, rather than the hiphop/rap which is customary in the US.

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Do I have the world's most obnoxious hotel guest in the room next to me? Perhaps so. Mind you, I'm not saying he's a brute, or a bounder, or a thug. Just obnoxious. His only volume level seems to be bellow, even if it's midnight and he's standing out in the hallway bidding the other members of his party/family good night. If he's irritated at one of them, then the bellow might become an aggrieved bellow. Judging by the accent, he's English or Australian. (Note: I have now seen the bellower, on the third floor. Is it possible he's so loud I think he's right outside my room when he's actually a floor below, or is it just chance I saw him below?) In the days preceding his residence in that room, there was someone (or someones) who liked to play Indian or Middle Eastern music loudly at 11:30 pm. Fortunately the walls here seem to be pretty thick, so most of the internal noise that comes in, comes via the wooden door. The external noise, of course, comes from the balcony. Certain motorboats crossing along the shore across the street seem to resonate with the balcony, making it almost vibrate.

On the other hand, one might look out off the balcony on a Sunday morning and see this:



I "auto-enhanced" this photo. The morning was not as lovely as it appears here. It was hazy, humid, and quite unpleasantly warm. Later the wind picked up and the sky looked like sand might be blowing in from the Sahara (although Malta, a limestone desert island, might have all the dust it needs for beige-ing out the sky). Then for a while it cleared out a bit and was rather nice, then grey clouds moved in and the wind got almost chilly. An odd day for weather, to be sure. Of course I hear that Texas is getting deluged.

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One day last week I gave you a photo of an external wall of the ruined Grand Opera House. Here is a close-up of one of the arched window openings above the much larger rectangular window openings. You can see the wood which has been wedged into the opening, apparently to keep the arch from collapsing.



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How is it that I didn't think sooner to take this photo of a restaurant just a few doors down from my hotel?



(The missing word after the & is "grill.")

The menu includes a "jacket potato" which is, apparently, a baked potato. I may have one, one of these days.

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This evening on the seawall I saw a tall guy wearing a Texas A&M t-shirt. I debated approaching and asking if he actually attended A&M, but finally didn't. He was quite tall, apparently quite intent on getting wherever he was going, and had a rather odd gait which left me a little unnerved.

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This afternoon, after coming in from my sultry time in Valletta, I got into the Mediterranean again for a few minutes. Even on May 27, even on a sultry May 27, the water was quite chilly, and the waves were fairly high as well, urged up by the wind. They weren't rolling breakers like one gets in the Atlantic or Pacific, but since the shore here is rock, one doesn't necessarily want to be tossed around. I wonder what the the salt and mineral content of the Mediterranean is, as compared to the Atlantic or Pacific. I feel oddly coated when I come out of the water here, but maybe it's just been too long since I've spent much time in salt water.

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Is martedí Tuesday? If so, I might get the chance to see how NCIS plays in Italian this Tuesday. It comes on at 9.

Vittoriosa

May 26, 2007

I believe it's Memorial Day weekend in the US. I hope you are all having a nice three-day weekend.

One can really begin to get a sense, in Malta, for how much time you can eat up on public transportation. You may be going only 4 or 5 miles, but it can take 20 or 30 minutes, both because of the stops along the way and because of the pace at which traffic has to move on narrow winding streets. Sometimes I gape out the windows and look at the towns and neighborhoods I'm passing through; sometimes I read; sometimes I visit with other passengers. So it's not a bad thing, but it is a time-consuming thing. If one was working, and having to go back and forth to work this way, I think reading would be a good way to make use of the time.

Today I went to Vittoriosa, the "victorious" city. It's one of what are called here the "Three Cities" which are right together on two small peninsulas and the base where they come together. In Sliema, I am sort of northwest of Valletta, the capital; the Three Cities are sort of southeast. Man, this place can get you as mixed up as Las Cruces, New Mexico. I don't know if the whole island is hard to get a handle on, or if it's just in these cities that are all clustered together within a few miles of Valletta and the Grand Harbor. Going to Vittoriosa today we passed through Paola which is where I went to see the Hypogeum on Thursday. We were driving along to Vittoriosa, and I looked out the window, and there was the Addolorata Cemetery! I had certainly not pieced these cities together in that way. Riding on buses, I suppose, is not the way to get a handle on how an area is laid out, especially if much of the area is built along a sequence of small peninsulas and harbors.

We passed through enormous fortification walls on the way to the small bus terminus just outside the entrance to Vittoriosa. It gives one a pretty clear idea of how threatened the Knights felt on this small island between Sicily and Africa. The Great Siege of 1565 pitted the Knights against a fleet sent from the Ottoman Empire. Though the Knights were woefully outnumbered, reinforcements arrived in time to help them defeat the Ottoman fleet. The Ottoman Empire was still on the march at this time, if I remember correctly, aiming to conquer deeply into Europe. The big battle outside Vienna didn't occur until the 1700s, I think. So the Knights of St. John occupied an important strategic post here.

Other than the fortifications, the Inquisitor's Palace probably fascinates tourists more than anything else in the city. It's now a museum illuminating those times when the Inquisition was a major tool of the Roman Catholic Church in combating what it considered heresy. This plaque, on the wall outside the entrance, also points out how important inquisitors (even Maltese inquisitors) were in the hierarchy of the Church in those centuries:



The building itself is, like much of "old" Malta, made of beautiful soft limestone, which also perhaps softens one against the idea of the building's purpose. It is not a monument to torture. It was a residence, for one thing, for the Inquisitor, the prison warden and I don't know who else, as well as a court for hearing testimony and passing sentence. According to the various explanatory plaques, most of the accused were not tortured, and most of those sentenced were not sentenced to torture. Some of the plaques quote from various of the condemned, and include their recollection of their offenses (witchcraft or spells, for example), the length of their sentences, and so on. One man even notes that he was sent to the infirmary when he became sick and that, after he recovered, he was not returned to his cell. One or two plaques note that prisoners sometimes escaped relatively easily, since some of the cells were in rooms not originally been designed for security. Some prisoners received early release, as well. This photo shows one of the cells, if you can make things out in the darkness: flash wasn't allowed!



Torture did take place, however. One method was the stretching method, and another--which sounded incredibly painful to me--involved tying the prisoner's hands behind his back, then lifting him by his bound hands on a rope slung over a beam. A plaque noted that the rules limited torture to 30 minutes. 30 minutes is a long time, I'm thinking! Most of the cells, surprisingly, had "sanitary arrangements", which fed into ducts or tubes for whisking the "refuse" away.

This passageway once had 7 cells located off of it, 3 "public" cells on one side, 4 private cells on the other. The public cells could be looked into from the outside, if I remember correctly. They would be on the left in this photo; the others were on the right. The reason you can see so much light coming from those openings is that the British, after taking over the island, removed those cells to make space in the courtyard for sports activities!



This photo shows a sundial made on the wall right outside the window near the Prison Warden's room. One of the Wardens, apparently a very conscientious man, made the dial so that he could check on the prisoners at specific times.



I took this photo on the ground floor, just past the main entrance to the Palace and right next to a courtyard. It simply shows the vaulted arches on the ceiling there, which I found cool.




The Palace itself is quite a labyrinth, or at least it felt that way to me, wandering up and down from one level to another, using one staircase or another. Malta is celebrating the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio's time on Malta (1607-1608), and one room displayed salt paintings which duplicated various Caravaggio works. Apparently this making of salt paintings is a Maltese tradition for the Easter season.

There was also quite an interesting special exhibit on Father Emmanuel Magri, a Maltese Jesuit priest who was also one of the instrumental figures in early Maltese archaeology. He was one of the men, for example, who led work on the Hypogeum after it was first discovered, and it's an unfortunate aspect of the documentation that his journals/ledgers about the work he did there were lost after his sudden death in Tunisia just a few years later. The exhibit includes letters he wrote to various people (including noted English archaeologist E. Wallis Budge, some of whose books are still in print), documentary artwork from the early excavations, and so forth.

The Palace also features, of course, various paintings and other types of artwork, though most of us, to be sure, focus on the building and its former uses. Quite a fascinating place to explore.

**

I also visited the Maritime Museum there in Vittoriosa. It's in an old bakery (and what a bakery it must have been! It is a gorgeous building) on the waterfront, where there were also some very impressive yachts docked. Looking at some of them I was amazed to think that these boats are basically toys for their owners; somewhere all of them must have enormously expensive houses from which these enormously expensive boats are simply a diversion. I marvel.

The Maritime Museum celebrates sea-going, of course. It's a large collection of paintings of ships and portraits of important people related to naval history; ship cannons and other tools; books (some printed, some hand-written) of flag-signals and other subjects important to navies; and, perhaps most delightfully, a large collection of models of ships! Some of these models are amazingly detailed, with huge amounts of rigging and so forth. Others were made, apparently, for commercial purposes, to demonstrate what a particular boat or ship could offer, or educational purposes. Part of the exhibit includes information on a technical college that operated in Malta from the 1850s to 1970, preparing teenaged Maltese boys for careers in the navy or with ships in some other fashion. I even found myself enjoying the paintings, many of them watercolors, of the ships sailing across the blue. One section featured beautiful art demonstrating what Phoenician, Greek and Roman ships would have looked like, and there are even examples of Roman anchors on display.

One of the things which was interesting to me, both at the Maritime Museum and in the Magri exhibit at the Inquisitor's Palace, was the handwriting--whether in Magri's letters or in the hand-written ship books--of these times gone by. Some of it was difficult to read, but it was quite beautiful to look at.

Both museums have a lot to offer, though I think two museums in one day--or certainly in one afternoon--are a bit too much for this one traveler.

**

I may have seen Americans this morning. Up till now, I think the only definite evidence I have seen that I am not the only American on the island is a dollar bill dropped into the "extra donations" box at the art museum. This couple was sitting on a park bench while I waited at the bus stop in Sliema, and they got up and came to the stop as I waved the bus down. The man made a crack about my waving at the bus as it approached, and I told him you have to wave at them or the drivers don't stop. Then he made a crack about how "of course they'll stop," as if he thought I was some kind of yahoo. Hearing him talk then, and then on the bus a few seats away, I thought, "Those are Americans." They didn't sound English or Scottish or Canadian or Australian or Irish, and he certainly had that "I'm at home everywhere" kind of attitude that some Americans have. I thought about telling them, when we got off the bus at Valletta, that you really do have to wave the buses down. But by the time we arrived, I wanted to find my bus to Vittoriosa, and I figured he could learn about bus procedures in Malta on his own. Bus drivers here do not automatically stop at every bus stop. They stop if someone inside the bus has beeped that he or she wants off, and they stop if someone at a bus stop waves. Even on my ride to Vittoriosa today, I saw people get left behind because they waited too late to signal to the driver and he was already speeding on.

And, by the way, there are some nice new buses here--the ones called King Long--which even have TV screens in them, but far more numerous are the OLD buses, dating back to the '50s, I'm guessing, or the '60s at the latest. They are something.

**

I think I may be seeing some weird variation on the Picture of Dorian Gray here at the hotel. For the past couple of mornings, when I was eating breakfast, there were two high school or college boys, speaking German but looking very much like American kids with hip or preppy clothes and dark hair with bleached-out highlights. One of them had a very annoying giggle. Then this morning, I didn't see those boys, but instead a couple of forty-something men, also speaking German and looking like the adult version of those boys, even to the point of having highlighted hair. Strange. And there is a young woman here, whom I've seen maybe since my very first day, almost always eating alone and very reticent to say hi or good morning, which I normally do once I see people a few times. Mostly it seems people are here for a few days, or a week, but she has definitely been here longer. Maybe she is a ghost.

**

One more note on cars: my writer friend Alek Lindus from Samos says she has a Seat. They are from Spain. So I'm figuring the name is pronounced, seh-AHT.

**

By the way, it was four weeks ago that I got on the Grand Princess in Galveston harbor. A little bit amazing to think I've been gone that long.

Ruminations

May 25, 2007

After two days of long walks, I took it easy today and stayed in Sliema (except for an afternoon walk down to St Julian's), so this post will have a sequence of odds and ends.

I spent some time this morning at Stella's, a small cafe and coffee shop on the third floor of the Plaza mall, mostly reading my Doyle book. Then I browsed the Agenda Book Shop on the same floor and found a mystery novel (set in Malta but published in the U.S.) which I thought might make a good supplement to my sister's birthday present from Rabat. So once I got on the Internet, I ordered her a copy from BarnesandNoble.com.

**

This photo, the only one I'll post today, is of a building just a little ways down the street from the hotel. At one time, it must have been quite a lovely residence or office building, but this facade is almost all that remains, except possibly for the walls it might have shared with surrounding buildings. There are parts of walls inside it, but none of them is whole. I wonder if this was bombed in World War II--it certainly seems too fine a structure to simply let go. I think if you look carefully through the window on the lower right, you can see a Jeep parked inside:



**

Some Thoughts on the Cruise: I really do recommend a cruise as a way to relax and unwind. You travel without having to get in and out of cars or trains or jets and change hotels/motels; you have food, entertainment, and activities at hand; you have your days free to line up as you wish. I most enjoyed the days at sea. I couldn't, as it were, go anywhere, so I didn't have to worry about what time my onshore excursion was leaving or anything like that. I could sleep in if I liked (especially if we'd had another overnight time-zone change); breakfast when I liked; catch a movie or a dance class or a craft activity; exercise, or sit in the hot tub or sauna, or stroll the deck; or plop myself into a chair and read.

The onshore excursion days were more hectic, because I had to be ready to leave at a certain time (even on the occasions when the ship wasn't ready for us to leave) and worry about getting back on time. The excursions were fun, and I don't know that I would, in hindsight, cancel any of them, but they made the day a little more stressful.

One of the drawbacks is the ridiculous cost of some items on board: a can of Coca-Cola, for example ($1.75); or 75 cent a minute Internet access. But one can always get a Coke on an off-shore day and choose not to keep up with email (or do so sparingly). Another drawback is having an inside cabin. There was no natural light in my room, so I had to use the wake-up-call service or I might have slept who knows how many hours a day. Of course I was paying a premium for having a "state room" to myself, and I can't imagine what they might have charged me for an outside room. There were couples on the ship paying no more, or maybe even a little less, than I was because they were sharing a room. One of the men who had been on a number of cruises with his wife said that Princess charges the most for a single in a room, even though a single would presumably use fewer services and eat less than a couple.

Still, I enjoyed the cruise a great deal, enjoyed having "my home at sea", and certainly recommend the experience, if you have the time and inclination.

**

A Slower Pace?

Does life on Malta proceed at a slower pace? Maybe, but I'd guess it's not by much. Some of the businesses shut down for a few hours mid-day (lunch/siesta time) but after they open up again they may work an hour or two later than mom-and-pop shops in the US. A lot of the stores are closed on Sunday, including my home away from home, the supermarket. Shoppers don't particularly seem less hurried or more courteous than in the US, and there is certainly a great deal of pedestrian traffic to dodge on the narrow streets and sidewalks. On the other hand, you can stop just about anybody on the street and ask a question--such as "Where is the post office?" or "Is this where I catch the bus to Valletta?"--and they will answer if they can. If they can't, they may very well point out someone else you should ask. As a rule, the older people seem friendlier than the younger, but that's often true in the US as well. (Or maybe that's just an old person's perception! Maybe the young are much friendlier to young tourists.) I've gotten answers to questions from folks on the bus, and the bus drivers will answer questions and help you out as well.

