Another Two-Fer: Changing of the Guard & British Museum Redux

June 28, 2007

On this date in 1946, my mom and dad got married! My dad has been gone many years, but we still think about him and miss him.

This morning Susan and I went first to the Italian Gardens, which seem to be at the northern end of the dividing line between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, where there are small ponds and a pretty little stone building and where a couple of swans hang out. This is quite near the hotel. Then we angled on down through Hyde Park, sort of following the curve of the waterway--I guess it's kind of a fake river--across the park and down to Knightsbridge Road on the southside. Then we turned toward the Wellington Monument, which is in a small park which is basically surrounded by a traffic circle. This is where the New Zealand monument and other monuments related to the military are located also. By the time we reached the front of Buckingham Palace, it was about 11, and the Changing of the Guard is scheduled for 11:30, so we stayed there to watch the first part of it.

If I understand correctly what happens there, we saw the entrance of the new guard for the day (or shift, or whatever), but didn't hang around for the exit of the previous guard which apparently takes place about 30 minutes later after some kind of rigamarole inside the gates which we were really too far away to see. There were a lot of tourists there. There is also motor traffic coming through right in front of the Palace and around the Queen Victoria Memorial which also seems to function as the center of a traffic circle. So they stop traffic for a few minutes while one portion of the Guard comes in; then traffic flows again; then they stop some more traffic for another section of the Guard to come in; then some guys come through on horses; and then they all get inside the gates, I think, and then after whatever it is that happens in there, the guys getting relieved come out and march away.

Here's a photo of some of the new guys coming in. We're seeing them from behind, because they have already passed us by--we were across the traffic circle from the Palace--and are about to go into the gates of the Palace:



This is a batch of guys on horseback. I think they're called the Horse Guard. They don't have the fuzzy hats, but instead are wearing more helmety-looking things, with tassels on them. They came up The Mall (which is a road), as did at least one of the marching groups, and came around on the left side of the Queen Victoria Memorial and toward the front of the Palace. So they have also already passed us in this photo, and that's why you have the horses' rear ends to see! (Some of the policemen around the Palace and circle acted like horses' rear ends. . .)



The Queen's flag was flying over the Palace which means that she was in residence there today. Susan got a photo of that, but I didn't. This is my "arty" photo of the day--a close-up of some of the lamps at one of the Palace gates, with dark storm clouds behind.



After we left the Changing, we went down toward Westminster Abbey and had lunch in the Methodist building there. It's some kind of conference center and has "Wesley's Cafeteria" in the basement. Susan got a mixed salad meal there: I got tea and some fries to go along with my can of tuna. And--this is important--if you come to the cafe and have something to eat or drink, you can also use the restroom for free! The public restrooms across the street--between the Methodist building and the Abbey--cost 50 pence (about a dollar) to use.

Susan was pretty wowed by the Abbey too, and I was pleased to visit it again. Such a beautiful beautiful building. After our visit there, we went into the gift shop for a little browsing (Susan found some Lewis coat of arms magnets for her brothers and dad) and I stumbled across a little pamphlet-style book that lists the people who are buried or have memorial plaques in the Abbey. I found that Thomas Hardy's ashes are buried there, but his heart was removed from his body before he was cremated, and his heart is buried in Dorset. He is next to Dickens.

We roamed on down by the Houses of Parliament and Rodin's Burghers of Calais, the monument celebrating the abolition of slavery, and down to the Tate Britain. Susan discovered that she rather likes the portraits of John Singer Sargent, and I got to look at Edward Burne-Jones's paintings again, as well as a bunch of the Turner paintings.

**

We had a picnic-y kind of supper at the Marble Arch park, with a duck looking on most of the time. Finally we gave him a little chunk of apple, which he spurned, but he was quite happy to have a few bits of my croissant. I didn't mind feeding him--though he probably needs to be more self-sufficient--but I don't believe in feeding pigeons (which is, anyway, against the law in London!)

We found a Starbuck's with functioning wifi, so I could catch up on yesterday's email and get a Travel Log posting done. It was a big Starbuck's, with a very large basement full of tables and chairs. And very noisy. I didn't stay online as long as I might--I didn't check for comments at Travel Log--or even look to see if today's posting looked all right, because I was by then "flagging", as I usually say. Besides the fact that we had had a very long day, London has gotten to me. Whether it's how wet and chilly it's been, or if it's just the enormous amount of plant life, I've begun a sinus meltdown. Sigh. And believe me--you can look in half a dozen stores in the London megalopolis before you find a simple roll of cherry drops to soothe a sore throat! I didn't want menthol or eucalyptus or anything to upset my stomach--just cherry-flavored sugar! Apparently Life-Savers don't exist in England. Finally I found Bassett's Cherry Drops in a little shop called "Food & News". Pleased me mightily.

Signing off with a sore throat and looking toward a probably restless night. . . .

***

June 29, 2007

At some point during the night, my sinus meltdown shifted into phase three. The raw throat mostly quits at that point, and instead I get a kind of hoarseness and tickly throat which is much less painful. I always like moving from phase two to phase three.

Here's a complaint, which may also be a warning suggestion. Both yesterday and today Susan and I bought "one-day passes", good for as many bus rides as you want, because a single bus ride is 2 pounds, and the one-day pass is "only" 3 pounds 50 pence. In our case, it hasn't been a bargain either day. Each day we only got one real ride out of the pass, our first of the day. Today's situation was especially annoying: we waited while several buses of various numbers passed by until we finally got one we could use, and then we got a driver who apparently didn't know where he was going. Twice he stopped at bus stops, got off the bus, and--as far as we could tell--either asked another bus employee what to do or just looked at the bus map to see what he was supposed to do. When he got back on the bus the first time, one of the other passengers was telling him how to get back to where he needed to be to get us on track again. After about 20 minutes, we had gone maybe a quarter-mile. So we got off the bus and tried to catch another one. Didn't work out, and we ended up walking back to the hotel. Really annoying.

At least on the morning run, the bus took us right where we needed to go--the British Museum--and we had a good time there. A few years ago, they redid the courtyard of the museum, enclosing it, putting in gift shops, coffee shop and restaurant, and big curving staircases. Here's a shot, looking up at the transparent roof. Look carefully and you can spot some birds sitting on the roof:



Somehow on my first visit I missed the Rosetta Stone, although I must have walked right past it. Probably it was surrounded by a crowd, my eye was caught by other Egyptian artifacts more easily spotted, and I didn't even notice what I had done. The Rosetta Stone is the big piece of rock from about 200 BC which allowed scholars to begin to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's an inscription from one of the Ptolemies (the Greek "pharaohs" of Egypt in the centuries after the death of Alexander the Great: the last was Cleopatra), which is given in three forms--Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic (another form of Egyptian writing) and ancient Greek. It was found in 1799 by the French forces which had invaded Egypt the previous year. Since scholars could easily read the Greek, they started working from the Greek to get to the Egyptian. A French guy named Champollion finally cracked it in 1822 or so.

Today as Susan and I wandered through the Egyptian sculpture and statuary, we seemed to have started a short-lived trend by taking a picture of one or the other of us, with arm outstretched beside this monumental arm/fist of Amenhotep III:



This arm and hand are kept next to a monumental head of Amenhotep, though I don't know if they actually belonged to the same statue once upon a time. Amenhotep III was an immensely wealthy pharaoh whose predecessors had engaged in a lot of military campaigns and created the "Egyptian empire". After his father died young, Amenhotep became pharaoh as a boy and reigned for almost 40 years, during which time he mostly built things and spent money. He was also probably either the father or grandfather of Tutankhamen, "King Tut". Scholars still disagree about that issue.

The boy in the background right of this photo may give you some idea of the size of this Egyptian falcon--though the boy is back a distance. The falcon was normally associated with the god Horus, who was the son of Ra the sun-god. The reigning pharaoh was also considered to be Horus.



Not far from the Egyptian collection is the Assyrian collection. Those of you who read the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible historical books will remember the Assyrians for all the problems they caused the kingdoms of Judah and Israel in the centuries after kings David and Solomon. And you English majors might think of Lord Byron's poem about Sennacherib coming down like a wolf on the fold. Their palaces were full of wall relief carvings like this one:



While the relief carvings from the Parthenon may be the most noted Greek sculptures in the Museum, today I offer you this bronze head, once thought to be Homer, but now assumed to be the dramatist Sophocles, who wrote the dramas about Oedipus the King.



After leaving the Museum, we wandered along Great Russell Street for a bit. Susan went into a souvenir shop to look for some gifts and I visited a bookseller specializing in nineteenth century authors. I didn't buy anything (I am after all scheduled to visit the "book town" Hay-on-Wye, week after next), but saw some nice items: a really nice copy of cantos XII-XIV of Lord Byron's Don Juan as well as copies of some of his other books which had lost their covers.

A little further down the street we had lunch at a little diner which had "jacket potatoes" (baked potatoes), sandwiches and Italian ice cream. I had a jacket potato with butter; Susan had a ham-and-cheese sandwich. And then it was on to the National Gallery to see Leonardo, Velázquez, Caravaggio, Turner and other artists. Then, on our way back to Oxford Street (and our failed bus ride to the hotel), I went into the foreign language bookstore to buy a novel by a South American author while Susan browsed a "vintage clothing" store next door.

Later we had the excitement of going to a laundromat to wash clothes before changing hotels tomorrow to get ready for the bus tour. As in Malta, laundry is expensive, as much as 3 pounds 60 pence (more than $7) to wash one double-load of clothes; 2 to 3 pounds to run a dryer for thirty minutes! How do the locals afford to wash their clothes? I don't get it. And by the time all this was over, I didn't have the energy to try to get to Starbuck's and post yesterday's log or answer your email.

But I did have the energy to shower up. Have I mentioned this bathroom? The double room is substantially larger than the single room--maybe three times as big, maybe a little more--but the bathroom is essentially the same, although less conveniently arranged. Imagine a room which is, at the entrance, barely wider than the doorway itself. As you step in, the sink is on your right. Its back set back just a few inches from the door-frame; its front sticks out into into your line of passage as you enter. Just past the sink, directly in front of you is the toilet. Here the bathroom widens out: the shower stall is to the right of the toilet, in a recess past the sink. But the shower stall is also on a platform about 10-12 inches higher than the rest of the floor. To get into it, you have to turn right, just past the sink, and step up between the sink and the toilet, both of which are just a few inches to either side of you. Getting out is a little trickier, of course, because you are wet as you step down to the main floor. There is no room to speak of to dry off, without bumping into the wall or the sink, just as it's virtually impossible to take a shower without repeatedly banging into the (plexi?)glass sides of the shower stall, which is absolutely no more than 3 feet to a side, and maybe a few inches less. Believe it or not, it's less convenient to use than the bathroom in my Casita travel trailer was--and that travel trailer was under one hundred square feet large!

If you don't hear from me (email or Travel Log) for the next week, it's because I'm on a bus tour of England, Wales and Ireland and can't get Internet access!