**

I think I forgot to mention, in my inventory of automobiles, that there's a car here, a sort of mini-van, called "Picasso". I don't know what the make is: the emblem seems to be two chevrons, one above the other. Peugeot, by the way, has a very nice grill emblem: some kind of stylized animal rearing up.

**

I suppose I had expected that Malta would be much more British than it is and that the Maltese language would be more a curiosity, like Gaelic was not too many decades ago, than a functioning reality. But Malta is much more Mediterranean or Levantine than British, and one hears the Maltese language everywhere. Most Maltese speak English, but often with a rather heavy accent. The bookstores mostly have books in English, though there are Maltese titles as well, and yes, there are Maltese publishing companies: the books are not all imports. According to Lonely Planet, the population is only around 400,000, but Maltese doesn't seem to be a language in danger of dying. The kids speak it too.

Of course the fact that most Maltese speak English is a matter of British influence, and the tea-drinking may be as well, though I'm not sure that tea-drinking is much more prevalent here than in the US. Cafes and cafeterias (coffee shops) are everywhere; tea shops aren't. And one usually isn't offered a choice of teas either: it's tea, period, though the waiter will assume you want it with milk, if it's hot tea. The canned or bottled tea is always flavored: I have not yet seen (this may have been true of the excursions on the mainland too) a bottle of just sweetened or unsweetened tea. Lemon tea is popular, to be sure, but so is peach tea. Ick.

**

My tomato juice comes from Spain; my Gerber's applesauce from Poland; my Pringle's chips from Belgium; tuna from Italy; Quaker Oats and Nestle's Golden Crunch (which I eat dry, as a snack) from the UK. The Coca-Cola comes from Malta.

The Agenda Book Shop likes to sticker some of its books as having the "Original UK Price"--indicating, I suppose, that there is normally an import markup. Most of the English-language books probably come from the UK, no?

Malta joined the EU a few years ago and will switch to the euro next year. At first I had thought that prices were quoted in Maltese liras and euros almost everywhere because the stores would take both; but I don't think this is the case. I think most stores want only liras, but are either easing the people into the idea of the euro or helping the tourists from the EU know what they are paying for things. Just about the only place I have seen the dollar listed is where they are exchanging money or (I can't remember for sure) at tour locations where you can book a rental car or a tour of some sort.

**

I'm still not used to the fact that they drive on the left side of the road, like the Brits, and sometimes when I get ready to cross a street, I can't remember which way to look first. I feel like a safety-dyslexic.

**

The ATM fee here seems to be 1% of amount withdrawn, so it costs you no more to withdraw 10 liras 10 days in a row than to draw 100 liras once. (Of course your bank back home may charge you more for doing it that way.)

**

Someone here (I think it was one of the Maltese-Australians I've met) told me that the Maltese take care of nothing but their churches. I have certainly seen plenty of buildings with ragged "sea-side" exteriors, while others have clearly been recently refurbished. And there is no doubt that there are some incredibly ornate and beautiful churches here, especially in light of the nation's small population. After all, El Paso's population is more than 50% higher than Malta's!

**

Is Europe Just the U.S. with Old Buildings and Different Languages?

Sometimes one hears an American say there's no point in visiting other countries, either because they're too poor and icky or because they're just like the U.S., due to globalization. Well, I can't really comment on the mainland yet (though from my brief visits, only Cannes came close to being US-ish, and there you would have to question which way the influence is going), but Malta (or what I have seen of it so far) is certainly not just like the U.S. Besides the physical characteristics I have mentioned in this and earlier posts, there are other things that would seem to be more related to globalization, such as the prevalence of individually owned shops of all sorts and the absence of "superstores". (Correction: This morning, riding on the bus to Vittoriosa, I saw what looked to be an entertainment superstore.) I haven't seen anything like a department store. The supermarket I go to is on three floors (linked to a parking garage), but the total space of the three floors is a lot less than Albertson's and is maybe somewhat comparable to a local IGA or AG store. No Best Buy or Circuit City. No Michael's. Lots of stationers, who sell pens and paper, along with postcards and books and who knows what else. Confectionaries. (At one near here, you can get a "cheesecake", which is flaky crust, sort of like a croissant, with cheese inside it, for 10 Maltese cents. I had one the other day.) Newsstands. Food kiosks along the seawall, one of which has a fairly good-sized flat panel TV outside for the customers to watch. Do they take it home every night, or is Malta crime-free enough that it's safe locked into the kiosk? (Which is admittedly fairly large as kiosks go, but is still, as far as I can tell, a portable building resting on the brickish tile of the walkway.) There are brands we recognize, to be sure: but Panasonic is Japanese, not American, and when was the last time you saw a Panasonic store in the US? There are American clothing brands, like Quiksilver, but also European brands; and yes, the Plaza has a Polo/Ralph Lauren Store. But overall, I think the feel here is quite different.

Hypogeum and Addolorata Cemetery

May 24, 2007: Part Two

The highlight of today's sightseeing--and what may well turn out to be the highlight of the trip to Malta--was the Hypogeum. If one visits Malta, one must see the Hypogeum. If one loves Stone Age cultures and prehistoric buildings, one probably ought to schedule some time in Malta specifically to see the Hypogeum. Only 70 people a day are allowed inside--7 tours of 10 people each--so if you're making a quick trip to Malta, go to the Heritage Malta website ahead of time and buy your ticket online. I went to the Museum of Archaeology last Wednesday, and today--8 days later--was the earliest I could visit, and this is not even quite the "high season" yet, though it's approaching rapidly.

The Hypogeum was, apparently, an in-ground temple. It was also a cemetery of some sort, though scholars say that the remains (mostly in mass graves, jumbled together) of 7000 people buried here over a period of 1000 years means that not very many people were buried here at a time: perhaps they were priests or priestesses. Like the Tarxien temples, it was abandoned about 4500 years ago, though it was worked on and expanded for a longer period of time. I can't remember if the guide said six or seven thousand years ago for its beginning. (The Rough Guide says 3600 BCE, but for some reason my mind is saying that's not what the guide said.)

The first, oldest area of the Hypogeum was originally open to the sky, a sort of sunken building or temple, but as the people continued to work on it, they went further into the ground, creating or adapting a cavern. The tour itself is kind of frustrating. On the one hand, you are led through it by a guide, who supplements (sometimes by snapping and pointing) the recorder/player you are holding to your ear to listen to the prerecorded information. This means that dawdling, to further ponder what you are seeing, is impossible. It's also true that even though there are only 11 of you--a guide and 10 tourists--in the Hypogeum at a time, the walkways and viewpoints are relatively cramped and there are inevitably things you will not quite be able to see because of the other people crowded in around you. On the other hand, the Hypogeum, one of the oldest buildings on earth, is itself just amazing. The light is kept low, of course, to fight against the growth of algae, and this contributes to the sort of "holy" atmosphere of being in the place, moving along on (sometimes elevated) walkways through narrow passageways, stooping to see through an open "window" or "door" into another chamber, looking up to see the red ochre spirals painted on the ceiling. According to the guide, the scholars think that Stone Age people may have used red ochre to indicate blood or life, and they consider the spirals significant, even with no idea of what they might have meant, simply because they are symbolic and not representative of a particular object: a kind of writing, I suppose.

There is, at the furthest point (or one of the furthest points?) in the descent, a "room" they call the "Holy of Holies". It is, as the guide points out, a sculptural representation of architecture--that is, it is a carving, out of the native rock, of a temple, which therefore provides information to archaeologists about how the above-ground, ruined temples may have looked when they were whole: apparently circular, with a sequence of progressively smaller, recessed roofs. Photography is strictly forbidden, of course, and this is my little drawing of the Holy of Holies. I'm pretty sure my circularity is exaggerated, and the rest of it is an approximation, working from memory (as I sat outside the Tarxien temples) and with a less-than-perfect drawing hand. The Holy of Holies itself is not terribly large. It's hard to judge, gawking at it from a number of feet away and through an opening, but I'd say the columns of the "sculpture" are no more than 6 feet high, and maybe are actually less.



In one hallway, the guide points out openings which were apparently doorways, though they look more the size of windows and are above the surface of the cavern. But scholars hypothesize that there was dirt in the cave when it was used (perhaps with the bones of the dead in the dirt!), making the doorways at ground level at that time.

Unlike the Tarxien temples, a great deal of money has been spent to preserve the Hypogeum and present it to the public in an attractive and meaningful way. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and well deserves it. The "intro" room that the tour goes through first has several large "poster walls", in English and Maltí, explaining about the site and its discovery and displays of some of the material (or replicas) found in the Hypogeum. From the intro room, the tour goes into a small theater for a short film discussing the Hypogeum and what scholars think about it. Then the tour itself begins. The site first became known to scholars in 1902, though there is a theory that it was actually discovered in 1899 and not reported for three years. (Exactly why this is theorized must be in the book.) Its discovery is owed to men digging a cistern for a house and breaking through into the Hypogeum. We were told that four houses had to be removed to preserve and explore the site, which is, like the Tarxien temples, right in the middle of a town, with streets and buildings on all sides.

The most famous object from the Hypogeum, which is now housed in the Museum of Archaelogy, is called "the Sleeping Woman." A very small figure, smaller than most dolls, it depicts a woman/priestess/goddess, with a rather small upper body and an enormous lower body, sleeping on her side. The "intro room" has a replica of it.

How about the employees at the Hypogeum? A mixed bag: a little bit bossy and snappish, while also obliging and helpful. Our personal guide (as opposed to the pre-recorded guide) reminded me of a man leading an elementary school field trip. When I first arrived at the lobby, I was ahead of my pre-arranged ticket time and started asking if I should go wander around outside for a while or-- and the man behind the counter said, "Why are you shouting at me?" I think most of you would agree that a shout isn't my normal tone of voice (and maybe I should have said, "If I'm shouting, it's because I just walked in off a Maltese street and just got off a Maltese bus and I can't hear." But I didn't.) Then when they realized I had an 11 o'clock ticket, they rushed me in to join the 10 o'clock tour, which had an opening, telling me that I could make up what I had missed with the 11 o'clock group (and also allowing them to resell my 11 o'clock spot!) They also made fun of my famous hat, asking me where I had left the horse!

**

Yes, yes, you are all thinking, "Enough with the cemeteries." But while in the Paola/Tarxien area, I took the opportunity to visit the Santa Marija Addolorata cemetery. The name, I presume, is the Maltí version of Saint Mary Dolorosa. It is an enormous cemetery, located on a long sloping hill, with a small-cathedral-sized church in the middle of it, near the crest of the hill. In addition to "normal" tombstones, there are also multitudes of graves with sculptural decorations and lots of small buildings I presume to be family crypts or mausolea.

This is a shot looking up the hill at the church:



As I continued the climb from the downhill entry toward the uprearing church, I came across a large family tomb-marker, with this remarkable bas-relief sculpture in the center of it. I wonder what you will make of it. I thought perhaps it is the Angel of Death leading away the resisting Spirit of Life. It made me think of William Blake's artwork.



This group area puzzled me a bit. Surely not all of these men are buried at this spot. I'm assuming the small markers are memorial markers rather than indications of standing graves or something similar. But what an interesting thing to want to commemorate in a cemetery:



I also came across a German couple who were both painting, with acrylics on art paper, in the cemetery. The man was painting a view of a family crypt there near him, and the woman was working on a representation of an angelic sculpture. I wish I had their skills! They said this was their first trip to Malta, but that they intended to return in the fall.

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And here is a photo of me, with one of the Tarxien stones behind me, for those of you who have been wondering if I have grown a beard, or had my entire face tattooed, or lost an eye in a shaving accident! I do apologize for the goofy grin and the weird angle of my head. Taking one's own photo is a bit of a problem:

Tarxien and sundry

May 24, 2007: Part One

Because I took so many photos today, I'm going to divide today's entry into two parts.

The Tarxien (pronounced something like TARSHEEN) Temples are right in the middle of the town called Tarxien. Who knows what the original builders called them or themselves! The grounds occupy, I suppose, two or three acres, but they might be bigger than that. A project is underway to greatly expand the visitors' center (one might almost say to create a visitors' center since the existing one is so small), and there is not a great deal of explanatory material on the grounds themselves. One is allowed to wander through at one's own pace, but if you want more information, I suppose you are supposed to buy the book!

The Stone Age structures on Malta and Gozo, to which the Tarxien Temples and the Hypogeum (see part two) belong, were all built prior to 2500 BCE, when the civilization producing them came to an end. Archaeologists have even suggested that the people may have abandoned Malta at that time. There seems to be no direct influence of the mainland on Malta, or vice versa, in the matter of these buildings--except, I suppose, in the general fact that there are a lot of megalithic (big-rock) structures in Europe. According to my Rough Guide, Tarxien belongs to the latest stage of development, the final 500 years of so before the end of the civilization.

There are three-piece (trilithon) structures here, as at Stonehenge--two standing stones with another stone lying across them--though these are not as big as though at Stonehenge. When excavations began here, not quite a century ago, the stones were in the ground, some knocked over, some still standing. A farmer kept running into the big rocks as he was plowing, and he notified the authorities. This photo shows some of the stones forming a wall. I can't remember exactly, but I'd say this wall was probably 7-8 feet high:



These are big rocks! The stone on the far right shows the signs of earlier archaeologists' attempts to "restore" the temples to their original appearance, which is now a no-no. There were small round rocks, not quite as large as bowling balls maybe, scattered around the site, and scholars hypothesize they might have been used to move the larger stones around.

This photo shows the surviving bottom of what must have been quite a large statue, maybe twelve feet or more high. It looks like a woman or goddess to me, but who knows what these early Maltese people wore? Maybe it's a priest or a god! Such delicate feet for such a large body.



This frieze is rather charming, isn't it? The animals marching along together:



At another point in the temples, there are three carvings of larger animals--two bulls and something else which looked to me like it might be a lactating mother animal of some sort--but the carving is so weathered that the photographs are difficult to make out.

This is another frieze, using geometric patterns which might in some way recall or be linked to the spiral patterns inside the Hypogeum painted in red ochre. Though the Hypogeum was begun long before the Tarxien temples, it was still being worked upon until the civilization's end.



This shows an example of the doorway or trilithon feature, though this one is closed in. The supporting rock on the left actually seems to be made of separate stones, which might be reconstruction. I don't know. The "cauldron" in the right foreground is probably about a yard across.



It was fun to wander the grounds at Tarxien, especially being allowed to go at one's own pace rather than in a guided tour as at the Hypogeum, and it's impressive to think that this accumulation of walls and temples is old enough that, when it was abandoned, the Great Pyramid was still a few decades away from being built. But the feeling one gets here in these reconstructed ruins is nothing like as powerful as one gets at the Hypogeum.

On the way to the Hypogeum and Tarxien, I talked to an English couple on the bus. They have been coming to Malta four times a year for 18 years!

**

Just a note a propos of nothing (or is it a propos nothing?). At one time or another, on the ship or on land, I have seen folks who have reminded me of: Linda Rivera, that Dallas-church-singing dude named Cecil (who looks like Kenny Rogers--Marty will know who I mean), Virginia Sinclair, Wayne Jackson, Frances LaChance, Vicky Glynn, Stacy Childress, and Deron Bauman.

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Another note a propos of nothing: Don't most folks who spend four weeks on or very near the sea get tanned? Mind you, I'm not sunbathing, and my shorts come to my knees, and most of my T-shirts cover most of my upper arms, and my Malta hat pretty well keeps my head covered, but I'm only using SPF 8 on my lower legs and arms and neck, but I'm not sure I'm any darker than I would be from taking afternoon walks in El Paso. Of course it's true that I have generally found that SPF 4 is all the protection from sunburn that I need, unless I'm on the beach or in the river for hours at a whack, but this is ridiculous. Finally today, after wearing sandals without socks almost every day for four weeks, it begins to look like the 'sock' part of my legs may finally start to tan.

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Cars in Malta:

The cars are mostly European and Japanese, which is not surprising. I have seen one Chrysler/Jeep dealer, which surprised me, and this morning I saw a tiny little Chevy parked on the street. (Don't tell my nephew Maddison that Chevies aren't prominent here.) There is a vehicle named Seat, which I have never heard of before. There are Fiats, Peugeots, Toyotas, Nissans, Hyundais, Smarts, Land Rovers, etc. Mostly small. The streets are mostly quite narrow, and on some of them drivers go up on the sidewalk if it's a tight fit. One of my guidebooks says that the accident rate is high in Malta. I haven't seen an accident yet (and hope I don't), but I've sure heard squealing brakes and honking. Traffic goes slower because the roads demand it, but the drivers aren't any calmer, as far as I can tell.

Long Walks

May 23, 2007

Today I took a long walk again, from Sliema to Valletta, going mostly along the harbor-front and taking my time. I began by going over to Tigne Point (where there's a little park with a set of jungle-gym-style bars that I can do some chin-ups, push-ups and dips on). I'm not sure about the total distance: three miles maybe? Four?

Along the way I passed this beautiful Morris Minor convertible in the parking lot of the Msida Marina:



It made me think of my two older sisters, because June (or was it both of them?) drove a Morris Minor for a while in the '60s, when I was probably a sixth- or seventh-grader. If I remember correctly, it was the car a gush of water shot up into, one day during a heavy rain, when June drove into a big puddle: there was an open hole in the underbody of the car where the gear level was. Morris Minors were, and remain, quite an oddity in the U.S.

Not too much farther along from the marina is the "ecumenical" cemetery which I visited last week. This tombstone, which I found rather poignant, is simply one of many for men and women who died too young:



Along up the hill into Floriana from the cemetery I strolled a bit through the Argotti Gardens again and found an old man taking a noontime nap in the shade. If you squint, you can make out his shoes under the bench:



It doesn't take too long to walk the length of Floriana and come to the bus terminal just outside the Valletta city walls. In the center of one of the turn-arounds there is this fountain, truly one of the most peculiar things I have seen in Malta so far. The three mermen (?) hold up the smaller fountain bowl above them, and what peculiar mermen they are! For one thing I think you can see, at least with the merman in the right foreground, that their lower bodies are not the long single tail of a fish which one expects, but rather like two individual legs (with knees!), each of which ends in a fish-tail. Furthermore, their faces, which you cannot make out in the photo, are markedly Asian, almost like something you might see in illustrations for a Chinese folktale involving pirates or river-spirits. The water was flowing as I took this photo, but was off a few hours later when I came back by here to catch a bus:



***

While eating my lunch at the Upper Barakka Gardens, I thought it might be fun to do a "drawing", rather than take a photograph, of one of the plaques mounted on the walls of the garden. The one directly across from where I sat was in the Maltese language and was clearly in commemoration of some aspect of the Maltese involvement in World War II. It was interesting to recognize the Maltese versions of "Nazism" and "fascism" -- N-Nazizmu and Il-Faxizmu. (I'm not sure I correctly remembered the spelling on the second: the Maltese x is pronounced like "sh".) But I decided against drawing this plaque, because the older man I was sharing the bench with didn't seem pleased to have to share the bench. So I wandered down a ways and worked instead on a (Rats!) longer plaque, in English, in memory of Sir Thomas Francis Fremantle, who died in 1819. I had some trouble keeping the rows of the engraving centered, as they are on the plaque, but at least the printing's not too bad. I guess you can't really call a transcription of a text a "drawing": maybe it's more like a document. I don't think Her Majesty's Forces will be needing my help in the art department:



The "slant" in the photo is because I angled the camera away so as to avoid flash-glare, and the "Upper Barakka Gardens" is my notation, not part of the entire monument.

***

The Grandmaster's Palace, which was once exactly that, the Palace of the Grand Masters of the Order of St. John, is now used by the Maltese Parliament. Two museums within it are open to the public: the Armoury (British spelling) and the State Rooms. Today I visited the State Rooms, which feature paintings of the Grand Masters and suits of armor in a long high hall, several state rooms, a room of tapestries, and a lot of scenic and faux-carved frescoes. One is not allowed to walk all of the way into the various state rooms, which means that some of the art is not at all easy to see. It's also true that the portraits of the Grand Masters aren't distinguished art: they serve more of a historical purpose, I would say, for a pre-photographic age. The most interesting thing about the suits of armor is how small they seem to be. Assuming the lower body proportions are correct on the mannequins which hold the armor, the knights would seem to be smaller than I am--not just shorter, but smaller. Most of us have read about how much larger people have gotten, but it's one thing to imagine a 5' 2" Beowulf, 1200 years ago, and quite another to imagine mounted horsemen much the same size only four or five hundred years ago:



The tapestry room was probably the most interesting, and it's a pity that one is kept out of the back two-thirds of the room and has to peer at the art from so far away. Most of the tapestries are quite large, and a number of them depict scenes which I take to be views of exploration: one features an elephant; I think I recognized a tapir in another; and at least one or two look to be versions of the "new world", with iguana-ish lizard, scantily-clad aboriginals with bows and arrows, and so forth.

The State Rooms show signs of wear and aging which have not been recently repaired, and the 2 Lira entry price is ridiculous: a gallery of work which requires about 20 minutes of browsing oughtn't to cost more than 6 dollars!

Oddly, when I gave the ticket taker my money, he asked if I were 60! That's the age at which their "senior" pricing begins, and I think it's the first time I've been considered to be possibly that age. It was especially interesting to me in light of something I had just noticed earlier, when getting ready to go out this morning. I suppose we all do strange things (make faces, smile, frown) when we are, for whatever reason, looking at ourselves in mirrors. And we men certainly make lots of strange expressions when we are shaving with non-electric razors. So I had noticed months ago, if not farther back, that I had acquired a long vertical wrinkle in my left cheek, beginning at the outside corner of the eye and going almost straight down. I wouldn't call it a "worry line" because it was prominent when I smiled as well, but I noticed this morning that it is nearly gone. I took that as a good sign that retirement was agreeing with me--until the ticket-taker came along, anyway!

***

Corrections: Both my Lonely Planet guide to Mediterranean Europe and one of the employees at St James Cavalier have corrected my misperception about the Maltese language, Maltí. It is not derived from Arabic, although there are some Arabic imports into the language, along with other imports from English and, I assume, the languages the Knights spoke. It is, like Arabic, a Semitic language, but according to Lonely Planet it is "believed to be based on Phoenician." This makes sense since the Phoenicians/Carthaginians were here before the Romans took over in 218 B.C.E., but it's amazing that the language survived all those subsequent conquests, beginning with the Romans. The man at St James also said that Maltese people can understand the Lebanese, and vice versa, and I didn't even realize that there was still a surviving version of a native Lebanese language!

National Museum of Fine Arts and American Embassy

May 22, 2007

This afternoon I received an email from one of the writers I've published in elimae, who told me his 22-year-old son dreamed of Malta after reading my Travel Log!

**

I got off the bus to Valletta in Floriana this morning. Floriana lies more or less at the "land" end of the peninsula it shares with Valletta, which is at the "sea" end and guards the Grand Harbor. I got lost trying to find Triq Sant' Anna, also known as St. Anne Street, which is where the U.S. Embassy is. I realized last Friday that I hadn't checked in with them, and I thought it might be a good idea since I'm here for an extended period. I passed through two security checkpoints, one at the entrance at street level and the other on the third floor where the embassy is located. On the third floor I filled out a registration form letting them know where I am staying, who my emergency contacts are in the U.S., and when I will be leaving. It was a quick and easy procedure.

From the Embassy I headed toward Valletta, but before I entered the city walls, I made a couple of stops. I visited both the World War II Memorial in the center of a traffic circle/turnaround. It features commemorative messages from King George VI (I think that's the right number--he was Queen Elizabeth II's father) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt's message is, interestingly, dated on the second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I'm not sure if you'll be able to read it from the photo or not, but here goes:



To the south of the war memorial is a garden overlooking the harbor, and along one arm of the garden is another small monument from King George proclaiming his pleasure in assuming the "Colonelcy-in-Chief" of the Royal Malta Artillery in honor of their support for the R.A.F. during the war so far. I took a photo of this proclamation especially for Ron McDougle, husband of my old teaching buddy Suzanne McDougle. Ron already knows more about Malta's military history than I will learn in six weeks here. If I thought Cary Phillips cared anything about Maltese history, I'd "give" it to him too:



I took this shot from the sidewalk looking over the wall into a parking lot below. Even with the cars evident under the tree, the brilliance of the blossoms seemed worth snapping:



**

The National Museum of Fine Arts is quite an impressive place. The building itself, while lovely enough, needs some renovation and it suffers from a failing common to so many museums: lighting the paintings without creating a glare on them. Along with sculptures, some of them quite nice, and even a display of pocket watches, there are paintings here going back to the 15th century, if not further, and many are dark: I don't know if it's from smoke or soot in centuries past, or if the artists intended the darkness. I found myself wanting to get closer than I could without stepping into a glare.

But the work on display is well worth seeing, and a great deal of it features Maltese scenes, particularly the Grand Harbor at Valletta and paintings displaying some portion of the city's defensive walls which are of course still here. Much of the work is apparently by Maltese artists, artists whom I've never heard of but whose skill is not in doubt. There's even a special room for watercolors, deliberately dimly lit to preserve the watercolors from fading. This room includes the museum's single JMW Turner work. Turner himself never came to Malta, but created the watercolor based on another artist's work. This Maltese scene is small and tidy, with a lot of highlighted details on top of the background colors which seem, at least to me, almost impressionistic.

There are many portraits in the museum, including church figures and at least one of the Grand Masters of the knights, as well as other persons of no particular historical interest. The very severe-looking woman in one of them seems to want to reach out of the painting and smack somebody. Two of the works which most impressed me were Mater Dolorosa by Giuseppe Cali (whom I presume to be Maltese) and a painting of Mary Magdalene by an anonymous "early 19th century Maltese Nazarene painter" (whatever that means). The Mater Dolorosa shows Mary's head close-up, tucked into what seems to be the corner formed by the two beams of the cross. She wears a head-covering, and one tear has just fallen from her left eye. Though the rendering of her face is a little soft and hazy, rather than razor-sharp, the effect reminded me of Pre-Raphaelite work. The Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, is brightly colorful, with a beautiful blue sky behind Mary and a very thin gold halo above her head. Perhaps the traditional confusion of Mary Magdalene with the "woman caught in adultery" led the painter to depict Mary topless, though her long wavy hair and upraised hands keep the viewer from seeing anything untoward. She gazes serenely upward with that sweet Renaissance expression of bliss on her face.

There are also two paintings concerning the Cain and Abel story, which I don't recall being a prominent theme in art in general (though Romantic poets were attracted to the Cain character). One of the paintings depicts Abel sprawled on the ground while Cain, with a club raised over his head, has one foot in the center of Abel's torso, ready to strike the fatal blow. In the background one can make out the altar and a small figure, presumably Adam, next to it. It is notable, since the story deals in part with a sacrifice of grains rather than animals, that the brothers wear animal skin loincloths, in what we would probably consider the "caveman" style. The other painting is one of the museum's larger works, probably at least 6 x 8 feet, and shows Adam and Eve discovering the dead body of Abel.

The large staircase which connects the basement, ground and first floors of the museum features banisters made of chains with small maceheads at each end, a reminder of Malta's very military past (and perhaps a survival from the building's original purpose as a private home), and the courtyard at basement level has a small fountain and a large sculpture of a seated Anton Chekhov. All in all, I definitely recommend this museum and the Cathedral Museum in Mdina.

**

This is a shot of the longest surviving wall of the Grand Opera House. It has been destroyed twice, I read, once by fire and once (I think) by German bombers. Currently there are blue plastic seats inside it, so I reckon it's still used for some kind of open-air performance situations:



**

This afternoon, after my almost daily grocery stop (if I buy deli ham or turkey, I have to eat it right then, since I don't have refrigeration!), I gave in and bought only my second book of the journey so far: Ted Hughes's edition of A Choice of Coleridge's Verse, which includes Hughes's 100-page essay about Coleridge's work. I'm still reading my Spanish Arthur Conan Doyle, but I wanted some English to read as well.

Here and there

May 21, 2007

This morning I strolled along a section of the seawall where I hadn't walked before. There are two completely enclosed "rock pools" there (one of which is pictured below)



as well as other partially enclosed pools, with steps cut out of the rock or metal pool stairs going down into the water.



The two enclosed pools are actually attached to the sea as well, but through an opening under the water level. Even inside the pools, the water surges up and down.

Perhaps the most colorful character I've met on this trip so far is a Maltese-Australian man (born in Malta, but at some point emigrated to Australia) who is staying at the Europa. He said he used to swim in these pools as a boy. He is currently in Malta for a wedding and then plans to go to Istanbul, with the intention of buying a large sailboat (with two diesel engines). He has negotiated a price over the Internet/email with the seller, but won't make up his mind for sure until he sees it. If he buys, then he will have to hire a crew and take several weeks sailing it back to Australia. He said he has an engineering company in Australia, and he's getting ready to retire in a couple of years and turn it over to his son. He wants to completely redo this ship and start his own "Windjammer"-type cruise company sailing in the Southwestern Pacific out of Australia. The boat has both double and single bedrooms and a room for the crew. This man, who is probably a little older than I am, mostly wears tank tops: his upper arms are covered with tattoos. He has a sort of British look and coloring, except that he is very deeply tanned. He's full of opinions about the tax rate for upper income folks in Australia and about the government assistance the Maltese receive. On the other hand, he has said that a typical Maltese citizen only makes about 80 Maltese liras a week (somewhere in the neighborhood of $250), which makes the 200 liras-a-month apartment I saw posted a pretty steep proposition.