Two-fer: Tate Britain Gallery and Susan Arrives

June 26, 2007

The Tate Gallery, at some point (I don't know when), split into two galleries: the Tate Britain Gallery and the Tate Modern Gallery. I learned this after arriving at the Tate Britain Gallery this morning. The Tate Britain is devoted to British art (thus the name), and I bet you can guess what the Tate Modern is devoted to. There is of course some overlap of artists since some British artists are modern artists. Hehehe.

I walked from the hotel to the Tate this morning. There was some sunshine, but it was quite chilly: in the 50s, I suppose. In fact, it might not have gotten above 60 degrees all day. But it didn't rain--yippee!

Going southeast from the hotel, I went through Hyde Park toward the Wellington Monument, but from there I took a road new to me: Grosvenor Place which continues on down toward the Thames River. As I walked along I noticed this sign, which those of us with Irish heritage might appreciate:



And not too far from there, I snapped this photo, looking up at the barbed wire and long nailish barbs at the top of the wall along this backside of the Buckingham Palace grounds.



This same sort of barbing protects the wall along Constitution Hill Road too.

Shortly after this, I turned onto Lower Grosvenor. The sun was shining at the time, right onto the red-brown brick wall to my left, and it actually felt warm there for a minute or two! For the past three days, London has felt like Dallas in November. (And the weather prediction for tomorrow is more of the same! But the flooding you may have heard about is north of here, not in London.)

After another block or so, I got around to Vauxhall Bridge Road which leads to--you guessed it!--Vauxhall Bridge, one of many "London" bridges which cross the Thames River. I turned down a road called John Islip a bit before reaching Millbank Road, which runs along the Thames. From John Islip, one can reach the side entrance to the Tate Britain Gallery.

My first goal--once I got a map of the museum (and had a visit to the men's room)--was Room 14, where the Pre-Raphaelite paintings are kept. Apparently Edward Burne-Jones, whose work I often like and whom I earlier referred to as an associate of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, isn't really a Pre-Raphaelite: his paintings at the Tate are in another room. But in getting there I came to a contemporary exhibit, laid out in a long connecting hallway, which deals with British protests against the war in Iraq and features some very disturbing imagery. I wonder if an American public museum could show such work without serious controversy erupting.

Perhaps the most famous paintings in the Tate Pre-Raphaelite collection are two by John (Something) Millais. One is Ophelia, the famous painting of Shakespeare's Ophelia (from Hamlet) floating down the river as she dies. The other is Christ in the Home of His Parents, which shows Jesus as a teenager working with Joseph in the carpentry shop while other members of the family are engaged in various activities as well.

The Tate Britain also has several works by artist and poet William Blake, including some copies of his illuminated (illustrated) books of poetry, among them Songs of Innocence and Experience. Cabinets display some of the books by other authors which Blake made engraved illustrations for, all within the context of the British abolition-of-slavery movement. There is a photographic blow-up of Blake's poem "The Little Black Boy", as well as the actual poem itself which takes up two pages in the Songs. The museum exhibits the first page from "Copy A" and the second from (I think) "Copy T". These copies were made many years apart, I presume because of the time and expense involved in making these books. Blake did not get wealthy as either artist or poet. Lou Ann, I imagine, could tell us exactly what the broader situation was for Blake.

The Tate Britain has a really large collection of works by JMW Turner: oils, watercolors, finished paintings, unfinished paintings, sketches. I really enjoyed seeing some of his drawings of buildings, especially one of Durham Cathedral which he did as a very young man. And some of the unfinished paintings look finished to us as "moderns" because our views of art have changed so much in the 150 years since Turner died. There are scenes of shipwreck, buildings, the English countryside, things he saw on his trips to Europe, and so forth. A real wealth of material. The "interactive" room points out that in the 18th and 19th centuries (when Turner was born and when he made his name and career) art students learned by copying earlier works, and so it provides several works along with pads of paper and pencils, so that visitors can sit down and have their own lessons, if they want to. I was tempted to do so, but was probably a bit too tired by that point.

I was at the museum for about 4 hours, I guess, but I broke the time up by having lunch in the cafe. I had a can of tuna and an apple with me, so I bought a pot of tea and (what else?) a chocolate muffin to add to them. (Why is it that nowhere in the universe can anybody offer a plain muffin? Why does everything have to have fruit, nuts or chocolate in it? The cafe didn't even have plain potato chips! Okay--end of complaint from Captain Food Allergy.) I sat in a corner, ate my little lunch and read a bit. The Tate Britain cafe, by the way, gives better value on tea than the Tate Britain kiosk cafe near the side entrance or the Victoria & Albert Museum outdoor cafe does.

After leaving the Tate Britain I wandered up Millbank Road toward the Lambeth Bridge. (The next bridge beyond Lambeth is the Westminster Bridge, and beyond that you hit the Waterloo Bridge, the Blackfriars Bridge, the Southwark Bridge, and then the London Bridge. I haven't made it that far yet.) Along the way I took this photo, looking down the Thames toward the Lambeth Bridge and the London Eye.



The Eye is the enormous Ferris wheel in the photo. The information guy at the Tate Britain told me that the London Eye is really the only thing associated with England's millennium celebration that people like. He said on a clear day it's really wonderful to ride it and see the whole city. Maybe there'll be a clear day later this week! (Technically, today was probably clear enough--the clouds were fairly high--but it was way too cold to want to be in a Ferris wheel.)

Walking on north one gets this view of the Houses of Parliament.



Just west of here (to the left of the photo) is Westminster Abbey, which itself faces west. If you look carefully at the photograph, you might be able to make out part of the south clock face of Big Ben. I couldn't get more of the clock without moving under the trees, and thus losing another part of the clock!

As one gets nearer to Parliament, one comes to The Burghers of Calais by Rodin.



According to the story, in the fairly early years of the Hundred Years War, Edward III of England had had Calais under siege for almost a year when 6 burghers (citizens) of the French city volunteered themselves as sacrifices on behalf of their people. Edward allegedly had mercy on them. The Hundred Years War ran from something like 1338 or 1339 to 1453. Edward himself was king from 1327 to 1377 and (if I remember my English history correctly) was really more interested in architecture than war. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Passing alongside the Abbey, I ducked into St Margaret's Church for a few minutes and got out of the wind. The church is right next to the Abbey. Then I went by the Westminster kiosk for another cup of tea. I was thirsty, and I needed something to warm me up. I held the cup with both hands for heat as I walked for the next few minutes. The tea cooled down fairly quickly and was ready for drinking. I made it to St James's Park and took this photo of Buckingham Palace from the pedestrian bridge in the park.



At the same time a long line of ducks was passing under the bridge.

**

Checking email a while later, I got a message from Susan saying that, last time she looked at the Continental Airlines information online, her flight arrival time tomorrow had been delayed. So I checked as well, and saw the same information. Looks like I won't need to leave the hotel quite as early in the morning as I had thought. What's interesting, of course, is that the time in the US, at that point, was only about noon, several hours before her flight was supposed to leave Houston, and yet they were already predicting delay because of a problem with another flight or some such nonsense. In fact, as I write this posting, Susan is probably still sitting in the airport in Houston!

***

June 27, 2007

This morning I took the longish walk down to Victoria Station to catch the train to Gatwick. As of yesterday evening, Susan's flight arrival time had been delayed about two hours, so there was no need to be in a particular hurry to arrive. I walked through Hyde Park, taking a path I hadn't taken before. At one point I stopped and pulled out my map to figure out which direction to go next. A passerby stopped without my even asking and said, "Where are you trying to get?" Lots of nice folks here. I also took this photo of an Aston Martin in the park. I thought Deron would want to see it.



The ticket line at Victoria was incredibly long, so I got in the "quick ticket" line to buy the train ticket from a machine. Some kind women in line behind me helped me decide which I needed (the cheapest did just fine!), and then I had to find a couple of other folks along the way to figure out which platform and train to get to. Victoria Station confuses me no little bit.

When I got to Gatwick's North Terminal, it was about 11:30. Susan's flight, originally scheduled for a 9:55 arrival, was on the arrival board for a bit after twelve. I had a can of tuna with me, so I got a cup of tea and some chips from a little cafe at the terminal and had an early mini-lunch. After reading a while, I bought a soda and a package of croissants at Marks & Spencer to supplement lunch. Then I walked down to the arrivals area, just in case Susan had had time to come through passport control, luggage and customs by then. I looked into the WHSmith bookstore near Arrivals to see if she was there, then wandered past the Arrivals gate--and there she was, looking perhaps a little dazed, just coming through.

They fed her well on the Continental flight, apparently doing everything they could to make up for the long delays in leaving the US, so she didn't feel the need for one of my croissants. In fact, she wanted only a bottle of water before we got her ticket and got on the train to Victoria Station. We left Victoria and went up to the street, catching a bus rather than "the Tube" to get back to the hotel. From the bus, you can see the view out the window--on the subway, there's nothing to see.

Once we got her things put away in the hotel, she was ready to get out and look around, so we headed off up Bayswater to Oxford Street, thinking we might make the British Museum before it closed. We bought some picnic items at Sainsbury's Grocery and ate at the Marble Arch park right on the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Then, continuing on Oxford, we went into a Clark's shoe store, did some browsing at HMV (music superstore) and broke out the umbrellas repeatedly as the rain came and went. Finally we made the British Museum about 5 minutes before it closed, so we didn't go in, though Susan took some photos outside. She also photographed the plaque marking Randolph Caldecott's house, just across the street from the museum.

After returning to the hotel for a short rest, we went just around the corner to a small fish-and-chips/burger place, which the desk man at the hotel recommended. Susan had fish-and-chips and a salad; I had chips only. Then we went down to Starbuck's so that I could check email and post the Travel Log, and Susan wanted to read from her London guide and have a cup of mint tea. Well, tonight the T-Mobile connection was not connecting. I suggested to the Starbuck's clerk that he could just unplug it and plug it back in and it would probably be fine, but he was adamant that Starbuck's employees don't touch the T-Mobile equipment. I tried repeatedly to connect, but the problem was clearly in their router--since I was getting a strong signal of connection to T-Mobile, but T-Mobile was not connecting to the Internet. Since there is another Starbuck's up the street, we headed up there to try to get a connection, but at that location there was no T-Mobile signal at all. Yet at both locations my computer detected numerous other wifi providers! Of course I'm not paying for those, so they were no good to me. I'll hope to pass a T-Mobile shop tomorrow so I can complain. For now, my only comment is that T-Mobile's wifi hotspots leave a lot to be desired, both here and in the US. I used Barnes & Noble's SWB/ATT wifi service for a year from 2005 to 2006. It occasionally hiccuped, but never failed to work. T-Mobile's service--good at Starbuck's and Borders Book Stores--which I used in the US for about 10 months before I left for Europe was not nearly as reliable, a B+ maybe, whereas the B&N service was right at the edge of being perfect. So there is your explanation for why you did not get a travel log posting on Wednesday!

The constant wet chilly weather here has given me a sore throat, and unfortunately the weather shows no sign of improving. I'm still having great fun, but I'm not enjoying being sent back to an ugly March in Dallas!

Coming Soon: The Changing of the Guard

Victoria and Albert Museum (and more rain)

June 25, 2007

The Victoria and Albert Museum, to the south of Kensington Gardens, is across the street from the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum and just down the road from the Royal Geographic Society. Today I made it only to the V&A, but maybe I'll make one or another of the others at some point.