***

My first "conversation with a stranger" today took place a little further along. The woman is from England and is here with several friends. They are on a package deal, almost like a cruise. They are staying at a hotel called Plevna, and their package includes three meals a day, usage of the hotel's beach club, and drinks (she didn't say if she meant alcoholic or not, but I'd guess not) throughout the day. I had walked down the staircase into the beach club, just to see if the public sidewalk continued that way (it didn't), and was coming back up as she was coming down. Overlooking the sea, the beach club has a pool, a wide deck for sunbathing, and some kind of snack bar. From what she said, they pay significantly more than I do, but they get lunch and dinner for it, which might mean that a "normal" person, who can eat regular food, could save money on the deal! She certainly spoke highly of the place.

It was right in that same area that I had this reminder of El Paso: iceplant hanging down a wall:



This building was in the same neighborhood as well, but almost right across the street from the harbor, on the other side of the peninsula:



***

After lunch back at the hotel, I spent an hour or so browsing what is so far the best bookstore I've seen here (and, no, I haven't seen them all, believe it or not). Books Plus is small, like most stores here, but is very nicely laid out. It's on two floors, and the staircase that leads up to the second floor features a plate glass half-wall along the stairs, with stainless steel banister, as well as a mirror wall to the side, making the store look twice as big and quite bright (and also making one catch a glimpse of oneself out of the corner of one's eye and wonder if someone is approaching). What distinguishes the store, besides its design, is its inclusion of poetry, apparently not in high demand here, and a nice selection of "classics" published in the Wordsworth line from the UK which are priced at only 99 Maltese cents--quite a bargain for this neck of the woods. They also have an edition of Coleridge's poems with a long introduction by Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate of England.

***

This evening, on my way up the stairs from a short walk and reading-on-the-Strand time, I got into a conversation with a young couple I've run into several times here. He is Spanish (Galician, actually) and she is Italian. They have been living in London, where they went specifically because she wanted to learn English. (She already knows French as well, and he also speaks Portuguese and English, and probably Galician.) She is interested in working in the travel industry, and he has already trained as a chef. They had thought Malta might be a place worth relocating to, but changed their minds after spending this trip here. They don't feel (remember that they are young) that there is enough to do here, and they are also not excited about the number of buildings still in ruins, even with all the construction going on. She said they would probably end up in Italy, where her employer in London can transfer here. With his skills as a chef, he can pretty well work anywhere. He also gave me contact information for his father, when I mentioned that I would be going to Spain, because his father has a hostel in Santiago de Compostela, a prominent tourist and pilgrimage site in Northwestern Spain. The hostel (not a hostel in the "youth hostel" sense; more like a bed-and-breakfast) is probably more expensive than I can afford for more than a night or two, but he recommended I go and see it, even if I don't stay there: he said the building is beautiful. He said his father might be able to give me a discount if I mention that his son sent me, but that that would be difficult in summer.

***

I need to end today's post on a somber note. Last week, quite unexpectedly, my brother-in-law's mother passed away of a heart attack, though she had no known heart condition. The funeral took place today. I ask you all to send your warm thoughts to Bryan, his father Jim, and his sister Melanie.

Music in St Catherine of Italy Church

May 20, 2007

My first stop this morning was St Catherine of Italy Church for an 11 a.m. performance of Baroque music on flute and harpsichord. Interestingly, the harpsichordist was the same young man I talked to yesterday at St James Cavalier about the construction of that building. According to the program, he's in his early 20s and composes as well as plays. The flutist looked to be 35 or 40. He's a college teacher here and has studied organ as well as flute and is also a choir conductor. They performed works by Vivaldi, Bach (scholars disagree as to which of the Bachs actually composed the work in question) and Handel, along with two composers I had not previously heard of--Valentine and Philidor. Valentine, the harpsichordist/host told us, was also a chess master who eventually decided to devote his energies to chess and not music.

The acoustics in the church were excellent. It is a small octagonal building, with extensions off the octagon. The main altar, for example, is a rectangle or square off one side of the octagon, as is the entrance. There is a small dome above the octagon, and the outside walls disguise the octagonal nature of what's inside. When the host spoke, he stood just slightly into the main octagon, and there was a bit of echo which sometimes made him hard to understand. The harpsichord was set up, however, exactly under the archway between octagon and altar room, and the flutist stood under the arch as well. When they played, the sound was perfect. The audience was perhaps 40 or 50 people, including a woman with two small boys, and though the older can't have been more than 5, I never heard a peep from them throughout the hour-long performance. It made me wonder if they were musical prodigies themselves, or if they have simply been very well-trained! The proceeds from the concert go to the fund for restoring the interior of the church, which needs a great deal of work, in terms of the paintings in the dome as well as the wall-painting and so forth. The exterior was restored a few years ago, and preliminary work is to begin on the interior soon, though we were assured the concerts would continue, even around the scaffolding.

St Catherine of Italy Church was, when the Knights still controlled the island, the church of those who spoke Italian. The Knights were divided into langues (language groups), and each langue had its own church. Their residence was, I gathered, behind (which is, I think, more or less, east) the church. Almost directly across the street is the Auberge de Castile, which I can only assume had been the headquarters of the Spanish-speaking knights. It is now the prime minister's offices (and perhaps a residence as well?) and is not open to the public.

As I was leaving the concert, a man asked me what I was drawing during the performance. He said at first he thought I was writing criticisms of the show, then realized that my hand was moving across the page in a non-writing manner. He was right--I thought it would be fun to try to draw a bit while I was listening, so I sketched out (with a rollerball--hardly an instrument for sketching, but it's what I had) the two musicians playing and the display case which contains a statue of St Catherine. The man and his wife are German, visiting Malta from Nürnberg, and staying right in Valletta, which I have often wished I had known enough to do. They highly recommended their bed & breakfast, called Asti. (Later I took a peek in the front door--locked!--and saw a beautiful old lobby with a limestone staircase going up the rear wall.) They also gave me their names and contact information, so that if/when I visit Nürnberg, they can help me find a good place to stay and make recommendations as to what to see. Very kind folks indeed.

I roamed the Lower Barakka Gardens again, reading a bit, and snapping this photo:



From a distance it looked to me almost like a chalked or painted "33", in a very stylized form, or even a gang-style logo. But of course it's actually a set of four screw- or bolt-housings with the shadows coming down perfectly, from where I sat, to make the 33. In my photo, unfortunately, I didn't get the angle exactly correct, and the 3s don't quite join in the middle.

Later I wandered past the Grand Master's Palace (or is the Armoury? Or maybe they're the same?) where the Grand Master of the Order lived, back in the old days. It now belongs to Parliament, I believe. There is a parking lot across the street, marked for members of Parliament only, and it is currently closed to the public, though normally it's open. I'm wondering if Parliament is in session, or if perhaps restoration work is going on inside. Anyway, this photo shows a look through the large entryway into the plaza inside the building. That appears to be good old Lord Poseidon standing in the plaza:



Both side-walls of the entryway feature commemorative plaques, which look to be made exactly like the tombstones in St John's Co-Cathedral. One commemorates a visit of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, and this one commemorates of visit of (you can read for yourselves):



I took a long walk after returning to Sliema, going sort of north along the seawall, though because there are so many inlets here one might be going almost any direction at any given point. The buildings across the street from the seawall/Strand run the gamut from obviously renovated, and probably very expensive, apartments and hotels, to clearly NOT renovated, and sometimes empty, buildings. But the seawall itself is quite nice: a brick or stone surface to walk upon; limestone and iron fencing to prevent your falling off; trees and small bushes in the parkway between sidewalk and street; benches in many places; and often snack shops and actual eateries. There are sandy beaches in other places upon the island, but near here the ocean access is stone. There are "diving centres" where one can sign up to scuba dive, as well as pools overlooking the sea, and--in one spot a mile or so from here--some sand, though the bed was quite narrow.

The television offered here at the hotel is Italian (and I recall someone saying that that is the norm for Malta), and my sister Jane will be pleased to know that Columbo, speaking Italian, is one of the offerings.

Early Morning at Sea

This is a photo I didn't get posted after I made it to land from the ship. I took it not long after sunup one morning, probably the morning we all got up earlier than normal expecting to see Gibraltar.

St. James Cavalier and more

May 19, 2007

The day's early goals were fairly simple: walk to the post office (maybe 3/4s of a mile) to post my sister Jane's birthday present to her. (Shhh. Don't tell her.) I bought it in Rabat yesterday. (Shhh. Don't tell her.) Her birthday's June 3, so hopefully air mail will get it to her on time.

Then I headed for the Plaza, Sliema's mall. The Plaza is not like an American mall, a sprawl of one or two floors of stores. Instead, like most things here, it goes up and not out. I'm not sure how many floors it is (five maybe), each of which has maybe 6-8 smallish stores. No giant department stores. Because Vanilla Wifi's Internet cafe is not open on weekends, I headed for Stella's, which features Vanilla, to get some work done over a cup of tea (actually a small pot of tea) and a chocolate turnover. The tea was fine, and so was the turnover (though I scraped most of the chocolate off), but I couldn't connect to Vanilla. So the manager (owner?) pulled out his cell phone right then and called up the Vanilla guy to report the problem. The guy said he would come out later to see if the router (or whatever it is) was not working right. Anyway, I tidied up the text of yesterday's post, had my tea and turnover, and then went out to find a spot to do some wifi-ing.

The problem, to be sure, was that even in the shade the midday light was bright enough to make it difficult to see the screen on my laptop. So I took care of a couple of emails, made the posting to the Travel Log, messed around a little bit more, then went to the supermarket to get some things for lunch and future meals. I had lunch on the balcony of my room (including taking this photo):



After lunch, I returned to Valletta.

**

St. James Cavalier Center for Creativity is built into the wall fortifications of Valletta. An employee (who, I learned today, is also a musician and composer--you'll have to read tomorrow's entry to get the info) told me that two of the rooms had been cisterns, one of which is now their cinema. They have remodeled and reworked the interior space so that it's a really wonderful blending of the original Renaissance (I think) fortifications and the contemporary exhibit space. You can see limestone walls and arches, and in a number of places they have built a display opening into a new wall, so that the old wall behind it is still visible. The new exhibit had just opened and featured works in a sort of centennial commentary on Picasso's 1907 painting The Demoiselles d'Avignon. The exhibition is called "The Philosophical Brothel", which they say is the original name of Picasso's painting. The work is by students in the University of Malta and the Unversity of the Arts London. I would think any artist would be pleased to be displayed in such a lovely spot. Here is one of the entrances:



And this is a shot of the name placard of one of the works:



Wandering around on the walls, I had a short visit with an older English couple resting on a bench. They were interested in my plans, and the husband recommended that, when I return to the US, I begin caravanning (RVing) again.

**

This photo shows one of the walls close up. I'm assuming that the difference in the amount of erosion is due to the stone itself, some of which would then be harder, some softer. (Or maybe they've tricked me by replacing some stones.)



**

A Bank of Malta location there on/at the fortification wall right near St. James is serious about your not driving too fast into their parking lot:



**

I wandered Valletta some more and found their mall, likewise a fairly constricted high-rise, which also has a cinema. Maybe at some point I'll take in a movie. While in a book and magazine store called Agenda (they have a location in Sliema and in several other places on the island too), I looked for a while at their selection of pens and pencils, still trying to decide if I ought to try my hand again at doing some sketching while I'm here.

**

On a totally unrelated note, I'm slowly reading (I haven't been spending a lot of time reading) the Spanish translation of Arthur Conan Doyle which I picked up in Barcelona: Historias de intriga y de aventuras. Stories of Intrigue and Adventure. These stories (that is, the few I've read) have some similarity to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as moodier and more Romantic elements, such as narrators who have determined to remove themselves from society for one reason or another. Given that I'm reading a Spanish version of Doyle's writing, I'm still impressed. Critics consider him "light" reading, but his skill is evident and the work is very well-done. While on board the Grand Princess, I read Julian Barnes's Arthur & George, a historical novel based on the lives of Doyle and a mostly forgotten lawyer named George Edalji, which piqued my interest in Doyle again. Barnes's novel is quite good, by the way, and it seems that he did a good deal of research before creating it.

Mosta, Mdina and Rabat

May 18, 2007

Today on my way to Mosta, home of the famous dome, I met another Scottish couple. They seemed to be pleased that I knew the difference between Scotland and England. National identity seems to be quite a strong issue with the Scots. (And the husband mentioned that I might want to pretend to be Australian, since Americans aren't terribly popular in Europe at the moment.)

Mosta, as the guidebook says, is fairly nondescript except for the Dome. Unlike most churches with domes, which are built on the cross-like floor plan, and place the dome over the intersection of the two beams (if you will) of the building, the Mosta Dome is built like the Pantheon (the temple to "all the gods," from the reign of Augustus) in Rome--essentially a round building underneath the dome, with side chapels spoking off to the sides. This is a shot of the front of the church:



The twelve apostles flank the main entrance, six to each side, and apparently St. Andrew was the Cooper of the Apostles. Rather than being dressed in the formal sense, his mantle/robe was just sort of carelessly thrown around his mid-section. Maybe he was getting ready to take a dip in the Sea of Galilee. (Mosta's Bartholomew isn't a fashion-plate either, but his robe is at least draped across one shoulder.)

During World War II, a German bomb pierced the dome when about 300 parishioners were inside. The bomb hit, then skidded across the floor and came to a stop, never exploding. This is, needless to say, considered a miracle, and a replica of the bomb (quite a large one for the time) is on display in the gift shop. The church calendar shows the point where the bomb came through the dome, which may or may not be the retouched spot (if you can make it out) in this photo, about 45 degrees right of the peak of the dome, where the windows are.



From Mosta I went back to Mdina and Rabat, since they are just a few miles away. At a small cafe not far from Mdina's main gate, I bought a cup of tea and some potato chips, to supplement my tuna and applesauce, and sat outside to have my lunch. Then I headed down into Rabat to find St. Agatha's Catacombs. After buying a ticket, one is directed first to the Museum, which houses religious objects, coins, pots, Egyptian ushabtis, and artwork. Some of the items are clearly donated, but if most were found in Malta, then the Greeks must have had some kind of presence here, though most of what I have seen so far seems to go from the Carthaginians directly to the Romans. The Greeks founded a number of cities in Sicily, but they may have found Malta not worth the bother. I'm just not sure.

The catacombs are, of course, the main draw, not the Museum, some of which the L.V.Stockard girls (appearing alphabetically: Lou Ann, Melanie and Sheila) would have described as "tooky". The stairway/entrance down to the catacombs is in the plaza right outside the church, which was closed today. According to the brochure, visitors can only enter 1/10 of the catacombs, which cover more than 4000 square meters. They are interesting and creepy. There is a good bit of wall art--whether it's technically fresco or something else, I don't know. It's all damaged to some degree, but still colorful and impressive to see. The catacombs themselves go back as far as the 2nd century C.E/A.D., though much of the artwork was added later. From the main foyer, as it were, at the bottom of the stairs, one can see the main altar, only a few hundred years old, and another alcove, which has the look of a small chapel. The entrance to the open section of catacombs is to the right. One goes up a short set of stairs, and then starts winding down into the catacombs. Narrow walls, low ceilings, and open burial places characterize them. In some of them there are bones; whether original or replica, I don't know. Others are empty. There are small wall niches, perhaps for the burial of children or for ossuaries, as well as the longer "coffins" carved right out of the rock, judging by appearances. One winds around and down, from one "room" to another. At the end of the point that visitors are allowed to go is a small "church" cut into the rock. If one looks toward what I presume to be the front of this chapel, there is a carved alcove to one's back, with a restored decoration featuring doves and, according to the booklet, the Chi-Rho (the first two letters of Christ in Greek), though I wasn't sure what to look for to spot them. Or perhaps they are simply too damaged. Without the low lights in those winding hallways, one might wander lost for a long time. Definitely a claustrophobic sensation.