The V&A is both an art museum and a museum about how arts and crafts get done. Finished (and sometimes unfinished) works are on display, to be sure, but they are categorized by the materials they are made of, giving the visitor a chance to compare how various artists of various times have worked in the same materials. The museum also has a large collection of plaster casts of famous art from many countries, including copies of such works as Michelangelo's David and Moses and even such large architectural works as part of the front of the church at Santiago de Compostela in Spain and the enormous column Roman emperor Trajan, so large the cast is in two pieces, the lower half and the bottom half--the whole thing together won't fit inside the museum!

The first gallery I wandered into was the sculpture gallery. The museum has quite a collection of bronzes by Rodin, most famous for The Thinker (one copy of which is in St Paul de Vence in France--I blogged it earlier). They also have work by the British artist Eric Gill who, in addition to being a sculptor, designed alphabets. This plaque features only upper case letters, and the numbers 1-9: aren't they beautiful?



The sculpture gallery also contains large pieces by two different artists on the theme of Samson smiting Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. This is one of them:



Do you think Samson's hair ought to be longer?

The gallery also includes funerary art, such as this short poem carved into one end of a large box (for a crypt or mausoleum?):



The sculpture gallery overlooks a courtyard where the museum has a cafe with snacks and drinks. I was carrying a can of tuna and an apple with me, so I went out, bought a cup of tea and a muffin, and sat down for an early lunch. Before I finished it began to sprinkle, and there was a pretty good rain shower while I was in the museum.

Apparently the V&A gets lots of school visits--or maybe it's just that time of the English school year. A large group of what seemed to be high school students came noisily through while I was in the sculpture gallery, and a couple of hours later, when I was leaving, a really large group of elementary students were lined up with their teachers in the foyer. One of the museum employees was sitting at his desk there with his fingers in his ears. I probably should have told him, "I know the feeling!"

Upstairs there is another section of small sculptures, grouped by material into different cabinets. Some of these small sculptures displayed incredible detail in their carving, and some of them were worked in ivory! This section of the museum is an elevated walkway, overlooking the two large rooms where the casts are kept below, and there are also materials here which you are invited to touch. This little owl, not quite a foot high, and a bit over 150 years old, is for touching, so that visitors can experience what the marble feels like:



There is also a rather heavy, but even smaller, bronze horse for touching, and one of the display cases has a silent film, with captions, showing how the "lost-wax" process for creating bronze sculpture works. It was quite fascinating and looks rather complicated.

Much of the art at the V&A is "practical" art--what we call crafts or even tools. There is a really cool gallery of musical instruments, many from the 1600s and 1700s, and including instruments I had never heard of, such as the theorbo. They have several hurdy-gurdies there:



I have wanted a hurdy-gurdy ever since seeing part of Captains Courageous several years ago. In the movie Spencer Tracy plays a hurdy-gurdy and sings along. I like the sound very much, but they are not inexpensive. Maybe learning to play the hurdy-gurdy will be one of my "achievements" in retirement.

Here is a photo of an entire case of string instruments, especially for my finger-picking friends Dave Larsen and Greg Whitfield and those great fans of heavy metal Esther Arriola and Monica Nicolai!



Another of my favorite areas was 19th century painting. The museum has work by William Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Constable, JMW Turner and--a personal favorite--Edward Burne-Jones. This Burne-Jones work is quite large and hangs in a stairwell. I took the photo from the side, trying to get it into the best light. It is called The Car of Love and perhaps represents how love controls or snares both men and women.



This one is by Rossetti. Doesn't she have a languid, dreamy look on her face? Some of the Pre-Raphaelite painters seem to specialize in that other-worldly gaze, a much different expression than the trapped or tormented look which one often sees in Burne-Jones's subjects, even though he and Rossetti were associates.



This "cartoon", also from the second half of the 19th century, also by an English artist (Leighton?), is a working version of the finished painting, done for the museum. This draft was rolled up in two pieces (see that line across the top third or so of the painting) and forgotten about for 100 years before it was rediscovered.



The photo above shows only about the left quarter of the full work. The entire title is something like "The Arts of Prosperity In a Time of Peace". Its companion deals with the time of war, and the preparatory cartoon for it was presumed lost. X-rays revealed, however, that the war cartoon is underneath this one, which is painted on top of it!

The photos I've posted here give no idea of the breadth of the collection at the V&A and there is much to see which I either didn't get to at all or just sort of walked past and glanced at. One's eyes sort of fill up after a while. There is a gallery of ironwork, for example: iron-fences, wooden window shutters with iron hinges and bindings, and so forth. There is an entire gallery of work done in silver! The place is enormous.

**

After a second lunch--we hobbits eat frequently--I walked back down to the Oxford Street area to check out two stores I had stumbled across yesterday (actually about a block off Oxford Street). One is an independent bookstore which specializes in non-English language materials: literature as well as reference and teaching materials. So of course I had to browse the Spanish for a while. Prices seemed high to me, as most prices in the UK do. I found one book which looks quite interesting, however, and checked for it later on the bn.com website to see if it was readily available in the US. It doesn't seem to be--so I may have to buy it before I leave London: Parménides by César Aira of Argentina.

The record/CD store turned out to be almost entirely classical, which I was not expecting. I browsed a little bit and heard an interesting new CD which the shopkeeper was playing, but he didn't seem to have another copy of it on sale, so maybe it is something else I will look for later.

On the same street with both of these shops was this mural, painted on one end of a building:



Was it still raining? Yes. Did it ever stop. Yes. After I walked back to the hotel, had my early supper, rested a bit, loaded up the laptop to go to Starbuck's for wifi, and walked almost all the way to Starbuck's. In the last block or so, bits of blue sky began to be apparent, and while I worked at Starbuck's a big chunk of the sky actually cleared. I actually walked back to the hotel from Starbuck's without needing the umbrella above my head. Can I hope for more of that tomorrow? Who knows? In parts of England it's been flooding. Let's hope that doesn't happen in London!

National Gallery

June 24, 2007

I took a long strollish walk this morning, not in any particular rush most of the time. I was aiming toward Westminster Abbey and the 11:15 service, but I left the hotel about 9:30--plenty of time. I walked south and a bit east in Kensington Gardens, farther that direction than I had yet been, heading for the Albert Memorial. Prince Albert was Queen Victoria's much-beloved husband, who died about halfway through her 64-year reign. I'm thinking that Tennyson, poet laureate by that time, dedicated Idylls of the King, his Arthurian epic, to Prince Albert, and Victoria mourned his death ferociously. This is a close-in shot of the memorial:



And this is a shot of the whole tower:



This is so much gold (or gold-colored) surface that it reminded me of Byzantine religious icons, which used gold paint so extensively.

Directly across the street from the memorial is the Royal Albert Hall where zillions of prominent performers have played over the decades, including personal favorites Cream, both before disbanding in 1968 and during their reunion concerts in 2005.

From the memorial I walked along the south side of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, and then more or less followed the same route I had taken on Friday, going again past Buckingham Palace (where the board announced the changing of the guard tomorrow at 11:30) and then down Birdcage Walk along the south side of St James's Park.

Did I mention that it was raining? It rained almost all day--with a break of an hour or so in early afternoon. The umbrella I bought Thursday evening sure got a good break-in today. The temperature might have reached 65, though it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't. I wore a t-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt and--a good deal of the time--a windbreaker.

Attending services at Westminster Abbey was sort of odd, because the choir stalls create a big visual blockage, right in the center of the Abbey. I was sitting in a small section opposite the choir stalls and had to sort of look across into the transept (I think that's the word--where the long and the short axes of the church cross) where the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams stood as he preached and where communion was served. Today was a confirmation service, and several of the 10 boys who were confirmed had the kind of names one might, stereotypically, expect to find in English families, but not in American: Augustus, Raphael, Maxim, Callum and--yes, Dickens fans--Pip! (I made an effort to remember these names.) The organ was powerful, and the choir was good--though some of the music, with the high voices singing, was almost eerie. The choir sang "Panis angelicus", a song I like very much, during communion. The Archbishop preached about being good listeners and good speakers, capabilities--he said--which the Holy Spirit will help to develop in the newly confirmed. He stood at the doorway as we all left, shaking hands and greeting everyone. So I have now shaken hands with the Archbishop of Canterbury!

Not far from the Abbey is the Churchill Museum (I haven't been to it), and just outside it is the memorial to those killed in the terrorist attack in Bali in 2002. The names of British citizens are in the center of the memorial wall, but the memorial names all of the other dead as well.



I went into St James's Park, just west of the museum and memorial, to find a dry bench (it was still raining, but the trees are thick and tall in the park) where I could sit down and have a can of tuna and the remainder of my morning shortbread cookie. These pelicans were huddled on a big rock in the pond at the park. They didn't seem to be enjoying the chilly damp weather either.



After lunch I wandered on north, past where No. 10 Downing Street is (I guess it's behind all those guarded iron gates), through the arch where the Horse Guards are, and up toward Trafalgar Square. Here there is a high high pillar with a statue of Admiral Nelson (right?) up on the top. I took a picture, but it's not really worth much. It looks like a pole with a doll on top! And just north of Trafalgar Square is the National Gallery, an enormous museum full of paintings. I did not see everything--there's far too much to concentrate on in one visit, and it may be that I'll be back here later in the week anyway. One of the nice things about the gallery is the computerized information center where you can search by artist or title of painting and find out what room it is in. The computer will also give you information on the artist and and the painting.

The delights here include several Van Goghs, among them Sunflowers; quite a number of paintings by Pissarro, Cezanne and Monet (North Texans might be especially interested in his Flood Waters); and Seurat's Bathers at (I forget). There are also two Leonardos--The Madonna of the Rocks and a cartoon (a preliminary drawing) for a painting of Mary, holding Jesus and sitting on her mother's lap. The Gallery also has three paintings by Caravaggio (it's his enormous Beheading of St John the Baptist which is in the cathedral in Valletta, Malta, and in which the beheading is not yet complete). One of the paintings is the immensely repellent painting of a boy being bitten on the finger by a lizard, and another--recalling Valletta--has Salome with the head of John the Baptist.

Sometimes I just strolled from room to room, watching to see what caught my eye. Today bright blues (normally skies) and dark but very detailed scenes seemed to do the trick: who knows why?

It was after leaving the Gallery that I discovered a bookstore specializing in non-English language books. While eating my turkey slices and drinking my Marks & Spencer cola at Hanover Square (at least I think that's what it is), I got a few photos of this bird, determined to get some use out of this discarded apple:



Hey, it's ten o'clock, and I think it may have finally stopped raining.

The British Museum

June 23, 2007

If Westminster Abbey was heaven, then today must have been at least the third or fourth heaven--maybe the seventh! While standing in line this morning to ask about getting a train ticket to Oxford for a day visit, I heard someone mention the British Museum, and I thought, "Why should I leave London to go to Oxford when I've got the British Museum to see?" So I got out of line and started walking.