Next I went to St. Paul's Grotto, which is supposed to be the place that Paul lived while preaching for 3 months in Malta after being shipwrecked there. There is a small, rough cave, carved (like the catacombs) from the rock, where Paul is believed to have lived and where there is a statue of the apostle and a beautiful hanging lamp made of silver in the form of a sailing ship (commemorating the shipwreck and made in about 1980, I think the guide said). There is also a larger room featuring burials in the floor (as at St John's and the Mosta Dome) as well as small chapels or nooks with artwork, including an alabaster statue of St Paul, which is quite impressive, although its whiteness can be too close to the whiteness of the walls if one takes a photo with a flash! (I got a photo of it, though my program is, so far, refusing to download it, as with the Mdina cats. Some kind of glitch which happens for unknown reasons from time to time.)

I also visited the Domus Romana/Roman Villa museum, which is another Heritage Malta site. This museum contains and explains the ruins of a first century CE Roman villa which was later covered over by a Muslim cemetery. The most important features of the villa are several large statues, damaged to various degrees, and the remains of several quite beautiful mosaics. The statues are presumed to be of the Emperor Claudius (his statue is in the best condition) and his family, and this is taken to indicate that the family who lived in this villa had important government connections--perhaps this was even the home of the governor of Malta. There is apparently no written evidence, since the Museum's statements are all couched in conditional terms. The surviving mosaics are mostly geometric rather than representational, though there are some representations, perhaps most notably two maenads attacking a satyr. The most complete and beautiful floor features primarily a lozenge pattern which resembles an ascending or descending stack of cubes (like visual "tricks of the eye" and recalling M.C. Escher's art) which really does look three-dimensional the farther away from it one is. After going through the fairly small museum, one exits to the back, where stone remains of the rest of the villa have been exposed. You're not allowed to walk among these, however.

I then visited Mdina again, mostly just strolling around. Here is a photo of a doorway, which I'm thinking must be someone's house:



And here is a shot of some bouganvilea, not far from that same doorway:



I got off the bus back to Valletta near the cemetery in Floriana and took a longish walk back to the hotel from there, sort of reversing the walk I took on Wednesday. Along the way I found a street I have been wanting to see ever since I stumbled across it on the map a couple of days ago. It's only one block long, and only block off the main street that goes along one of the harbors, and can hardly help but be dear to an old English major:



Triq means street, and the cemetery attendant (whom I spoke with on Wednesday) told me that the q is not pronounced, but indicates a glottal stop. Most of the street names are given in Maltí, sometimes with English translation, sometimes not. One hears Maltí spoken all over the place, even though most folks also speak English quite well. I haven't quite figured out what the situation is. The English took over from Napoleon in either 1799 or 1800, so the English overlay is strong. Prior to Napoleon, who controlled the island for only a couple of years, there were the Knights who ran the place, and who came from many different countries with many different languages (although English was probably not prominent since England was principally Anglican beginning with Henry VIII). There were also two periods when the Muslims were in control of the island, and before that control was Roman/Byzantine all the way back to 218 B.C.E. Maltí is a form or derivative of Arabic, according to what I read, and yet I haven't gotten the impression that there is much of a Muslim religious presence. Catholic churches are everywhere. Somehow it seems that the language survived here, but the religion mostly did not. Maltí itself is written with the Roman alphabet, with some variations, and the Maltese accent is pronounced and quite different from what we consider an English accent. At times I have a great deal of difficulty understanding someone speaking English.

(I checked the phone book. There is one Islamic center listed; one "Jewish community"; a Baha'i group; and everything else is Christian, the huge majority of which is Catholic.)

Anyway, there are many monuments and commemorative plaques which are written in Maltí only, not in Maltí and English, or sometimes in Maltí and Latin, appropriate to the ecclesiastical history of the place. The tombstones of the Knights in the various churches, as well as those of the bishops, are of course in Latin.

The architecture is beautiful. Limestone is obviously plentiful here, and the buildings constructed of it are quite lovely. Facades have a Mediterranean look, and I wonder if this is something like what old Greek/British Alexandria in Egypt (or perhaps even Beirut) looked like a century ago.

I've seen quite a few school kids, and like in America, the high school students stand out more because of their dress and sense of style. They seem to be quite as style-conscious as American kids, and in many of the same ways: black hair with bleached highlights on both boys and girls; boys with their hair moussed up on top into the faux-hawk; pierced ears; and so on. The other day in Valletta, on the other hand, I walked through what seemed to be an elementary school bunch on field trip. They were in fairly serious uniforms--white shirts and the whole bit--and looked much like parochial school kids. Later that same day, I think, I saw some other kids also in uniform, but more of the American public school look--polo shirts in two colors, rather casual in appearance.

**

This evening, after I went out briefly for a walk (the wind is up and it's chilly again), I asked the cook in the little restaurant here in the hotel if it was possible to get a cup of tea. The hot water pot which is always on for breakfast (with tea bags and instant coffee to add to it) was turned off, and--as it turns out--the restaurant had actually already closed. But he took me back to the kitchen, put some water in a hot pot, and made me a cup of tea. And wouldn't let me pay for it either! The folks here are really nice.

In response to a couple of comments

It's been very windy here since Tuesday. Monday afternoon when I arrived was not bad at all. Yesterday was partly to mostly cloudy, with a chilly wind. Better today, but still windy. The temperatures are probably around 70-75, but I'm not really sure. Haven't seen it posted on a bank, as in the US.

As for my eating, those who know me well know there's virtually no eating out and no haute cuisine because of my food allergies and intolerances. It's all tuna, applesauce, turkey, tomato juice, ham, cereal, bread, potato chips or fries, etc. Very very plain.

Balzan and Mdina and washing instructions

May 17, 2007

Today turned out to be a very interesting day. I decided to go to SG Solutions, which is the authorized Apple/Mac dealer on Malta, because when I have my PowerBook plugged up to recharge the battery I'm getting "leakage": that is, I can feel a current running through the shell and get a bit of a shock when I touch it in a certain way. I had felt this on occasion when the computer was plugged up in El Paso at school, though it's a bit stronger here. (Oddly, I can't remember ever having the problem at home.)

But SG isn't in the touristy section of Malta, where I'm staying; it's in the more business-y area several miles away. So I took a bus to Valletta, the main bus terminal, and then another to Balzan, where I needed to go. On the way from Sliema to Valletta, I had a nice talk with two ladies from Sweden, perhaps a mother and a daughter, though I wouldn't swear to it. They have been to Dallas, because they (or one of them, if they weren't related) have cousins in Argyle, north of Dallas! She was eager to tell me also that I needed to come to Sweden, and that I needed to come now, while it's warm.

Then, on the ride to Balzan, I talked to a nice Scottish-English couple. The woman did most of the talking, and both were quite nice: and insistent too on the distinction between being Scot or English. (She is Scot; he is English.) They are now retired in York and were disappointed that I haven't got York on my England itinerary. She even gave me her card and told me they have a guest room if I make it to York. How very kind they were, and as pensioners themselves, they commiserated with my need to save money by not staying in the UK as long as I might otherwise.

In Balzan, I found SG fairly easily, after a walk of a few blocks, and the technician came to look at my computer and my adaptor plug. He showed me how a pin inside the adaptor box is plastic instead of metal, and therefore the plug isn't entirely grounded. That's why I'm feeling the current. He assured me that it's not dangerous, either to me or to the computer, but he is going to see if he can get hold of a plug with a metal pin, which he thinks might cost about 30 Maltese pounds (or lira). This is somewhere around $93-94, so it's not an inconsequential purchase, but it sounds like it will be handy to have, if he can find one. And of course it won't really be a "trip" purchase, but rather a working necessity. So. . .

After we got that taken care, I was talking to him and the receptionist about visiting the churches in Balzan, since I was there, or walking to Mosta to see the dome, which is either the 3rd or 4th largest in the world. They advised against walking to Mosta, which is apparently around 3.5 miles or so, and also poo-poohed the idea of looking at the local churches. They said I should get back on the bus and go to Mdina and Rabat. I had intended to go to those cities anyway, though on another day, but I took their advice and headed on.

In Rabat I got off the bus (Mdina is quite small and more or less abuts Rabat) and started walking up the street toward Mdina. I passed a little cafe/snack-bar called Windsor Castle and saw "fish and chips" on their menu board. I'm always leery of fried fish, since I never know how the batter is prepared, but I asked if I could just get chips. The counter guy said yes, so I ordered chips (French fries) and a "Coke" (which turned out to be a bottled Pepsi--bottles are common here for soda; plastic is not). While I waited for the chips to be fried up, an elderly man who had been in the back of the shop (quite small), right near the entrance to the kitchen, came up and asked if he could sit at my table. He said he didn't like to be in the way. I told him to have a seat, and we got into a conversation about Rabat and Mdina and Mosta and even about his living conditions. Apparently he is now living in a retirement home instead of his own house. I wasn't entirely sure, but that's the idea I got. He made it clear he didn't like the situation. He told me that, of the two catacombs in Rabat, St. Agatha's is better to visit than St Paul's, because it has more artwork and decoration to look at. (The British couple, whom I ran into again outside Mdina, seconded that.) He also said that the Mosta dome is the 3rd largest in the world, behind St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London. I told him I would not be in Rome, as far as I knew, but that I would be going to London soon, so hopefully I'll be able to see St. Paul's. (Make a note of that, Susan, okay?) He also mentioned having relatives of some sort in Iowa. By then my chips (which I ordered for take out) arrived, so I thanked him for the visit and headed on up the street. I encountered a nice park--the Howard Gardens--and decided to stop and much on my chips and drink my Pepsi. While there I was greeted by at least five hungry-looking cats, though I wasn't sure that fries would be good for them. (And the package was plenty big: I would've gladly shared.) But one I threw out on the ground for looking ugly got sniffed at and disdained by one of the cats, so I figured they knew what they needed to eat and what to avoid. At least two of them seemed to be fairly new or fairly recent mothers, judging by their nipples. (I'm no cat expert, however.) I was going to include a photo, but my camera program wasn't cooperating and wouldn't export the file. Who knows why?

By the time I'd had enough chips and was strolling the gardens a bit more, I saw what looked to be the entrance to Mdina, which I had taken to be a bit farther along. It was indeed the entrance, so I moseyed on in. Here's a photo of the main gate:



Mdina is called "the silent city". It is a walled city which seems to be built almost entirely of limestone. Beautiful limestone. Apparently residents (at least some of the places looked to be houses), business people and police can drive inside the walls, but outsiders can't. The streets are very narrow, about 8 feet wide, maybe, in many cases, with doors which open right out onto them. One of the shops I gawked into (on one side) and stepped into (on the other side) had limestone walls inside as well, low arches, and a limestone staircase going up the back of one room. Like having your own little home inside the castle. Truly wonderful and "Romantic". Here I visited with two more couples, talking mostly with the husbands while the wives looked in shops and so forth: one couple English; one couple Scottish. The Scot said he had been to Malta 5 times, and the Englishmen 3 or 4 times. The Englishman was selling me on visiting Essex, since we talked about my having studied Roman history, and he pointed out that the oldest known Roman settlement in England is Colchester. Very nice and personable folks.

After we parted ways, I came to a place on the walls where a number of people were gathered because there you can get right up to the outside wall and look out over the valley below:



At the end of this open sort of area, I came to Fontanella Tea Gardens and went inside for a pot of tea and a piece of chocolate cake. (It was the plainest thing I could get.) It had already been somewhat cloudy with a somewhat chilly breeze for a while by this point, and I thought a pot of tea would do me well. It did indeed, and the bill was only 1.35 pounds.

I wandered on to the Cathedral and its museum. One buys a ticket (1 pound) for both at the Museum and starts off there. I guess I spent an hour at the museum, maybe a little longer. What an impressive place it is. At least one of the paintings was early 15th century, and I'm not sure it was the oldest I saw. There was also one or two works by Mattia Preti (I think I've misspelled that too), who had a lot to do with St. John's Co-Cathedral. And I think I had an odd realization: I think I've come to like painting. Most of my life I have preferred sketches and sculptures and not cared much for painting (Michelangelo, Rousseau and Rothko being exceptions), but looking at these, admiring the details and the skill it required to create them, made me think back to visiting the Getty in April with my mother, my sister and my friend Allen, and talking about admiring the skill of some of the work there without really liking it. (Although some I really liked as well.) It felt anyway like a little revelation--like a part of the world I haven't cared much for is maybe opening for me, and it made me think I ought to (once I've settled down a bit more than I can while on this trip) take up painting (or perhaps colored-penciling) and see if I can get any good at it at all. Any little bit of skill. (Note 1: Maybe Nancy is an inspiration too! Oh, yes, and she pointed out that I had misremembered what she said about her sales of artwork: she hasn't sold anything in Italy yet, but has sold work in the US before coming to Italy.) (Note 2: Some of you may remember having seen some work I did with pastel chalk on canvas and colored ink on canvas back in the '80s, almost none of which still exists. As I moved and moved and moved, I simply had to throw things away. "Paintings" included.)

The museum collection has a complete set of Albrecht Durer's prints on the "Life of the Virgin" as well as another set called "The Small (Something)", which I'm blanking on at the moment. It included scenes from the life of Christ. There were also other prints which they called "After Durer", and were apparently prints done later, by other artists, based on Durer's originals. There were also two bas-relief artworks carved out of wax, which were quite amazing. I don't know if the artist used colored wax, or colored the wax after carving the shapes. The eyes of the people were especially entrancing. And there is a large crucifix for which Christ's body is carved out of ivory. Another amazing piece of work, even though the ivory has cracked in one or two places. Its whiteness and the smoothness of its surface are quite remarkable.

There is also a large display of bishops' garments and mitres and illuminated choral books from 1576, and another room houses a significant number of coins from various times in Maltese history, going all the way back to the Phoenicians/Carthaginians. Apparently the Greeks weren't interested in the islands. But the Romans were, and there are a large number of Roman and Byzantine coins on exhibit.

The cathedral, right across a small plaza, is quite heavily decorated, like St. John's in Valletta, although many of the pillar walls are smooth here, rather than elaborately carved as in St. John's. Here's a photo looking up into the dome:



and another looking just beneath the dome, which you can see the edge of at the top of the photo:



By this time of the afternoon, I was ready to head back to Sliema, have a snack and do my email and Internet activities, so I did not make it to the catacombs in Rabat, or to the Roman villa (if I decide it's worth visiting--depends on the cost, probably, hehehe), or the church.

**

For those of you following my worries about how much I'm spending, today I was able to keep my spending to about 6.5 pounds, which included:

1.2 pounds bus fare
1.05 pounds chips and Pepsi
1.6 pounds tea, cake and tip
1.0 pound museum and cathedral entrance
1.55 pounds deli ham (for supper), package of cookies (for several days worth of dessert and snacks), and 2 liter bottled water

**

Derek has suggested that I discuss my use of the shower for washing my "delicates" (although I think I would not call anything I wear delicate). Here's what I've been doing. I take the T-shirt and pair of boxers I've worn that day into the shower with me. I soap them up (one at a time) with the same soap I'm bathing myself with; rub and lather it all up very nicely; then rinse, wring, and hang outside the shower. (If one is wearing shoes instead of sandals, one can also wash the socks in the showers.) Then after I finish showering and drying myself, I roll up the wrung-out clothes in a towel, twist and squeeze to draw out even more water, then hang overnight on a hanger. I have also washed out my Quiksilver shorts this way, and because they are made of fast-drying material, they are also dry by morning. I originally intended to buy long pants of this material, then changed my mind, and shouldn't have. So now I have a pair of jeans and a pair of khakis which have to be machine washed. Rats. Tomorrow I may try washing out my short-sleeved button-down shirt in the shower as well. I was going to do that today, but because it's cooler and damper I thought it might not dry overnight.

Another way of doing this washing on-the-go--besides Woolite in the sink--is something I did quite a bit of when I was still living in the RV and thinking toward the time I would be traveling and packing light. Carry one or two two-gallon Ziploc storage bags. You can stick a pair of boxers and a t-shirt in it at the same time. Squirt in some Woolite or dish detergent or even shampoo (or you could probably just stick a bar of soap in there), put in a quart of water, zip it shut and kind of shake it around. Just make sure it doesn't come unzipped! Keep the zipper end UP. After you're done "agitating," pour out the soapy water, squeeze out the clothes, then put them back in with clean water, shake 'em around, pour it out, repeat until the pour-off is not soapy. Even better than a Ziploc bag is a Tupperware-style container (you can agitate more vigorously), but you may not want to carry that.

For any of you males planning to take a trip and wanting to travel light, here's what I recommend: buy the REI brand (I think it's MTS) and/or Ex Officio boxer-briefs (or boxers if you prefer) and the REI t-shirts which are made of the same material as the boxer-briefs. They wash easily and dry quickly. I'm set for underwear (all REI and Ex Officio), but my t-shirts are a variety of manufactures, all of which dry quickly, but some of which are harder than others to get wet in the shower. They are made to "wick" away moisture and so they repel water, to a certain extent. The REI material does it a bit, but not as badly and is therefore easier to wash. I would recommend only 3 boxer-briefs and 3 t-shirts. I've got six of each (meaning one to wear, 5 to carry) and that's too much. With 3, you've got: 1) the set you're wearing; 2) a clean set; and 3) a set you've just washed which ought to dry by morning. Carry one or two of those plastic bags that you squeeze the air out of for tighter packing, and you can use them to hold anything that didn't get dry by the time you need to pack up if you're changing hotels/hostels that day. I'd recommend one pair of long pants and one pair of shorts. Wear the long pants on the days you're traveling from one place to another, and then you don't have to carry them. The only drawback to this plan, I think, is that if you are on an organized tour for part of your time, you may be changing hotels every night, and may not have a chance to get the pants laundered overnight. So try to switch pants and shorts on alternate days.

Carry one or two button-down shirts to wear over the t-shirts when it's cooler or when you need to dress up a bit. Carry two windbreakers (light) instead of one windbreaker and one sweater (heavy). I'm thinking right now that I will ditch my jeans (and keep the nicer khakis) and maybe 2 pairs of boxer-briefs and 2 t-shirts before I head to England. I have already ditched my sweater, my robe and a pair of sweat-shorts which took forever to dry. (I left them on the ship for the steward to take.) If you want to carry shorts for sleeping in, swimming in or exercising in, take nylon soccer shorts or an equivalent form of swim-trunks. They pack light and dry quickly. And there's no reason you can't wear them, instead of a robe, down the hall to the bathroom/shower-room if you're staying in a bed & breakfast or a hostel. If you must have a robe, get the thinnest, light-weightest thing you can: you'll only be using it a couple of minutes a day. I'm also carrying a pair of quick-dry briefs, for wearing under the soccer shorts I've been using to swim in, but the truth is there's no reason not to wear boxers or boxer-briefs under swim trunks, and briefs are more likely to be uncomfortable when you're in a long sitting situation--on the plane, or a bus, for example.

I've got two pairs of shoes with me: a pair of sturdy and very comfortable Timberland walking shoes and a pair of Merrell sandals. I'm almost never wearing socks with the sandals, so that saves on carrying socks, and they pack light. So, again, when you are in transit, wear the shoes and slip the sandals into the backpack or suitcase. When in transit, wear what's heavy!

Is that enough with the house-keeping tips?

**

I'm sitting on the balcony in the dark. For some reason the balcony lights, which seem to be controlled by the hotel, have not come on yet tonight, which is fine, since I'm looking at a computer screen. It's been windy and a bit cool today, and now, off to the east, more or less, is what looks like heavy grey rain-clouds. If it rains, I hope it happens overnight. I don't want to fight rain tomorrow. I think I may go back to Valletta tomorrow, although there is a cathedral right near here which I haven't seen yet. Sliema, though, is not as charming and cool as Valletta. It's both more touristy and more residential and doesn't seem to have as much in the way of history, though it has more shopping, I suppose. Good night all.

PS

I just added two photos and a couple of notes to the post on Lisbon, May 9, under the "Incidents du Voyage" heading.

Another day in Valletta

May 16, 2007

My second full day in Malta. After breakfasting and cleaning up, I took off on a long walk. Instead of walking across Sliema (perhaps a half mile) and then taking the ferry to Valletta, I walked to Valletta. I don't know exactly how far it is, and I stopped along the way and looked around, so I can't judge by how long it took. But I did a lot of walking today. If you can get access to a detailed map of Malta, and especially the Sliema and Valletta areas, you will see that the coast is quite rugged, with a lot of separate inlets. So Sliema and Valletta are not very far from each other, across their inlets, but if you walk down one inlet and then back up into the next one, then you've gone quite a distance. I'm not sure if Sliema and Valletta are on one inlet, with an island in between them; or if there are two inlets, with the island more like a peninsula splitting the inlets apart. It's urbanized all along the route I walked, with busy streets and high-rise apartments (I don't mean thirty stories: most are probably 5 or 6) that have shops at ground level and so forth. There is also a large marina--the "yacht" marina--that I walked along at one point.

When I got to, or near, Floriana, the last town before I reached Valletta itself, I spotted an interesting-looking cemetery and went inside. There is a domed chapel (although I wasn't able to go into it) and a lot of 19th and 20th century tombstones: including English, Greek, Russian, Vietnamese and Hindu burials. I got into a conversation with a man who works there one day a week. He was telling me about various prominent people buried there, including a woman named Olga Mills, who was instrumental in the early days of the Baha'i Faith is buried there, but he wasn't able to pinpoint her grave for me. I thought it might be an interesting photo. He said visitors didn't often ask for her grave. But he also volunteered to locate the tomb for me on the cemetery plan and show me next Wednesday if I want to come back. I told him I wasn't sure what I would be doing next Wednesday, so maybe I'll go back.

From there, I wandered up closer to Valletta, peeked into a public garden called the Argotti Gardens, then went on into Valletta itself again. Today I visited both the Upper and Lower Bakarra Gardens, which are more like small parks by American definition. At the Upper Gardens, you can also watch the noontime firing of one of the cannons overlooking the harbor there. They do the firing nowadays with a 2-pound load of gunpowder, the soldier-host told us, but when they were using it in battle, they fired it with 10-pound loads! If I remember correctly, the cannonball would go up to 1.5 kilometers, almost a mile.

At the Lower Gardens there is a monument to Alexander Ball, one of the early British governors of Malta (he died in 1809) and for whom the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge worked for several months in 1803. (Unless the cemetery guy and I have our combined memories totally crooked.) My photo of the monument is here:



The park also features a recent sculpture of the Trojan/Roman hero Aeneas called Enea, which I suppose is either the Italian or Maltí spelling. Here is a photo of it:



Across the way from the Upper Gardens (one has to exit the Gardens, go down to a much lower street, cross the street, and then climb again), is the Siege Bell Monument, which commemorates the Siege of Malta, 1940-43 (World War II) and those who lost their lives. This photo shows the sculpture which overlooks the harbor. (Or actually it doesn't overlook the harbor, since the statue is prone.)



The bell is housed in a temple-ish looking building, sort of like the Ball Monument, but round instead of square, with the very large bell hanging in the middle. I understand that it is rung at noon daily also, but I was busy hearing the cannon at that time and didn't hear the bell, unless it was the church-sounding bell I noticed about that time.

As I continued my walk, one of the carriage drivers (there are horse-drawn carriages all over Valletta) tried his best to persuade me to take the ride around the city, but I told him I was walking today and would perhaps do it another day. He was the second driver of the day to ask me aboard, but the other wasn't so insistent.

I visited the Carmelite Church nearer the center of town (I think the real name is something like the Church of Our Lady of Carmel), and this photo shows the enormous dome of the church, which is the highest point of Valletta, I believe the brochure said. I kept seeing the dome from far off and thinking it was part of St. John's, which is a much bigger church, but not as high.



I also visited St. Paul's Anglican Church, which (for some reason I didn't quite understand) is not supported in any way by the Church of England and relies entirely on donations and offerings made specifically to it. I suppose, given the way the Anglican church is called "The Church of (Country)" almost everywhere it is found (the US is an exception, using the Episcopal name), that an "official" Anglican church in Malta would be called the Church of Malta. But I don't really know.

I also stumbled across this interesting historical marker on a street corner which apparently is the corner of the hotel as well. English literature buffs may get a kick out of it:



After some more walking, I stopped in at the Museum of Archaeology (which I did not yet wander) to buy a ticket to see the Hypogeum next week. This is, I gather, one of the most important Stone Age buildings in the world, and only 70 people a day are allowed inside to see it: 7 tours of 10 people each. Some, if not all of it, is subterranean, so it should be interesting. I am scheduled for next Thursday at 11 a.m. Near it is a temple, also several thousand years old, which I will hope to see while I am over in that area of the island. I don't think it's terribly far--maybe 10 miles or so--but I certainly don't want to walk there!

Lots of walking, lots of calories used up. I did not walk back to Sliema, but took the ferry instead. Even after the ferry docks, I still have a half-mile walk or so, though. After a brief return to the hotel, I took my laptop outside to the Strand (the seawall) to see if I could connect to the wireless service I thought I was unable to subscribe to on Monday evening and found out I was able to connect right in to it. I emailed for several minutes, then walked down to the wifi location because it was so windy outside. While there I worked on email, the travel log, and ClusterFlock, and also checked my credit card billing. I found out that the billing had gone through, so that will be my wifi service while I am on Malta. I purchased a one-month plan for 25 Maltese lira (which billed at $79.23--Internet isn't cheap here!). And I hope, of course, that I will find somewhere reliable to do wifi for the two weeks I'm on Gozo. Since I will be staying (if I can read maps) less than a mile from the main city of Gozo, I'm hoping there'll be at least one Internet cafe. But that's still four weeks away.

(PS: Perhaps someone can help us all out here. It's about 5:30 pm [or, as they have it here, 1730] as I post, but the time in Blogger says about 8:30 am. That's a nine-hour time difference. I'm assuming Google is on the west coast, which would mean the time gap between here and Dallas would be 7 hours. Maybe this is right, because I think I pick up an hour when I fly to London, and I believe London and Dallas are 6 hours apart. Eh? Anybody know for sure?)

First Full Day in Malta, May 15

May 15, 2007 Malta

Today, for the first time in my life, I woke up on the island of Malta. Here's a photo of the hotel room:



And here's a photo of the view from the balcony of my hotel room:



What do you think?

I'm still feeling kind of disoriented and sort of up-and-down, at one moment thinking, "Why did I plan out at least five months of travel during which I would be on my own almost all of the time?" and at another thinking, "Wow, this (whatever this happens to be) is really cool.

Probably the coolest of the cool things today (besides getting to do about 2 hours of Internet time, catching up on email and working on the Travel Log and elimae) was seeing St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta. Valletta is the capital of Malta, but it's no longer the most populous or most "happening" place. Sliema (where I'm staying) is one of the happening places--especially, I gather, for tourists--and not many kilometers from here is Paceville (I'm not sure I've spelled that right), which is the place where the younger locals go to the nightclubs. I'm glad I'm not in a hotel over there!

This is a photo that I took from the seawall in Sliema, looking across the harbor to Valletta:



Anyway, the co-cathedral (and please don't ask me what that "co" means: if one of you knows, you can explain to us all in a comment) is still an active church with masses taking place, but it was once the church of the Knights of Malta, which are the same thing as the Knights of St. John, I think. As one of the guides told me, it is in a very real sense a cemetery. Apparently almost all of the ground underfoot, the floor that one is walking upon, consists of tombstones. I could see a few undecorated places, which I guess were spots still waiting to be filled when the Knights quit burying here. (Do they still exist? I don't know.) The tombstones are elaboratedly decorated, with (as the audio guide points out) lots of skulls and bones in sight, inscribed in Latin telling about the knight who is buried underneath. One is, yes, walking on graves. I didn't take any photos, unfortunately. I was not much in the photo mood, for one thing, but just as importantly is a strict ban on flash photography inside the cathedral, and I'm not always sure when my camera is going to flash or not--so I was leery of getting yelled at for being crass.

The cathedral is not just decorated on the floors, either. The chapels have paintings hanging in them and paintings on the walls as well. The walls themselves are very elaborately worked too, carved into all sorts of designs and scenes. It's very difficult to find an undecorated surface. Quite an amazing place. But those of you who know about the cathedral are probably saying, "When is he going to mention the Caravaggio?" Caravaggio's largest painting hangs in the oratory here, and Caravaggio was, for a short time, one of the Knights himself. The painting depicts the beheading of John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Knights, and is mostly in very muted and dark colors, except for the red mantle of John, thrown across his "private areas" as he is otherwise unclothed for the execution, and the green mantle or jacket worn by the guy ordering the executioner to finish the job. In the scene, John has already been cut once, and blood is flowing, but his head is not yet severed. Caravaggio signed this painting in the flowing blood, and it's the only painting that he signed. On the right, in the background, two prisoners are looking out through their bars at the scene, and on the left in the foreground are an old and a young woman. Some take the younger woman to be Salome, holds a large basin to receive the head when the job is done. It is a massive painting, covering almost all of the upper rear wall of the oratory. I'm going to guess that it's at least 30 feet wide and 20 feet tall, but it may be even bigger. I just can't tell. In any case, it's bigger than my 200 sq. ft. Euroway travel trailer was!