Along the way I stopped in at HMV Music Store and saw several CDs I wouldn't mind having, but CDs are expensive here and--to tell the truth--I can probably get most, if not all, of them from Tower.com, possibly at a lower price. But who knows? I may yet go in and plunk down some pounds sterling for a CD or two.

I also visited Debenham's, a big department store, to check out the possibilities of a shoulder-bag to replace the backpack I left in Malta (deliberately). I've been feeling that I'm a little too old to be carrying a backpack around like a college student. I found a canvas bag I felt would be pretty useful but didn't buy it until later in the day, after I'd looked at other computer bags and tote-ish bags at a few other places as well. While in Debenham's I also stopped at one of their cafes and had a cup of green tea and a donut. Breakfast (5 half-slices of bread, two bowls of dry Rice Krispies and corn flakes, and 3 cups of tea) had worn off by then.

I kept walking. My map showed a little park called Bedford Square, which looked to be right near the British Museum, so I figured that would be a good place to sit and have my little can of tuna and part of my apple for lunch before going to the museum. After lunch, I headed up the street (the wrong way, as it turns out), but it was serendipitous because I passed a blue (ceramic?) plaque on the front of a building, designating it the house in which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1858. The painters and writers associated with this group created some beautiful work--and maybe I'll see some of it before I leave London!

Directions from helpful pedestrians got me to the British Museum. Wow, what a place to spend some time. It's enormous, and the galleries lead from one to another to another. I'm sure if anything was paying any attention to me, they must have thought, "That poor deluded man," because I kept walking into galleries and just sighing or ohhing at what I saw before me. The museum is full of things I have seen in books decades ago.

I decided to head first--not to Ancient Egypt, not to Ancient Greece--but to Ancient Iraq (Mesopotamia). And what should greet me in Mesopotamia but the piece popularly known as the Ram in the Thicket, inspired (I think) by the story of Abraham and the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, though this ram is not caught in the bushes, and is also probably a goat and not a ram. The goat is up on its hind legs with its front hooves in a tree, probably to eat leaves. It's made of gold, lapiz lazuli and shell and is probably a little older than the Great Pyramid. I took a photograph, but it's not terribly wonderful. Much of the material in the Museum is behind thick glass or polyurethane, and it can be a problem to avoid reflections and glare.

But I do have a photo for you of the so-called Battle Standard. One side features battle scenes, though the other has peaceful scenes. This is a misidentification because the early scholars thought it was meant to be carried on a pole, like a military standard. Now it's admitted that no one knows what it is for--it's been suggested it was part of a musical instrument, a sound-box, I suppose. Here's a photo of it:



And then there is the Gudea display! Seeing the Gudea material, right there with the Battle Standard and the Ram in the Thicket, was like seeing old friends. I learned about these objects when I was working on my Master's at UT in 1982 or possibly earlier. Gudea was the ruler of Lagash--I believe he was called ensi, if my memory serves me. He was not, as it were, the king of the city-state, but rather its ruler on behalf of the gods. This photo is of a statue from the city, though it is not identified as Gudea--it's the most perfect and lovely of the statues at the Museum. Another of the statues does have Gudea's name on it, but it's in such bad shape it wouldn't mean much to you.



These statues from what is now southern Iraq, but was then Sumer, feature these large eyes, and robes worn over one shoulder, and folded hands, as if in reverence before the gods. Beautiful work. If the Ram and the Battle Standard are perhaps 4600 years old, these statues are a little younger, maybe 4100 years old. For comparison, by this time, Egypt's Old Kingdom (its pyramid age) had already declined and maybe even splintered into smaller semi-kingdoms before being reorganized by the kings of the 11th Dynasty.

And speaking of Egypt, how about a pre-mummification mummy? This is a natural mummy--a mummy that the dryness of the Egyptian climate created from a "regular" burial. This is pre-dynastic, that is, before Egypt was organized into one nation under the earliest pharaohs. This burial took place something like 5400 years ago:



The earliest two dynasties of the unified Egypt are pretty sketchy. The traditional uniter of the earlier two nations is called Menes, but scholars aren't sure who he is. Maybe he is the same as a pharaoh called Narmer, but it's impossible to establish. Another of these earlier pharaohs is simply known as Scorpion to the Scorpion King, a name which will ring a bell for those of you who are fans of Mummy-related movies. Some of the art which survives from those days takes the form of palettes, more or less flat pieces of stone carved on both sides. This is called the Hunter's Palette. Two of the three pieces of this are real; and the third is a cast of the other piece, which is in the Louvre.



When I first saw this, I thought, "Narmer!" because perhaps the most famous of the palettes is Narmer's battle palette. But Narmer is not here. I don't know which museum has him--maybe the Egyptian Museum.

The pharaoh of the Great Pyramid is sometimes called Cheops, a Greek version of his name. Khufu would be closer. And this stone has his name on it, in the box. Those of you who are fans of King Tut will recall the so-called cartouche, which pharaohs always wrote their names in later. But in this earlier period, royal names are sometimes in these boxes (which may represent a house or a temple, I think). Khufu is 4th Dynasty, almost 4500 years ago. The explanatory plaque said the name as written here would be something like Medjedu.



Here are three mummies, in one display case together, but they aren't human: these are cat mummies, and this photo is especially for my sister Teresa and my alphabetical friends Lou Ann, Sheila and Steve.



The Egyptians weren't the only ones doing fancy burials, of course, though sometimes the others weren't doing it quite as well. These are coffin lids made by the Philistines.



In books about ancient history, the Philistines are considered part of a large movement of various groups of people called "the Sea Peoples" more than 3000 years ago. Egypt had problems with various groups of them at one point, especially during the days of Ramesses III about 3200 years ago. But most people, when they hear the word Philistine, think of the Biblical stories of Samson and of David and Goliath.

Coming forward several centuries here is a wall carving from Assyria (or is it Persia? I'm pretty sure it's Assyria). Assyria figures in the books of the kings in the Bible and had its homeland in what we would call Northern Iraq. This is some kind of spirit-creature or perhaps a minor deity or servant of the gods. If I remember correctly, scholars sometimes refer to these figures as cherubim. You can see the lines of cuneiform text running across the middle of the panel, right across the figure's body and the trees from which it is plucking something.



The Museum has an enormous Greek collection as well: pottery, statues, carved friezes from the Parthenon. I sort of skated through some of the Greek rooms because I wanted not to see too much too carefully today, so that there will be more for a return trip. This is Athena, in one form or another. I was able to take most of my photos in the Museum without flash, because most of the galleries are quite well-lit. This one required flash, but it created a really almost chilling effect with her eyes, which I rather like:



I also went fairly quickly through the Roman rooms, though I took a number of photos of both Greek and Roman materials. This is, I'm pretty sure, Roman, though I don't remember conclusively. It's the rim of a rather large bowl or basin--maybe 3 feet across--and I found it quite lovely. Notice how beautifully life-like the bird's neck and head are.



Well, we've been sort of moving from older to newer art in this little tour, but now let's go way back--Stone Age art. These are very small pieces, a few inches long each, and the plaque points out that they are not "useful". Much early art serves a purpose: the "art" is really a decorated tool. But these two are not tools, meaning that they may have been decorated just for the loveliness of doing it: art in our sense of the term.



What skill the ancients had in depicting animals!

And now you're thinking, "Wait a minute! How long has it been since he talked about food?" And you're right to be suspicious. I broke my visit in half by stopping in the main floor snack area and having a cup of Darjeeling tea and a packet of "potato crisps". Since I hadn't had any with lunch, it seemed appropriate to have some at the Museum.

Fortunately I had bought AA batteries at Superdrug on my walk to the Museum. I took so many photographs that I wore out the first pair of batteries (the camera takes two at a time) before I got out of the Museum! For comparison, most of the pairs I had used up to this point lasted 5 to 7 days!

Visiting the British Museum can certainly make one wish one had gone into archaeology. What an amazing place it is.

**

While I was at Starbuck's later this afternoon, working on email and the Travel Log, a bobby walked up to me and said something like, "Sir, while I am talking to you on this side, someone could be coming up on your other side and taking your bag from where you've got it hooked on the corner of the chair." And he advised me to put it in front of me and hook it around my leg to discourage attempted theft! I had felt like it was pretty safe because I looked down at it every few minutes, but he was right--two thieves working together could have deprived me of my new Debenham's bag. And when I was having my tea at the British Museum a guard there came up to a Spanish family across the table from me and told the woman, who had set her purse on the chair behind her, that a thief could easily take it without her knowing it--so the British authorities, even at the Museum, are keeping their eyes out for the safety of tourists! Nice, indeed.

And then this evening, while I was showering, I had the window open both to let the room cool down a bit (it faces sort of west-ish) and to let the humid air of the shower out--and of course the first real rain we've had since I got here happened while I was showering, so the inside of the window was wet, the bottoms of the curtains were wet, the window-sill was wet, and the bed was even a bit wet! They only give you one towel at the hotel here, so I had to use the floor-towel (not really a floor-mat) to dry everything off! You can get your tan, you know, from standing in the English rain.

Westminster Abbey

June 22, 2007

I will try to do a better job of noticing this morning, but I believe the sky begins to lighten by about 4:30. Certainly the light woke me more than once before I actually got up. I just rolled over again and went back to sleep. I was tired.

I had toast, tea and dry cereal for breakfast at the Springfield--and a full breakfast was offered me, but I had to turn it down. The Springfield certainly offers the most complete spread that I have seen since leaving the ship--egg, breakfast ham, baked beans, sausage (I believe the English say rasher; is that correct, Lou Ann?), coffee, as well as what I had myself.

Once again I spent most of the day on my feet. My metabolism seems to be racing from all the activity, so I told myself that I can have all the sugar I want in my tea, since my body will burn through it in just a few minutes anyway!

I took off walking, trying as best I could to follow the central London map Air Malta gave me, with Westminster Abbey as my goal. It is maybe 2 miles from the hotel; maybe not quite so far. But I had no need to hurry, and I like to walk anyway. I came through Hyde Park and then down Park Lane to the Wellington Arch. I got off on the wrong side-street at one point and ended up on Piccadilly, which would have carried me away from Westminster Abbey. To get to the Wellington Arch, in honor of the famous duke, one has to go into an underground walkway and come back up again. The arch is in a little park, surrounded on all sides by broad streets with heavy traffic. Here's a shot of the arch:



The park also contains a World War I memorial and an unusual multi-piece sculpture which must be in honor of the fallen soldiers of New Zealand. The individual pieces look more or less like steel girders, except they are +-shaped, instead of shaped like I-bars or T-bars, so that each bar, angling up from the ground, ends by displaying a cross to the viewer.

Leaving the Wellington Arch, I walked along a road called Constitution Hill, with a beautiful park on both sides. Then, as one comes to where Constitution Hill becomes "The Mall", and Spur Road comes in on the right, there is Buckingham Palace! When I reached there were, of course, a great many tourists out front, but the gates were closed. I don't know if this meant that Queen Elizabeth is in residence, or if it just wasn't quite time to open yet. I think it was about 10. Here's my shot, nothing to write home about, taken through the iron railing fence:



And this is one of the guards, way off across the open plaza in front of the palace, so that he looks almost like a toy soldier:



The changing of the guards occurs about 11:30, and I thought to myself I might make it back from Westminster Abbey by then to watch (but I didn't. There'll be other days.) I moseyed on down Spur Road to Birdcage Walk (don't ask me why it's called that), and soon there it was, right ahead of me: Westminster Abbey:



By this time, my breakfast had sort of worn off, and there across the way from Westminster Abbey, was some sort of Methodist building with a cafe open to the public. So I went down to the cafe and had a pot of tea and a small roll. (And this qualified me to use the "water closet" too. Sometimes one has to pay to use the bathroom in London!)

The photo above shows the front of the Abbey, and that is the main entrance for services there. But the tourist entrance is off along the north side. At the moment, the museums in London which the government owns are free to the public (although the Conservatives have said they will change that policy if they regain power). But Westminster Abbey "receives no financial support from the State, the Crown or the Church," and the entrance fee is 10 pounds (about 20 dollars). But oh my, what a place! What a wonderful place.

It is, to be sure, a beautiful building even if one knows nothing about English history and culture--the "sentimental" attachments that people have to the building. Its pillars and windows just soar up into the air enormously, making St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta feel small by comparison. Its history goes back to 960 AD (says the brochure), and King Henry III began the "present church" in 1245. Many kings and queens and nobles are buried here, and many other famous English people are either buried here or have plaques or memorial stones here: Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill. But of course the "poet's corner" really drew me. Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400, I believe, is buried here. And there are burial or memorial stones or plaques for Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Lewis Carroll, and--especially cool for me--Thomas Hardy. Hardy, I'm almost positive is not buried here, though his heart may be. I had to squat down and touch his small square stone on the floor.

The tombs of kings and queens are huge impressive works of art--reclining statues on top of heavy carved stones. Queen Elizabeth I and her sister Queen Mary ("Bloody Mary") are buried together, and even Mary, Queen of Scots, is buried here--though that came about after her son James VI of Scotland became James I of England and not while Elizabeth I was queen. Anne Nevill, wife of Richard III, who died in battle against Henry VII, is also buried here, a burial which must have taken place while Richard III was still king--surely his enemy Henry VII wouldn't have allowed his wife burial in the Abbey. King Edward the Confessor, whose death in 1066 set into motion the events which led to William of Normandy invading England from France and becoming King William I of England (William the Conqueror) has an enormous shrine in the Abbey, though it can only be glimpsed in bits because so many later additions to the Abbey block view of it. One of the Abbey marshals (I think that's what his badge said) told me that his body was removed at one point, and then later returned to the Abbey. To the east, I believe, of the shrine is one of points at which you can see parts of it--and on that side is the Coronation Chair for the kings and queens of England. According to the brochure, Edward I ordered it built in 1301, and it has been used in every coronation since: Edward II was, I think, the first to be crowned in it. The Stone of Scone was for many many years kept under the coronation chair, but was returned to Scotland about a decade ago, though it will come back to rest under the chair temporarily, for the next coronation. (And who will be sitting on the chair? Charles, or William? Will Queen Elizabeth outlive her son? She is already one of England's longest ruling monarchs, though she hasn't yet equalled George III's 60 years or Victoria's 64.)

The Chapter House is a lovely chapel-ish building outside the main abbey with tiles on the floor going back to the 13th or 14th century and much faded paintings on some of the walls. The high stained glass windows are newer, replaced after being broken in World War II, though some of the pieces have been taken from 19th century windows. Several centuries ago, the Chapter House was the meeting place of the House of Commons, which must have had far fewer members in those days!

Westminster Abbey was a grand place to begin my official "sightseeing" in London, and I look forward to going back next week when Susan arrives. After leaving the Abbey I took this photo of Big Ben which is just about a block away.



Not long after I snapped this photo of one of the Horse Guards:



I had lunch--ham on wheat bread and a cup of tea--while sitting on a low ironwork fence in a tiny park behind the National Portrait Gallery, right near a statue in memory of Henry Irving, a prominent 19th century actor for whom the author Bram Stoker (Dracula) was business manager. Then I roamed up Whitehall Road, which sort of turns into Charing Cross Road. I visited some used bookstores and then, as I neared Oxford Street which is supposed to be the, or one of the, premier shopping areas of London, some new bookstores. I visited Blackwell's, Borders, and an independent called Foyles. There I bought a novel in Spanish called Las puertas templarias by Javier Sierra, who also wrote La cena secreta (available in English as The Secret Supper), which I hope will be a fun read.

**

It showered three or four times today as I was in and out, so the cheap umbrella I bought yesterday came in handy. At various times it was comfortably pleasant or just on the edge of chilly. I kept my windbreaker on all day. There was sun from time to time, but mostly it was cloudy. Then, this evening, just as I was nearing being finished with email and the Travel Log and elimae, a man asked if he could share the table I was at, because Starbuck's was crowded. I told him sure and that I was nearly finished, and then we chatted a bit as I got ready to go. He said he lives nearby and that it's a really nice part of London, and he asked what part of the States I was from. There was another American at the next table, and he heard us talking and it turns out he is from Houston. He has been in India on business, then London, and returns to Houston tomorrow. There are a lot more Americans in London than in Malta! No surprise there, I reckon.

To London We Will Go

June 21, 2007

Mrs Galea called me a bit before six this morning to make sure I got up on time to catch my flight to London. After fidgeting with and finalizing up my packing, and taking a quick shower, I went down for a cup of tea and a small loafette of bread which Mrs G prepared for me, even though breakfast isn't normally until 8. I left the Asti about 7 a.m. and walked to the Valletta bus terminus for the last time--this time around, at least. Waited for the bus. Took the long ride to the airport. Got there about 8, I guess. The plane left at 10. In between, I had a cup of tea, ate some cookies, did some reading.

The flight was uneventful, about three hours long, although only two hours on the clock, since Malta is one hour minus Greenwich mean time. So it was about noon when we got to London. By the time I got through customs, got my luggage and got my train ticket to Victoria Station, it was about one. Two, Malta time. Since my early, small breakfast, I had had cookies and four little crackers with butter. I was almost so hungry that I wasn't hungry anymore.

The train ride to Victoria Station took about 35 minutes. Fortunately I was able to sit and set my backpack down. It weighs about 11 kilograms, apparently--if I read the meter right at the airport. About 25 pounds maybe? It sure feels heavier on my shoulders. After disembarking at Victoria Station I had to get my first lessons on the London Underground, or "the Tube." An Underground employee was very helpful and practically led me by the hand to show me which subway line to take and how to buy a ticket. After I got to what I hoped was the right platform, I asked another bystander about what subway to catch and how to know which it was, and he told me everything I needed to know for right then. On the subway itself I had to stand for the first half of the ride, and then was able to get a seat and get the weight off my back. I was next to a young lady who also had a backpack, so I started up a conversation with her and found out that she is from Washington State and just arrived in London yesterday. She had attended the Solstice Festival at Stonehenge yesterday and loved it. (She's young, remember.) She said she has had about 6 hours of sleep since Monday. Yikes!

From Paddington Station, my stop, it was pretty easy to find the hotel. I had the map that Air Malta had given me of Central London and it was quite helpful. But it is also true that people were very helpful and ready to assist an ignorant Texan.

The Springfield is on Sussex Gardens Road, which sort of arcs off Lancaster Terrace, a tiny little connector to Bayswater Road which skirts both Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park on their north sides. So this is really a pretty cool part of town. The block the Springfield is on is pretty much nothing but hotels. They look like a solid block of buildings, much like in Malta, but once I was inside my room (up on the fourth floor above ground again!) I could see that there is empty space behind those solid facades. I look out toward another hotel block but there are lower buildings between and below us, so it's not like staring at a wall three feet away. There is open air. The hotel directly beyond the Springfield, toward the east, is called Days Hotel, and--judging by its logo--it's a version of Days Inn.

Anyway, by the time I did all my train maneuvering and walking (not that far) to the hotel, and getting checked into the hotel (a bit complicated since I will have to change rooms once, and maybe twice, because of making the late booking for these early 6 days), and getting to the room and unloading a bit, I guess it was 2:30. So I went out to see if I could find a grocery store that had enough food to help me, and maybe find a wifi spot as well. I wandered toward where I thought the deskman told me, but either I didn't wander correctly, or he didn't understand my idea of a supermarket, because I didn't find anything that looked like it would be much help. More wandering, and more asking of residents for help, got me to Marks & Spencer. Now in Malta, M&S was clothes--here it's grocery and clothes, which strikes me as an odd combination. It didn't help me as much as I had hoped--I didn't, for example, find pop-top or plastic-packet tuna, or small bottles or cans of V8--but I found deli ham, turkey and chicken (today I went with ham), "quick" oatmeal (aka "porridge"), a bagel, some potato snackish things, some apples, and some bottled water. After checking out at M&S, I headed down the street on the way back to the hotel, got a little lost, asked more directions, bought an umbrella (it's already rained lightly since I arrived, as well as been sunny and cloudy), and then went to Kensington Gardens to sit on a bench and have my very late lunch.

Yes, Nancy Bass, I had my very very late lunch (almost 5 p.m. Malta time) at Kensington Gardens. Not a terribly well-balanced lunch, mind you--deli ham, potato snackettes and bottled water. With the intention (which did not come to fruition) of later having part of one of the apples, once I could get to the hotel and get my pocket knife and peel the thing. (I can't eat peel.)

After returning to the hotel with the uneaten groceries, I went out again, this time with computer, because--in my roaming--I had learned that there are two Starbuck's along Queensway, which is where the M&S is. But first I went back into Kensington Gardens, because I had noticed on my map a notation for "the Peter Pan statue," and I thought my young nephew, great-nieces and great-nephews might like to see a photo of that. After I took one photo and was looking for the right spot for a second, a woman asked me if I would take a photo of her with the statue and then she would reciprocate. She likewise wanted the photo for nieces and nephews. Here's my initial photo, taken from the side, because the sun was behind Peter Pan. You can't see much detail, but the shadowy nature of the statue here is maybe a good representation of the shadowy nature of Peter himself:



And here is the photo of Peter and me, which the kind stranger took. I believe this is the first photo of myself which I've posted since Tarxien, the second week I was in Malta. (Not counting the ankle of course.)



After taking the Peter Pan photos I wandered on farther south (despite my hankering for Starbuck's) because I had noted a pointer sign reading "Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain", and I knew I should get a picture of that for my friend Nancy Bass. Now Nancy has been to England many times, but I don't believe she has been since this fountain will have been created. I had to walk and walk quite a way before I finally reached it. It's not actually a fountain, in any ordinary sense. Rather it's a sort of lopsided oval, on a slightly sloping field, where the water flows around and around, to all appearances going uphill at one point! This photo shows the spot where the "bed", if you will, is broken up to make a kind of small rapids.



And this one shows the fountain arcing on around from "below" (should I say downstream?) the rapids.