The oratory also features another Caravaggio, this one of St. Jerome. It's a more normal-sized painting and rests in the back of the oratory. One can get a lot closer to it, but as it's behind glass, it's hard to get an angle on it without a glare.

While in Valletta, I also found a cool little Internet cafe, which lets you use its wifi free as long as you buy something, so I tidied up some email there and checked my bank account. I would probably be going there every morning if it were closer to my hotel, but Valletta is a bit far. The people were very welcoming, and I think I would enjoy having them as my "home cafe" for the next few weeks.

The St. Paul Shipwrecked Church is also in Valletta. It is dedicated to the memory (I don't think I'm saying that correctly) of the time St. Paul was shipwrecked on Malta and taught the people while he was there. This was while he was on his way to Rome for trial. It is smaller than the cathedral but also elaborately decorated. It also claims to have part of the pillar upon which St. Paul was beheaded, as well as a wrist bone (or part of a wrist bone) of another saint. I can't remember now who it is--St. Joseph maybe? Shame on me. The church is built into a very narrow street with buildings on both sides, so you can't really get a distant view of it. The same is pretty much true of the cathedral. There's a bit of a plaza on the side, where one can step back and get a bit of a photo, but the building is very stark and plain. The main facade is on a narrow street.

The picture here is of a church facing the harbor between Sliema and Valletta. At least I assume it's a church. I took the picture from the seawall (called the Strand).



I took the ferry to and from Sliema-Valletta. It takes about 5 minutes each way. I'm thinking of going back tomorrow and just walking the whole way, maybe a mile and a half each way? I'm not sure. I may know by this time tomorrow, eh?

I wandered in three or four bookstores today, none of them "superstores" like we are used too, and none of them with a cafe. Rats. (Although one is in a mall called the Plaza, near Stella's Cafe which is supposed to be good.) Books aren't cheap here, and I may hold off buying anything until I finish the Spanish translation of Doyle I bought in Barcelona. Or I may buy something, so I can go back and forth between English and Spanish. One store I stumbled across in Valletta has a lot of remaindered books, so I could save some money that way, if I wanted to buy, for example, Monsoon by Wilbur Smith or Dickens's Nicholas Nickelby. None of the stores has a great selection, because--let's face it--Malta doesn't have a huge population, but there were interesting books in all of them.

**

On my way downstairs for a late evening walk, I had a nice chat with one of the guys who works here. He was walking up with a backpack, and we realized that we recognized eachc other, so I asked him if he both lived and worked here. He explained that he was in university in Poitiers, France, and that he had to live/work out of the country for three months as part of his degree. So he is working here at the hotel to fulfill that requirement. He isn't paid, but is given a room, breakfast and supper instead. We talked a little about my plans, and he recommended that I visit Nantes and Bordeaux as I work my way south from St-Malo to Spain. He said one of his friends from the university had just arrived today, and they planned to meet tonight to visit. As I returned down the seawall from my walk, I passed him again as he headed out to meet his buddy.

Photos have appeared

Hello, everyone. Now that I'm on land and able to use the Internet at less than exorbitant rates, you will find some photos in some of the earlier postings which were not there before. And I may add more later, as time allows.

Cannes to Livorno to Malta

May 12, 2007 Cannes/St Paul de Vence

(Don't tell anyone, but it's actually May 13 as I write this.)

Today was another terribly handled deboarding. My tour group waited for almost an hour and a half before we were allowed to leave the ship. Instead of letting us sit on deck and have a second breakfast and then calling us when they were ready for us, they had us all logjammed in the onboard theater, waiting and twiddling our thumbs. I was really irritated.

Once we got on our tour bus, things sharply improved. The guide gave us lots of information about the towns we were passing through as we left Cannes and the Riviera to go up into the hills to St Paul de Vence. The Cannes Film Festival begins in just a few days, and preparations were underway for it. Cannes is a very glitzy town.

St Paul de Vence, on the other hand, has preserved its medieval past, in terms of architecture at least.



The ground floors of many of the buildings now hold galleries and other kinds of expensive shops, but the buildings and the medieval city walls are intact, and some people do still live in the upper floors of the old buildings. It's just beautiful, perched on its hilltop overlooking valleys to both sides. Marc Chagall moved here later in his life, died here and is buried in the cemetery.





One of the bronze castings of Rodin's The Thinker is in St Paul de Vence too!



After we returned to Cannes, many of us chose to walk around Cannes for a while before returning to the ship. The streets are lined with designer shops, and--because the weather has been warmer than usual--the beaches were full of people too. Not crowded exactly, but not anywhere nearly empty. And yes, one saw the occasional topless sunbather.

***

May 13, 2007 Livorno/Lucca

Today Princess redeemed itself. Our tour began on time, and we weren't forced to idle our morning away waiting for things to get going. We arrived in Lucca about 8:30 and began our tour. Lucca is, in my opinion, the most beautiful spot I've yet seen on the cruise. The Azores are beautiful, to be sure; but they don't have the depth of history that Lucca or St Paul de Vence does, and for some reason, Lucca pleases me more than St Paul. It too has surviving city walls, which one can walk atop. There were many walkers, joggers and bicyclists out there, later in the morning. The town itself is lovely. Again the narrow streets, multi-floor buildings, and old churches, but there just seems to be more of it in Lucca. The guide told us that historically there had been 99 churches in Lucca, even though the population in the past was only about 20,000. Nowadays only about 7000 people live within the city walls in the old buildings, and only about 6 or 8 churches are actually open daily for services.

The cathedral was begun (or maybe it was just converted from church to cathedral) after a bishop of Lucca became pope in the 14th century, and as you can see, the tower and the church don't match. The tower preceded the cathedral's building, and no attempt was made to match them. The cathedral has varying styles in it, as it was being worked on over a long period of time. Interestingly, the main facade was never finished, the guide told us, because the Black Plague struck in 1348 and as much as 3/4 of the population died. It took a long time for the population total here and throughout Europe to get its footing again. There are a good number of plazas throughout Lucca, because in the early 1800s, Napoleon's sister (I think) was given control of the city, and she ordered various blocks of buildings built down because the town felt too claustrophic. The guide said people are still irritated about the demolition, but it certainly makes the city more beautiful and welcoming.

There is a Roman amphitheatre in the city, but at a later period, because people wanted to live inside the walls, they began building apartment buildings on the inside of the amphitheatre. In spots you can still see the original stones of the amphitheatre, but in most spots the later construction covers up what was originally there. The residences that were first built, along the inside of the walls, are still there, though the residences in the middle were ordered torn down by the sister, so there is now a large plaza in the middle. The guide told us that some of the apartments still have Roman survivals, such as steps from the amphitheatre popping up in the middle of rooms and so forth. Sounds beautifully cool to me, but of course no one invited us in to see the apartments on the inside!

Are there beautiful hills and trees in the U.S.? Of course there are. But history just sits all over this countryside. One of the first roads we drove on, as we began the tour, either follows or parallels (for a while anyway) one of the ancient Roman roads, the Via Aurelia (which is how it's listed on the traffic signs). The land itself feels civilized by the millennia of habitation and building and usage. Marvelous. And, oh yes, we saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa off in the distance as we drove to Lucca.

Livorno, on the other hand, is a much newer place--dating back about 600 years, I think. It's a port city, and our guide said something like, "Ports are ugly, and Livorno is the ugliest." I think she may be right. Livorno didn't seem to have much to recommend it, except the old fort at the harbor which is lovely. Even the churches in Livorno aren't especially lovely. A lot of the people who got off the ship here got off to go to Florence or Pisa, not to stay in Livorno.

The great delight of the day, besides Lucca itself, was getting to visit with Nancy H-- (I'll leave her a little bit anonymous, since she might not want to be blogged). Nancy and I tried to arrange a meeting place and time via email, but as neither of us knew anything about the town, it actually took us about 2 hours to finally find each other. Nancy came by train all the way from Florence just to get together--a two-hour trip each way! She is currently studying at an art school there, after 13 years of being a public school art teacher. She has already sold a few of the works she did for classes, even though she's only in her first year here. She pointed out that what I had observed is true--Italy is extraordinarily expensive. Here's one example: at a little grocery store right in the middle of downtown Barcelona, I bought a half-liter bottle of Coca-Cola for about 0.89 Euro. In Italy I paid 2 Euro, and Nancy said they are 2.50 at some places. I wonder how people afford it. My little pot of morning tea in Lucca was also 2 Euro (something like $2.60-2.80), but at least I got a little pot, a nice cup and a table to sit at!

A big round of applause for Nancy, for coming so far to meet me, after so many years since we have seen each other, and for working so assiduously to find me, after our meeting plans didn't pan out!

***

May 14, 2007

An odd day. I could give you all the details of what passed between getting up about 6:30 and getting on the airplane about 1:15, but it wouldn't be all that interesting. The plane was not full, which was really nice, and I had my little bank of three chairs to myself. We took off around 2, I guess, and flew more or less south. Toward the end we passed over Sicily, and I'm assuming that the big snow-capped mountain to the east of us was Mt. Etna, but I reckon I could be wrong.

As we were deboarding in Malta (a nice small airport), I was fortunate enough that the couple I asked for information about getting to my hotel were Australians who have family in Malta and have been here once before, and they were quite friendly and helpful. Going through customs was very easy, and the customs officer asked me what Texas was like--if it was all ranches, and so forth. So we had a bit of an interesting conversation.

I got some Maltese lira at an ATM. One lira is worth more than 3 dollars, so it was quite a jolt to my bank account. And since the receipt was given in Maltese lira (just as the Barcelona ATM receipt gave me a Euro balance), I still don't know exactly how much money I've withdrawn. I haven't been able to log into my bank account yet to check because the wifi service I'm hoping to use here isn't giving me a strong enough signal from where I'm located. I may just go back to their office tomorrow and see if they can troubleshoot a bit for me, or I may just have to sit at their location and work, which will be a shame because I'd rather sit on the seawall in the evening and look at the water as I work.

Which is by way of saying that my hotel is indeed just across the street from the Mediterranean, and I do indeed have a great view from the balcony in my room. The hotel itself is no great shakes. The people seem very nice, but the hotel is in the process of being remodeled, and it leaves a lot to be desired so far. Except for the view, it's really no better than an old Motel 6. No joke. But it's about as cheap as a Motel 6, so I reckon I can't complain too much. I am however getting really antsy about spending some time on the Internet, doing email, connecting with people, taking care of elimae and so forth. I feel sort of disoriented right now, having been gone so long and having mostly been out of email contact. I feel estranged. Once I get the wifi situation taken care of and get things going, I'm sure I'll feel more settled.

I went to the grocery store and got a few days worth of supper or lunch items, as well as some cold cereal to have for breakfast. (Milk-less, of course.) I'll be interested also to see if prices drop once I'm away from the shoreline here--that is, wandering inland or away from the heavily touristed areas. I just paid 50 Maltese cents (which is something like $1.60 or so) for a little 12-ounce cup of hot tea! (Can you tell I'm worried about expenses? It seems like I have had so many expenses right up front, paying for rail passes and all of that in advance.)

Back in the room I sat on the balcony and had a tin of tuna, a bottle of Gerber's applesauce (!), a bottle of tomato juice, and some chips for supper. Then I took a brief swim in the Mediterranean. It was fairly chilly water, probably in the 70s. If it hadn't been so late in the afternoon, it might've felt perfect. Of course it would be much more fun if one of you were here to enjoy it with me. My room has twin beds, so one of you can just fly on over. I'm scheduled to be at this hotel till June 13.

I'm tired. The last few days have been long, and I've been too geared up to sleep as well as I normally do. So I think I better close this up, go back to the hotel, read a bit, and then go to sleep!

Hopefully I'll be able to get my Internet worked out tomorrow and get this posted.

(Just came back to the hotel. There's a club/bar on the ground floor which plays very loud music. Fortunately I'm four floors above it, so I think I'll be all right, although I may not be able to keep the balcony door open.)

Somewhere in the Mediterranean

May 10, 2007

Tomorrow is my buddy Tim's birthday. If you're reading this, Tim: Happy birthday!

*

We went through the Straits of Gibraltar late this morning. Quite a number of us got up early, expecting to encounter them before we did. I was up at 7, and talked to a kindly woman who'd been up since 6, but there was no sight of anything Gibraltar-ish. So I went for my breakfast and kept a watch out the window. No sight of anything Gibraltar-ish. So I changed into my exercise shorts, walked a mile and did some reps on the weight machines; then I changed into my trunks and sat in the hot tub and chilled out (I mean that literally) in the swimming pool. No sight of anything Gibraltar-ish. So I had my shower and got dressed for the day and went back up. Gibraltar!. Well, the Straits, that is. We passed through the Straits for a long time -- or, perhaps more correctly, we made approach to the Straits for a long time, with Europe in sight to our left and Africa to our right, before the entrance to the Mediterranean finally narrowed down more seriously.



We were closer to Africa as we came through, and thus could see it more clearly: uprearing rocks and crags, villages, green fields and thickets.



On the European side we saw a wind-farm on the slopes of the hills and Tarifa, apparently not a terribly sizeable town, before we got to the famous Rock itself, which is not as big as some of the elevation on the African side. But the land around it is mostly flat, and I suppose that makes it stand out a bit more. After passing through the Straits and into the Mediterranean, a woman told me that the large habitation, in Morocco, was Tangiers. So I have now seen Africa, though I have not stood upon its soil. A cool thought, even so. We even had dolphins (and maybe orcas) alongside for some of the time -- another cool experience.

And now, for the first time in my life, I can look out the window or off the deck and see the Mediterranean. And don't forget -- it means, more or less, the center of the earth. Cool.

*

I've been thinking about expressions and demeanors. I hope mine is more appealing than some of the ones I've been seeing on shipboard. I mean, a person can't help it if nature gives him a face like an owl's, but he ought to be able to keep from looking like an owl midway through eating a field mouse.

There are the folks whose faces look so sour, you would think they're waiting on a tonsillectomy instead of enjoying a transatlantic cruise. There's the man who does his walk on the narrow walking/jogging track at a casual stroll, directly next to his wife, if possible, so that anyone moving faster has to ask to get past them -- and all the while he's wearing khaki slacks and belt, tucked-in shirt, and leather loafers. Is he getting some exercise, or on his way to the club for a Scotch and soda with the boys? Or what about the woman stretched out in a chair, waiting along with a few hundred of the rest of us for a site of the Straits of Gibraltar (or, as I like to call them, the Pillars of Hercules), staring out so fiercely you have to wonder whom she intends to maim next time? Then there's the tall gentleman with the slightly bemused expression, which is at least pleasant, as if he is just about to greet someone cheerfully. But every time you see him the same expression is still there, and he still avoids looking at you.

If this is what people are like when they're on vacation, then what must they be like at home? Uncharitable, ain't I?

May 11, 2007

Today for the first time I was really irritated at Princess Cruise Line. They kept bumping back our arrival time in Barcelona, so that by the time we actually got into Barcelona to begin our walking tour (original ticket time 9:30) it was actually closer to 11:30. And yet they did NOT push back our departure time, thus shortening our available time in the most important city on the cruise. Both of my thumbs are WAY down for Princess today.