At one point, probably a little farther upstream than this photo, there is an inscription on the inside (water) edge of the outer wall nothing the fountain's dedication (is that what you would call it?) by the Queen in (I think) 2004. I tried to take a photo of that, but my camera told me (again) "Battery depleted!" (It often gives me that message many times before the batteries actually cease to work, if I tweak a little bit.) Anyway, I didn't get that photo. But as I walked back "up" the park, toward Bayswater Road (and, eventually, Starbuck's), I noticed something I hadn't as I was coming down:



And yes, those are the tips of my Big Boy shoes at the bottom of the photo. After taking this photo, I headed out on my search for tea and wifi.

Finding a location, I ordered tea and a shortbread cookie, and sat down to wifi. I bought a one-month unlimited usage plan (unlimited usage, that is, in the UK--it will do me no good on the bus tour in Ireland) from T-Mobile for 40 pounds--$80. About what I paid in Malta, and about twice what one would paid for a similar plan (that is, not attached to a mobile phone account) in the US. Likewise the tea "posting" on the menu board says the same thing for a venti (large) tea as in the US, that is, 1.75, but in the US, that's $1.75, but in the UK it's 1.75 pounds, which is twice as much. The UK is expensive, not just for tourists. I spent an hour and a half, or two hours, catching up on email, posting the last full day Malta travel log entry, and checking what my next credit card payment will be. Oddly, though this payment isn't due until mid-July, it covers charges that go all the way back to my onboard charges on the cruise ship!

I didn't tell you about the room, did I? It's small. The Springfield has 18 rooms (at least the highest number I've seen is 18), and there are smaller and larger rooms. I am in a smaller room, a room for one. It has a twin bed, a chair, a tiny bedside table, a little shelf for the tea fixings, a very small closet, and a bathroom--all of which is squeezed into maybe 80 square feet. It really is probably roughly the same size as my little Casita travel trailer--it may even be a bit smaller. But it has an actual shower stall, not simply a lower place in the floor; it has a television with programming in English (whether it's interesting or not, I can at least understand what's being said); and it has tea fixings. You will laugh to know that I used those fixings--the water pot, the cup, the spoon, the sugar--along with the oats I bought at M&S to make myself a cup of oatmeal for supper. I didn't have any this morning (because I used my last packet yesterday), and I didn't have the energy to get out for supper, so I had oatmeal in. Ah, the life of the idle. And after I finished the oatmeal, I rinsed out the cup so I could have an evening cup of tea.

It is 10:23, and the sky is not yet completely dark. The northern summer days last a long time. It's cool to be in London. I haven't seen anything terribly exciting yet--except Kensington Gardens--but it feels cool to be here. It really does.

Kudos to the American Embassy, and to Mrs. Galea

June 20, 2007

Today, my last full day in Malta, was a mixture of peaceful and stressful. At breakfast I met a new guest at the hotel, who is a private tutor (to make money so she can travel) and a travel writer (which doesn't pay her much). She is currently embarked on a trip which will take her across Central Asia--including five (I believe she said) of the stans (Turkmenistan, etc.)--and she will end up, finally, in Vietnam. The land masses she is covering on this trip, along with those she has already covered, will add up to a circumnavigation of the globe, land-wise. She looks to be perhaps a little older than I am. She says travel is addictive.

I also met a young couple from Sydney, who are spending several weeks traveling in Europe--they have come to Malta from Italy--before heading to the UK to settle in for a while and look for work. Because they are citizens of a British Commonwealth country, they were able to get 5-year work visas fairly easily (though that doesn't guarantee getting work, of course.)

Then, while emailing and posting the Travel Log at Caffé Café, I got the unnerving message from my credit card company that I needed to call because they suspected fraudulent charges to my card. Sigh. I tidied up what I was working on, bought yet another international calling card (because I wasn't smart enough to know how to use the payphone without coins to make a collect call to the company, which I was supposed to do), made the call, and got told the offices were closed! Huh? Wouldn't you think the fraud department would be open 24 hours a day? (Noon here, remember, is somewhere from 3 to 6 a.m. in the US, depending on location.) So I went and had my lunch and finally ended up at the American Embassy, trying to find somewhere I could make that collect call, because I figured if I got through on the calling card, it would run out of minutes in the middle of the call and nothing would be resolved. (And as a matter of fact, when I tried to call the company again this evening, on another issue, that's exactly what happened. Chip-controlled payphones don't know about collect calls.)

So kudos to the American Embassy for letting me in, through security, up the elevator and into an office to make the phone call. It took about 20 minutes all together, long enough to eat up a calling card at the rates they charge here. Got the problem taken care of (they had blocked a hotel charge I had tried to make, thinking it fraudulent) and the information noted (again!) that I am out of the country and will be making charges out of the country. The kind gentleman who let me use his office to call noted that he had also retired, but that he kept getting called back to do short-term assignments in various places, normally during the hot months. His home is in Colorado, not too far from my niece and nephew-in-law Daphanie and Gregg--he said they had 300 inches of snow this past winter. I mentioned having lost weight from being on my feet all day long, and he said he has lost 30 pounds since getting to Malta!

After I left the embassy, I wandered over to the bus terminal to see if I wanted to make the run to Cospicua to see the church. I loitered for about 15 minutes, and the bus in question never showed, so I didn't wait any longer. Decided I'd go back to the Asti, rest a bit, then do a bit more emailing just before the cafe closed.

Hanging out in the coffee shop and emailing; sitting in the shade at the Upper Barakka Gardens and reading; even checking the Agenda Bookshop to see if they have Eduard Mörike's Mozart's Trip to Prague (is that the right title?)--these are relaxing and peaceful activities. Worrying about credit card issues from several thousand miles away is not.

**

It keeps raining in Northeast Texas, which those of you in Northeast Texas already know. I'm not there, you also know, so you can't blame that rain on me.

**

I'll spare you an ankle shot today. It feels better yet, but looks pretty well just as hideous, though I can now actually feel the ankle bone on the outside of the ankle, so that's a bit of improvement too.

**

Tomorrow morning, I need to leave the Asti around 7 a.m. or shortly thereafter to walk to the bus terminus and take the bus to the airport. I checked a cute little central London map the Air Malta folks gave me, and it looks like the hotel I'm heading toward is not far at all from Paddington Station. As long as it's not raining, it should be an easy walk--even with the backpack on my back. Certainly it should be easier than scaling the road at Ghajnsielem last Wednesday. Sussex Gardens, the street the hotel is on, looks to be a bigger street: at least it's shown so on the map, though it's not very long. Wish me good weather.

Mrs. Galea, sweetheart that she is, is planning to call me at 6, to make sure I wake up, and is going to have tea and bread ready for me at 6:45, even though the real breakfast hour is 8 to 9.

I'll be posting this entry and answering email once I get settled in London and find a wifi locale. And maybe on Saturday I'll make a day trip to Oxford. . . .

Malta Time Winds Down

June 19, 2007

Back in Texas, today is Juneteenth, and also Bobby Campbell's and Lisa Goldstein's birthday. I hope everyone has had a great day.

Last night (which means I should have mentioned all this in yesterday's log) while I was out on the wall having my little picnic dinner, I kept hearing music over in the Upper Barakka Gardens, not far away. Finally I wandered over that way and discovered some kind of hoohah in progress--men dressed up as knights or courtiers or some such (no, not in full armor, though they wore helmets and one guy had a breastplate and backplate on) (and maybe the helmets, breastplate and backplate were plastic--I couldn't tell), and there was another guy, dressed up as--I presume--the archbishop or head priest for the knights, because he was in full-length black with a rather Greek Orthodox-looking headpiece on and a long curling wig. Seems it was all in celebration of an international conference on health services to the aging, and I gathered that the prime minister may have been there. I talked to a couple of the attenders, both of whom were from Canada, and one of them, after we had only talked for a bit, asked, "Texas?" So I said, "Is it that obvious?" And she said--get this--"Well, at first I thought Louisiana." That's one I've never been told before! She went on to say that she decided against Louisiana and then said, "But East Texas, right?" And I told her that I grew up in Dallas, but had lived in West Texas a good bit. It's hard, of course, for one to really know what one sounds like to others, but that conversation was a surprise to me!

This morning I pretty well took it easy. The ankle looks worse (picture to follow, hehehe) but feels much better, so I could have gotten out and about more, but I wanted to sit at Caffé Café and do email, the Travel Log, etc. I like doing email and Internet in the morning, over a nice cup of tea. On my way from the Asti to the cafe, I noticed lights off in a lot of shops on Republic Street, and there was a fairly short blackout over much of the city. What was odd was how spotty it was, within one block. Most of the shops would be dark, but others would have lights. One of the banks was dark, but people were lined up at the ATM which had its lights on! So the power grid in Valletta must be really oddly put together. (Later in the day, when I was in Sliema, I heard that they had had a blackout too, but it was a day or two ago.)

After lunch back at the Asti, I rested a bit, then headed back to Upper Barakka where I read a bit (a historical page-turned, Monsoon by Wilbur Smith) and worked on a couple of drawings. One of them was quite ickish, but this one seemed all right. It's my "Impression of a Window" in the Asti breakfast room:



I went back to the hotel, loaded up a bottle of water, some "coffee biscuits" (tea cookies, more or less), and a couple of magazines and a CD which came with the Sunday paper. Then I headed down to the dock where the Sliema-Valletta ferry docks and took the ferry across to Sliema. I was scheduled to meet the French students Arnaud and Remi to visit one last time before I head for England. Before we met, I had time to do such things as stop by the park at Tigné Point to do some chin-ups and push-ups; buy a "Pocket Penguin" (skinny little paperbacks published in England to celebrate Penguin Books' 70th anniversary: the one I bought was a selection from a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley); and sit at Stella's for a pot of tea and reading.

Arnaud, Remi and I had supper at one of the kiosks (Road Devil) on the Sliema seawall, visited and looked at the people passing by and at the water. We talked about the logistical problems with their getting over to Gozo for a day or two--because of the hours the buses run (and don't run) a day trip can be almost worthless unless you want to spring for renting a car. We also discussed their schedules. Remi gets to finish up his internship and return to France (and probably do some summer work) in just a couple of weeks, but Arnaud doesn't finish his internship until August 3. Fortunately his brother is coming to see him in just a few days, and then his girlfriend will come to visit at the end of the month, so he will have some good company in the 6 weeks he has remaining. Neither is being paid for his internship, but instead is being given room and board and--of course--the college credit for doing the program. Remi mentioned that one of the places he checked into working for here wanted him to pay to do the internship: I believe he said they wanted 10 Maltese lira a day for three months--not at all an insubstantial amount of money. He wisely turned that offer down. Getting to know them, especially Arnaud since we were at the same hotel for a month, has been one of the serendipities of the trip, and both tell me to come see Poitiers.

About sunset I left them so that I could get on the bus to Valletta and get back to the hotel, clean up and get some washing done (in the shower, you know). As I walked from the bus terminus to the hotel I stopped to take this photo for my old banking buddy Tim Pinon back in Texas. (He and his lovely wife Marty are currently traveling in New Mexico. I don't know if the boys are with them, or locked in a box somewhere.) I had tried earlier to take a daytime photo of the "signboard" out front, but didn't manage to get a decent shot--I cut off part of the name, and since the "sign" is carved into limestone, it didn't show up well anyway. So here is the whole shebang, more or less, the Maltese Stock Exchange:



And now, yes, the ankle. I know you are all dying to see the ankle again. If you're squeamish, don't scroll down any farther:



Will I go to Cospicua tomorrow and see the church there? It's supposed to be quite impressive. Will I spend the morning at Caffé Café and the afternoon sitting in the shade reading? Who knows? And you may have to wait a few days to find out. On Thursday I will be in transit to London, then getting to the hotel, then settling in, then I will have to find out where I can (surely!) wifi. Whether I get to that on Thursday or not is an open question. So, once again, if I drop out of contact for a day or two or three, you will know why. Should I try to get to Stonehenge for midsummer's day, or will I have already missed it?