Barcelona itself is cool--at least the old section, which is what I wanted to see. (Who knows or cares what the new construction looks like?) I took off down a famous boulevard called Las Ramblas, but kept wandering off, getting lost and having to get directions. (Two of the people who gave me directions, an older woman and a young guy who was apparently a city employee cleaning up a plaza, were very kind and helpful.) I bought a package of ham, a Coke, and some chips at a small 'supermarket' and ate my picnic lunch in a little plaza. I supplemented this with a croissant from a little bakery on a side street, up which I took some photos of an old church (Sant Pau, i.e. Saint Paul, I believe). From the signs on some of the buildings I think it may have been a Muslim neighborhood, at least in part. Then I photographed two pieces of modern sculpture in a small city park.



Finally, after getting lost a couple more times, I found El Triangle, a shopping mall, where I went to FNAC, a big book, music and DVD store. I spent at least an hour there, as you might imagine, finding book after book I stuck in my mind as my possible purchase. (I'm traveling light, remember, and I only wanted to buy one.) I looked at translations of Jack London, Chekhov, A. Conan Doyle, Orham Pamuk and other writers, as well as being tempted by nice hardback editions of Borges and other books by Spanish-language writers. Finally I decided on a translation of non-Sherlock Holmes stories by Doyle.



After leaving FNAC, I picked up some bottled water and a donut at a little coffee shop in the mall, and then began to wander some more. I found the cathedral, which is apparently being repaired and restored at the moment, though I'm not sure if my photos will show that. I found the post office and mailed some postcards (mostly to family members, so don't be upset if you don't get one, friends--your time will come). And yes, there was only one person on duty at the post office; and yes, neither person in line in front of me wanted to buy stamps and get out of the way (both of them were taking care of passport issues); and yes, I waited at least 10 minutes to get the chance to just buy stamps. Some things are the same in any country, I suppose!

I made a stop at one of the banks and used my ATM card for the first time on this trip. Interestingly, when I got my receipt, the entire transaction was reflected in Euros--which gives me a basic idea of the current exchange rate.

Lots of appealing narrow streets. Apartments above shops at ground level. Small parks and plazas where people are sitting, visiting, skateboarding, and so on. Not once, when I spoke to someone in Spanish, did they beg me to switch into English, though the teenage boy at the grocery seemed puzzled by my Spanish, and I don't know if it was my accent or that he speaks primarily Catalan. He asked where I was from and seemed totally bemused by "Texas" or "Estados Unidos". When I mentioned "Méjico" I got a glimmer of recognition.

Incidents du Voyage

(NOTE: Because I'm currently having to make postings reflecting multiple days at once, I will reverse the posting date, so that you won't feel that you are working backwards. I will also add photographs, once I have access again to a reliable and affordably priced high-speed connection.)

May 6, 2007

Last night and again today I worked with the Garage Band program on my computer, something I had not done in quite a while. I recast some of the instrumentation for my earlier Syd and added a short, odd bridge to its center. I also worked on a new "composition" called Meditations on 'Falling', inspired by thoughts of a strange synthesized version of the Seeds' song Fallin'. It's far and away the most "industrial" thing I've done. Like everything else I've worked up on Garage Band, it's less than two minutes long. The only one of my recordings that anyone has heard is Ivor, in honor of Ivor Cutler, which is tucked into the travel section of my old Mac webpage. There is another piece which I may export to a CD for family when Christmas comes.

*

This ship is getting closer and closer to Ponta Delgada in the Azores Islands; we have journeyed more than 3500 nautical miles since leaving Galveston; and I still can't figure out why a 16-year-old boy in Big Spring, Texas, would want to play for a football team called the Steers.

May 7, 2007

Today we go ashore at Ponta Delgada on the island Sao Miguel, which is one of the Azores Islands and belongs to Portugal. This morning, while I was doing my walk, I saw the island in the distance about four times before I consciously realized it was land.





Sao Miguel is a volcanic island (as are the others in the group, I imagine), and so there is a great deal of basalt (a black rock) here. The people have used it in their buildings, creating a very interesting black-white style. Narrow streets, in the European way; houses and buildings sharing walls; and lots of walled fields and gardens. The temperatures range from around 50 in the winter to the 70s in the summer.





*

Of course I visited a bookstore (Feira do Livro), which must have been selling remainders or used books. The prices seemed very low. They carried a lot of comic books and graphic novels, as well as books in Portuguese, French, Spanish and English. I was very tempted to buy one of the French graphic novels, since the illustrations would have helped me make out the words I don't know, but I decided I first need to finish the French reader I already have!

I also spent my first euros today, at the Supermercado Sol/Mar (Supermarket Sun/Sea). I bought butter cookies, a (Portuguese) Coca-Cola, and bottled water.

*

I keep forgetting to mention that last Tuesday, when we docked at Ft Lauderdale, I was mistaken by one of the crew for one of the crew. Crew members were going ashore too (in shifts, probably), and thus many were out of uniform. I told a crewman, "I'm new at this. Where do we go ashore from?" He sent me to deck 4, where the crew were disembarking, instead of deck 6.

May 8, 2007

This morning, for the first time since leaving Galveston, the skies are completely gray and overcast. The wind is up, and the temperature is down. Folks are hanging about indoors.

*

Tonight we had comic Kelly Monteith for entertainment. Quite funny.

*

Now I'm reading Julian Barnes's novel Arthur & George. The "Arthur" of the title is author Arthur Conan Doyle. Say that ten times quickly.

May 9, 2007

This morning we docked in Lisbon, Portugal. A warm sunny day. After an early lunch, I joined the "walking tour" which took us to three distinct sections of the city:

1] Alfama: the oldest surviving section of the city, where the streets are narrow and canted at odd angles. The guide called the neighborhood labyrinthine. Families have lived in the same apartments for decades and shop in the small shops down below at street level. The Cathedral is in this part of town and is quite beautiful. Different parts are from different periods, but the oldest is from the 12th century. Alfama is quite hilly: good for walking.

2] Downtown: the central shopping district is literally "down", in a valley that runs to the River Tagus which Lisbon is built upon. There is a long pedestrian mall, flanked by all sorts of shops and businesses, running between two plazas. Cross streets have shops as well. I went into a couple of coin shops and a couple of bookstores, as well as having a piece of marble pound cake and a can of Lipton tea [!] in a padaria (bakery). This is a convent which was ruined in the earthquake, and is now an archaeological museum:



3] Bairro Alto: "uptown", again literally. The streets are a bit wider than in Alfama and cross each other at right angles. At street level, many of the shops/apartments are bars, full of young people at night (we were told), making it difficult for the residents in the floors above to sleep! It is the "happening" part of Lisbon. Both Alfama and Bairro Alto are built on hills which flank downtown.

The earthquake of 1755 destroyed much of Lisbon and killed thousands of people: much of the building postdates that time, and many buildings are now in the process of being restored. Our tour guide told us there are about 5000 old buildings (multi-floor apartment buildings etc.) in Lisbon and about half have been restored so far. Apparently the city intends to get them all restored. One can see restored buildings built directly against (sharing walls with) adjacent buildings which have not yet been restored.

*

Getting back to the ship I saw this sign in the terminal/harbor building:



Tonight I listened to a performance by the Armadillo String Quartet from Canada. They're quite good. On to Barcelona!

Incidents of Travel

May 4, 2007

By now we have traveled about 1300 nautical miles since leaving Ft Lauderdale and about 1500 miles remain until we dock at Ponta Delgada in the Azores. We passed south of Bermuda sometime during the night.

The dollar apparently keeps dropping against the Euro. At the moment, the onboard exchange rate is 100 Euros for $147. Amazing, isn't it?, that the news services in the U.S. keep crowing about the stock market, but the dollar is worth less and less abroad. I hope it doesn't drop any lower!

May 3, 2007

Today my first niece Daphanie is 40! Happy birthday, Daphanie. I was only an eighth-grader when she joined the family.

Early this morning, the sea was "like glass", though I was not

Alone, alone, all, all alone
Alone on a wide, wide sea!

While I was getting my lunch, the bridge reported that we had traveled already about 800 nautical miles from Ft Lauderdale; the entire distance to the Azores is 2800. We are scheduled to arrive there about noon Monday.

I keep forgetting to mention that the onboard art gallery, which sponsors auctions in the afternoon, has three lithographs by Salvador Dalí and another by Henry Moore. I hesitate to think how much they must be worth. The most charming of those by Dalí sold today; it reminds me either of Saint-Exupery's work for The Little Prince or the illustrations for one of Thurber's books, though whether I am thinking of drawings by Thurber or William Pene du Bois, I'm not sure. (This evening a Marc Chagall lithograph has been added to the collection!)

May 2, 2007

We made our second time-zone change (since leaving Galveston) overnight and will make another change overnight tonight. I think many of us keep feeling we are oversleeping, then we remember that only 3 days ago, today's 9 a.m. was only 7 a.m.

This morning the wind was roaring so much that foredeck 15 (a part of one of my walking rounds) was closed, and even on foredeck 16, which has wind-blocks, the breeze was quite intense. The ship makes the occasional sway or shudder, but it is so enormous (two blocks long, maybe?) that it seems mostly to cut through the water. Not too long ago, one of the officers reported that the swell was "moderate" today and that the ocean-bed was 5200 meters below us: well over three miles. Amazing to think about. We left Ft Lauderdale something like 18 hours ago (a little after 1700 yesterday), so I'm thinking we must be at least 400 miles offshore by now. I'm not exactly sure what it means that we are moving at 20+ knots per hour. I've been told that a knot is not much more than a mile, but we certainly seem to be moving much faster.

Those of you who get a giggle out of my dietary restrictions (yes, you, Cindy!) need some sort of menu report, I suppose. My breakfasts have included such items as: grits, cold cereal, bagel, ham, turkey. My lunches and suppers have featured: smoked trout, smoked mackerel (too fishy), ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, baked potato, a bit of peas or lima beans from the salad bar, applesauce, bread or rolls, chocolate-ish desserts (anything not chocolate seems to feature nuts or fruits, so I have to avoid those). Afternoon tea, which I attended one afternoon, offered scones as well. The Horizon Court, where I've been eating, is open 24 hours a day, so I've had mid-morning, mid-afternoon and mid-evening snacks as well. And lots of tea.

Those of you (someone, please tell Nancy, since she doesn't access the Internet) whom I've accused of eating like lumberjacks will be pleased to know that I am eating like a lumberjack (well, okay, a small lumberjack). The bracing sea air might be part of it, but mostly I think it's the amount of exercise I'm getting (see below). I'm sleeping, as they say, like a baby. Is it the rocking motion? Is it all the walking and stair-climbing? I don't know.

I'm doing a lot of walking (both for official exercise, as well as just getting from here to there) and stair-climbing, visiting the hot tubs and pools, doing some yoga, and making use of the weight machines.

Don't tell The Sweet (obscure Rock Music reference no. 1). Today I attended the onboard Ballroom Blitz dance class and learned the basic steps of the merengue from Jamie and Jackie McVicar. Where is Susan when I need her? Dust off my tuxedo!

May 1, 2007

While ashore today, I canceled my wifi service and my cell phone service, as they won't do me a great deal of good in Europe. Before doing so, I had one last round of St*rb*ck's Interneting, clearing out a pile of email, making some posts and checking bank and credit card accounts. I also bought a big jug of V8 (not apparently available on the ship), a couple of Coca-Colas, and a package of Golden Oreos.

The water is an intensely rich blue, more like ink or an enormous vat of dye than water. This was true in the Gulf of Mexico and is true in the Atlantic, as soon as we are a few miles off shore.

I finished reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Húrin and am trying to write about it for a new column of "In Dissent." If I remember correctly, my last column posted almost a year ago!

Tonight I watched the live performance of Lisa Donovan. She has an incredible "set of pipes" and hits amazing high notes. Her chosen style is more show-tunes than jazz (my preference), but she excels at what she does.

3 Days On

May 1, 2007

We have docked at Port Everglades in Ft Lauderdale. I am currently ashore, at a St*rb*ck's location, doing email.

April 30, 2007

Slept late this morning--0840 Eastern time (i.e 0740 according to my body). We will, I suppose, pass some time Tuesday night or Wednesday into whatever time zone is east of Eastern.

Breakfast included grits this morning, though I haven't seen a sign of oatmeal yet. Maybe I should abandon the 24-hour buffet and try one of the dining rooms?

The ship seems to be swaying more today, though the water looks calm. (The current [1405] "weather" report shipboard says that our weather condition is "slight", which seems to mean "not much wave action.") I am wearing pressure point wristbands most of the time (and took my first motion sickness pill later in the afternoon).

At one point today, the bridge (where the ship is directed from) told us that our average speed has been about 16.5 knots. I don't know what that means, but we had covered by then about 75% of the voyage from Galveston to Ft Lauderdale.

I met an older man this morning who used to work for E.M. Kahn in Dallas and whose wife is a retired community college teacher from Northlake in Irving. He wasn't able to verify the hazy memory that some of my friends have about the monkeys at Colbert's in Wynnewood!

Lunch today included smoked trout as an offering. I gave it a try, since it seemed otherwise untainted. It tasted great. I'm eating a lot of applesauce and mashed potatoes, as well as bread and other baked goods, and "plain" meat.

After watching most of We Are Marshall (I dozed off near the end), I learned that we were passing south of Marathon Key about 2145. My sister, brother-in-law and nephew live there. Howdy, folks!


April 29, 2007

Our first full day at sea. About 1630, I asked one of the officers where we were. He said we were probably about half-way between Galveston and the southern tip of Florida. The photo below shows our wake. I took this shot from deck 7 aft (the rear of the ship).



On one of the upper decks (15, I think), there is a sports and exercise area (fore) with a walking/jogging track, 1/10 of a mile long. One can go down to decks 7 and 8, however, and walk on a wooden deck, making a complete circuit of the ship. Most of this walk is on deck 7, but the fore part of the walk is on deck 8. The wind can be amazingly powerful on the foredecks. If one makes this circuit three times, one has walked a mile.

Today I have already had breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch and afternoon tea. I have also walked at least a couple of miles, perhaps more, done ten minutes or so of yoga, spent time in the hot tub and pool, read a few lessons in my French book, and read several chapters of The Children of Húrin, the "new" book by J.R.R. Tolkien. I also watched the Bridge to Terabithia movie this afternoon, which does an admirable job of interpreting the book by Katherine Paterson. I also picked up a bottle of sunscreen and a gift from my travel agent, Donna Johnson, which was awaiting me in one of the shops onboard: a packable windbreaker/jacket, which will come in handy. Thank you, Donna!

Watched The Queen with Helen Mirren last night. A very fine movie.

April 28, 2007

I boarded the Grand Princess early Saturday afternoon at Galveston Harbor. The photographs below show the following scenes:

The downtown Galveston skyline from the ship (Look hard and you might make out the Gulf of Mexico in the distance);



Part of the ship, looking up from a lower deck toward the engine area (I think);



A look at Galveston Harbor as we pulled away (at about 1830 [6:30 p.m.]).