And finally, your music tip for the day: take a listen to "Girl From Mill Valley", a piano-based instrumental by Jeff Beck.

Taking a Tumble in the Streets of Valletta

June 18, 2007

Only two photos today. There was only going to be one, but after I saw what my ankle looked like tonight, I figured I'd better go for two. But more on that later.

Today was sort of an odd, calm day, except for that tumble (but more on that later, hehehe). I took some clothes to the laundry that Mrs. Galea recommended. They weighed them (they charge by weight) and will bring them to the Asti, hopefully tomorrow. Mrs. Galea will pay them, then I will pay her. After that, I went to the Air Malta office to check on the London hotel query, but a response hadn't arrived yet, so the woman at the computer put it through again and told me I could call the "Flyaway" number in the afternoon and get the response.

Well, my main goal of the morning after that was to put in some time at Caffé Café, and catch up on email I didn't get to on Saturday (as well as new stuff), post the Saturday-Sunday two-day blog, drink tea, etc. I didn't have a photo of Caffé Café for that post, but now I do. And here it is, my new home away from home while I'm still in Valletta.



As far as I know this is the only place in the country--at least it's the only one I've seen (and I've seen a lot of Malta)--that has free wifi for customers. Really wonderful. And a pot of tea is only about 50 Maltese cents. So, next time you're in Valletta, you must stop in to Caffé Café and have a muffin and a pot of tea, and tell them that you learned about the place from me!

And I did get to Caffé Café and work on email and the Travel Log and looking for places to stay in England, in case the Air Malta query came back negative. But first, before I got to Caffé Café, while I was passing along the west side of St John's Co-Cathedral, I looked over to check the plaque that names the plaza/square right across from St John's there, because--like many street and plaza signs in Valletta--the name is given in English and Maltí both, and I wanted to see the Maltí for "Plaza" again because, at breakfat, another guest at the Asti and I had been talking about languages and words.

And being the klutz that I am, while looking at the plaza sign (the word, by the way, is pjazza), I took a tumble.

Now those of you who know me well have probably been wondering when I was going to do something seriously klutzy. And I probably hadn't mentioned that a couple of times, going up the stairs on the ship and at the Europa, I had tripped and fallen already, but I was going up and fell up with no real consequences to speak off. And I think I probably didn't mention that on the day of the Great Rain, I slipped and fell on slick pavement in Sliema--yes, in my Big Boy shoes which are usually so gripping--because the rain hadn't entirely stopped, and I had my backpack on my back and a couple of small bags of groceries in my hands--but I only went down on one knee, didn't break any of my groceries, and didn't hurt myself to speak of.

But today--

Well, in some places in Valletta, the rain run-off grates are large-ish flat squares, more or less flush with the street surface. But in other places, the rain grates are small and are about 3 inches below the level of the street or walkway. And that's what I stepped into, right foot. And I went down on both hands and, I think, both knees. Fortunately my backpack, with my laptop inside, was fully on my back and not hooked over one shoulder as I often carry it. And three kindly souls rushed right to me to help me up and ask if I was all right. I was able to put weight on my foot, though the pain when the ankle twisted wasn't piddly. I assured the two women who lingered to keep an eye on me that I would be all right, that I could walk on it, so they went on and I went on. Of course as time passed, especially as I sat still at Caffé Café, the more or less stationary ankle begin to feel a little worse, and it was harder to walk on when I left Caffé Café and went next-door to Hollywood Grocery to buy some lunch items. I had to gimp it like an old dude (which I keep telling some of you I am). The benches at the cathedral were full, so I went back to the Asti to eat there and to roll down my sock and take a look at the swelling. It wasn't discolored at that time, but it was swollen and not at all excited to go up and down stairs. So I had my lunch in my room at the Asti, finishing up Appointment with Death (a fun story but not terribly well-written) and resting a bit before I went back out again. I needed of course to get to the pay phone to call the Air Malta number (no dice--the hotel had no openings) and then to go back to Caffé Café and finish up email and try to find another place to stay. Gimping along.

Anyway, after an attempt to make a booking with Otel.com (which it kept refusing, telling me there was something wrong with my credit card--so I better not find a billing from Otel.com on my statement!), I finally ended up with a room at the place where I'm due on June 27th anyway. So I will be in London, not in Bath or Bristol (or even Hay-on-Wye), beginning this Thursday, somewhere near Hyde Park. For London the price is reasonable, and Susan says she has checked the hotel out on the Internet and liked what she saw--and the original booking was made through my travel agent, so let's hope it's a two-thumbs up kind of place. My home away from home in London for a while. And since I will already be there, not arriving there from somewhere else, or moving from one hotel to another, when Susan arrives on the 27th, I will be able to just go to the airport to meet her, baggage-less, meaning two of us to deal with only one person's luggage. Cool, no? Because we have to leave the airport by train and then switch to the Underground (or the Tube, as they call it) to get to the hotel. Susan checked taxi rates for a drive of the length involved--around 100 pounds, or $200. Yep, for one ride.

Oh, you're thinking, but didn't he promise us another photograph? Well, yes, I did: the ankle photograph. This is how it looks about 11 hours or so after the fall, and believe it or not, it's feeling better now. But be warned: it's not pretty.



I think walking on it today helped.

If things work out, I will probably visit one last time with the French college students Arnaud and Remi tomorrow evening. Arnaud emailed and said they would like to get together again before I leave. Maybe I won't be gimping quite so badly by then!

By the way, for those of you who like organ-based, slightly progressive rock music from the late '60s and early '70s, you can hardly do better than treat yourself to "Be Free" by Argent. Argent's big hits (later in the '70s) were "Hold Your Head Up" and "God Gave Rock 'n' Roll to You" (I think that's the title), and they were all right, but nowhere nearly as marvelous as "Be Free", which makes me happy as soon as the first organ notes start up. Rod Argent, the band's namesake, was also the organist and one of the two songwriters for the Zombies in the '60s. Their biggest songs were "She's Not There", "Tell Her No" and "Time of the Season". "Be Free" is just as good as those three songs. Dig it! (as we used to say.)

Two for the Price of One

June 16, 2007: To Valletta!

Tomorrow is Father's Day, but by the time I get this entry posted, it will be the day after Father's Day, so belated greetings and salutations to all you dads out there!

**

This morning, with the addition of several more mosquito bites, I had company for breakfast: two French college students from Lyon who are spending about a week and a half in Malta for what sounds like a week's crash course in English. They came to Gozo for the weekend since their classes don't start till Monday. They had been already been to some of the natural, as opposed to historic, sites of Gozo yesterday--the Azure Window and Ramla Bay--and asked me about what else I recommended they see. Today they were already planning to take the other ferry to Comino. They too had a really sweltering room and a problem with mosquitoes. That said, the folks who run the hostel were really nice and as accommodating as they could be, but I reckon I was just too Americanized to stay there.

I caught the 9:45 ferry back to Cirkewwa and had the pleasure of visiting with two ladies I ran into briefly on Thursday afternoon, who are staying with family on Gozo. They are good friends, both from Canada, who like to travel together: one single, one with a husband willing to let her take trips without him. It is the second one whose aunt (I think) lives on Gozo. Her mother was also along for the trip. Here are the four of them, snapped right outside the gates of Valletta, with a bit of the fortifications in the background:



The traveling buddies are the one on the right and the second one from the left; the other two are the aunt and mother, both in their 90s! Their trip into Valletta today was an outing for the older two ladies. We visited on the ferry, and then on the bus into Valletta. The entire trip, from Gozo to Valletta, including time waiting for the bus to begin its run, was two hours, owing to the Saturday traffic. The total distance covered, as the crow flies, is probably not more than 10 miles!

After bidding them farewell, I walked on, heavy backpack on back, to the Asti Guesthouse where I'll be staying until I leave for London on Thursday morning. Fortunately, the Asti isn't too far from the Valletta gates, where the buses finish their runs, so it wasn't a long walk for this burdened one. The Asti is on St Ursula Street, on a somewhat steep pedestrian block. Here, after you step through the front doors into the lobby, is the sight which greets you:



Nice, eh? I checked in with the proprietor, Mrs. Galea, and then went up to my room. The Asti is a relatively narrow, four-story building not far from St Catherine Church where I have gone to hear music several times. Because of its height it has several staircases and halls. For the first two nights I'll be in a double room, because that was the only one open on such short notice as I gave her. Then on Monday she'll move me to another room that will be open then. Mrs. Galea discounted the rate on the double room, since I am alone, even though I'm still taking up a larger room than I need. Very nice indeed.

This shot shows the Asti dining room, where breakfast is served from 8 to 9 each morning.



Mrs. Galea will bring me a pot of hot water big enough for me to make my oatmeal and have tea with. When I told her I had to be to the airport fairly early on Thursday, she recommended I leave a little earlier and catch the bus for 20 cents, instead of waiting thirty minutes or so and paying a taxi 5 or 6 lira. So she will give me a wake-up call on Thursday morning, to make sure I don't oversleep.

The Asti is a nice place, yes? It doesn't have A/C and guests share bathrooms in the hall, but because the building is flanked on both side by other buildings, providing insulation, and because the street is relatively narrow, allowing less direct sunlight, the room is not nearly as hot as the room on Gozo was. And the fan, mounted up near the ceiling, provides a nice breeze. Mrs. Galea did say, however, that it's best not to sleep with the balcony door open because there are mosquitoes in Valletta too. I suppose I didn't have a problem with them in Sliema because of the stiffer breeze right near the water.

Anyway, now I'm settled into my last of three accommodations in the nation of Malta; my ticket for London is ready; and I have to wait till Monday morning to find out if Air Malta did or did not secure me a reservation in Ealing, a London suburb. I called the number the staff in Gozo gave me, and the woman who answered the phone there gave me another number, but warned me that she didn't think anyone would be there on the weekend. That was indeed the case. So it will be Monday before I can plan my stay for June 21-27. Knock on wood for me.

After I got checked in, I headed off to Caffé Café, not far from St John's Co-Cathedral. Caffé Café is an Internet cafe more in the US sense--that is, it's a cafe (a real cafe with food, not just coffee, tea and snacks) that has wifi for customers to use. (Most Internet cafes here are banks of computers you can pay to use. No coffee. No tea.) I will try to get a photo of them for you next Monday or Tuesday. The owner/cook is a Maltese man, and the waitress is a Swedish woman, and it's pretty funny to listen to them tease each other. I give them high marks for being a classy operation. While there, I made the Travel Log posting for yesterday, and got a few emails answered, but I was working against the clock because they close at 1:30 on Saturday afternoon and it was 12:30 before I got there. So if you have an email off to me that didn't get answered yet, don't worry, though it will probably be Monday before I get connected again. (Caffé Café is closed on Sundays.)

After tea, Internet and a chocolate muffin, I went next door to the Hollywood Grocery. Hollywood, as regular readers might remember, has been one of my "homes away from home," a constant source of picnic lunch items (especially turkey!) for me on the days I've been in Valletta. Here is the grocery, with one of the proprietors. Her husband was up the street when I took the photo, so he missed out on his Internet fame. They're nice nice people:



Most of the rest of today I just roamed around Valletta, looking here and there, stopping to snack, looking at the shops or the buildings. I had a nice talk, while I was having my Hollywood lunch, with two women from South Africa, who had bought themselves a more standard "take-away" lunch than I had. We shared a plaza bench and talked about South Africa and their trip and my trip. They were interested to hear about how a cruise functioned, though one of them wasn't at all sure she would like being at open sea. I told her there are also Mediterranean cruises that stop at a different city every day for day-trips, and she said that sounded more to her liking. Later stopping for another snack and drink (remember, I only eat a little at a time, but I eat a bunch of different times a day), I had a conversation with an elderly Maltese man who wasn't particularly excited about Malta's being in the EU. He felt that the EU was getting a better deal than the Maltese were.

About an hour before sunset, after getting cleaned up and cooled off, I gathered up my can of tuna, the remainder of a bottled tea, and the remainder of the potato sticks, took my Agatha Christie book and a little skinny book by William Boyd called Protobiography, and went back out to find a spot to sit in the shade for my supper picnic. I sat on one of the fortification walls (maybe not the smartest idea for a guy whose allergies sometimes make him light-headed), had my little supper, read a bit, and looked off toward one of the towns south of here where they were setting off fireworks, even though it wasn't dark yet, for their festa (the celebration of the parish's patron saint). Then I walked around a bit more, then sat a while in one of the gardens and read some more, then walked some more and stumbled upon an orchestral concert at the Grand Master's Palace. The concert was inside the courtyard to the Palace, and was definitely a dress-up affair, but the Palace gates were open and the music was spilling out into the street, so I stood there a while with other people and just listened. I got into a conversation with two Maltese ladies about the concert, and one of them almost immediately asked if I was American. So we talked about the depth of Maltese history, and the things I had seen and enjoyed, and the things they were really proud of in Malta. A nice visit. And then it was time to get back to the Asti and start working on the Travel Log before the mosquitoes came out in numbers!

**

June 17, 2007: Alarme!

On Sunday mornings, Fort St Elmo, which once guarded the entrance to the Grand Harbour, is open to visitors: the rest of the week it's the police academy. A historical association provides re-enactments during at least part of the year, so that was my morning destination. I kind of hated to miss an unexpected last chance to hear music at St Catherine's, but I decided to go for the "new experience."

Fort St Elmo itself is not fully restored. Lack of funds, I suppose. You can see broken windowpanes and other signs of neglect. Perhaps as Malta's membership in the EU deepens, they will find money to refurbish it.

The re-enactment this morning, Alarme!, covered the brief period from 1798 to 1800 when Malta passed from the hands of the Order of St John, by then generally acknowledged by historians to be a corrupt order, into the hands of the revolutionary French army under the command on Napoleon Bonaparte, and then into British control. In 1798, Napoleon was not yet 30 and was not yet emperor. France was still a republic and was, I believe, at war with much of Europe. It had already taken over properties of the Order in territories under its control (I think that's what I heard the voice-over to say), leaving the Order in a weakened state. When France invaded Malta (on its way to Egypt), it was victorious fairly quickly, although just a few months after their conquest there was an unsuccessful Maltese rebellion. In this photo, the invading "French" advance through a haze of smoke, although I can't remember now if the smoke came from their own rifle fire or from the defenders' cannon.



In this shot, the French make an assault against resistors hiding out inside the building (which may have been supposed to represent a church):



For the life of me, I also can't remember if this scene was supposed to be during the original invasion or during the later rebellion. Nor did I ever get it completely clear (Was I just goofy this morning?) how much the Knights of the Order were involved in fighting against the French and how much it was the Maltese themselves who resisted, perhaps under knightly "officers" (which sort of was, I believe, how the Great Siege in 1565 went--there were far more Maltese fighting the Turks than actual knights).

During the brief rule of the French, education was opened to all children; titles of nobility were negated; and the power of the Church was lessened. But the French rule was brief. In 1800, the island was surrendered to the British, as re-enacted in this scene:



What's sort of amazing about something like this is to compare the timem-frame to the US. In 1800, John Adams was in his fourth year as president, and George Washington had only been dead a year. And for those of us with Texas backgrounds, it's even more unusual: Texas still belonged to Spain in 1800, and it would be more than 20 years before Moses and Stephen F. Austin got permission to enter Texas with English-speaking colonists.

The re-enactment was fun, if occasionally quite loud, and definitely worth the time and the 2 lira one contributes. Alarme! is only performed once a month; on the other Sundays a show called In Guardia takes place. So when you're next in Malta, plan to stop by Fort St Elmo on Sunday morning.

**

After lunch and a bit of reading back in my room at the Asti, I headed down to the ferry and went back over to Sliema. I wanted to drop off some books at the Europa for Arnaud and also to stop by the phone center to call my mom and use up the remaining time on the phone card I bought there. Mom told me it's been raining over and over again in Dallas, so I'm glad I'm not there to get the blame for it. She said it has rained every Sunday morning since they canceled the early service at her church for the summer! That might be a sign.

**

I bought an English Sunday newspaper later this afternoon--The Mail. I haven't looked at much of it yet, but I did read the article about Rod Stewart's third marriage and learned that he now has seven children, the oldest of whom is 41 or 42! After my supper on the wall again--tuna accompanied by McDonald's fries and tea (McDonald's tea is better than Burger King's, by the by)--I went into the Upper Barakka Gardens and sat down where I could look out across the Harbour to the "Three Cities". I browsed the magazine a while, and then asked the older couple sitting next to me on the bench which saint was being celebrated across the way where we could hear and see some fireworks. (St Catherine!) The woman immediately asked if I was an American, and the three of us talked for the next 30 minutes or so about the differences between Malta and the US, and what I liked about Malta, and so on. They were not happy about the state of the roads in Malta, a sentiment I think many tourists would agree with. After a bit, fireworks began going off in one or two other towns, to the west instead of the south, and the woman said that from now till the end of summer, there would be multiple festas in various towns every weekend. And apparently they had hoped to have a cup of tea, because she mentioned, with disappointment, that the kiosk in the Gardens closed. It was a very pleasant chat to end the day with: except of course that I was coming back to the Asti to get cleaned up and then sift through the day's photographs and work on the Travel Log, so my day wasn't quite ended yet!

Ggantija Temples! and a BIG Round of Applause for Air Malta

June 15, 2007

I've felt a little less out of sorts today, and a couple of times this afternoon and evening things were practically downright fun. But first to the historical sites:

Ggantija Temples: Ggantija is pronounced something like gee-GAHN-tee-uh and means what it sounds like: gigantic. The temples had pretty well been covered with dirt over the millennia, leaving a big mound with a big wall around it. The Maltese (or, more specifically, the Gozitans) thought whatever it was must have been built by giants. A British government official around 1820 did the earliest recovery work here, using prison labor (remember the old prison, from yesterday?) and paying the other expenses personally. In 1980 it was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (there are now a bunch of those sites in Malta). There are scaffoldings up at various places right now--though I don't know what they are doing--and the outer wall at one point is braced by t-bars.

There are two temples within this outer wall and, while I don't expect you to read this photo of a basic explanation of the place, I thought you might enjoy seeing the plan here, so you can sort of imagine how they're laid out:



The scholars use church architecture terms and say the bigger (and older) temple on the left has five apses (the clover-leaf-looking sections) and the right has four apses. Both temples have central aisles and, presumably, altars. Like maybe in this photo:



This shot was taken up the central aisle of the smaller temple (if I remember correctly). That one is currently blocked off so that you can't enter it: you have to stand at the beginning of the central aisle and look down it.



At the bigger temple you are allowed to walk down the central aisle, though not into the apses. This photo looks into the second apse on the left, in the bigger temple:



I took this one at the back, looking at the surrounding wall. My tour guide says that one of the rocks weighs 55 tons and is as big as a pickup truck. I wonder if this one, in the center, is that rock: it looked as big as anything else I saw.



These temples are the oldest of the Maltese temples, with first construction beginning about 5600 years ago, more than 1100 years before Khufu's Great Pyramid. The unification of Egypt into one, rather than two nations, is dated at around 5100 years ago, so this predates that. And full-blown writing, as opposed to what are apparently counting notations, dates to roughly 5000 years ago in both Sumer and Egypt. So these dudes in Malta were doing some heavy architectural work at a very early date. According to the information here, this is the oldest free-standing building in the world. Amazing to think about.

The explanatory material here says that Malta seems to have been inhabited from Sicily around 7000 years ago, so more than 1000 years passed before they began building these enormous buildings on Gozo and Malta, and their culture seems to have been confined to these two islands. The temple building, as I've probably mentioned earlier, continued until about 4500 years ago, when it fairly abruptly stopped. No one knows what happened or why the people may even have abandoned the islands. Cool mysteries to ponder!

After finishing up at Ggantija, I walked on down the road, not terribly far, to the Ta' Kola Windmill, which dates back almost 300 years. I can't remember now if it was the first windmill on the island or not--I think it was. I believe the material said that horse- or donkey-driven mills had been used earlier (and there are no rivers for water-powered mills.) I took some pictures inside, but they didn't really seem to be anything exceptional, so I won't include any today, except this one from outside. While I was waiting for the bus to go back to Victoria, the vegetable man came calling on the street. Apparently he has regular customers, because he wasn't going from door to door, but to specific houses. At first he was parked by the bus stop and I thought maybe he was simply going to sell right there, but he moved on down the street, passing a number of houses, before he stopped again to honk. Just before he left the bus stop, I remembered that Alek Lindus, a writer and photographer in Greece, had published photos just a few days ago of similar occurrences in Greece, and I thought I'd better snap a photo too. The seller was several houses away before I got this shot, using the mini-zoom on my camera. It turned out to be a bit of serendipity that the Ta' Kola Windmill is in the background. The woman in the foreground was cleaning/mopping her front sidewalk/curb. Since it's right out her front door, of course, that's not a bad thing at all to do, but I wonder how many Gozitans do so.



After visiting the two historical sites, I headed back into Victoria, had some lunch, and then went to do wifi, posting yesterday's happenings and answering email. I also did some searching for hotel or bed-and-breakfast possibilities in the event I made the flight change to go to England several days early. And as it turns out, I am!

After working at the wifi hotspot for quite a while, more than 2 hours, I think, I decided I would go back to Air Malta's Gozo location to find out the status of the June 21st flight, if plenty of seats were still available, etc. As it turned out, there were only two seats left in my "class" (economy, I think), but the price to transfer to one of those seats from the 27th had dropped from 41 Maltese lira (around $130) to only 26 Maltese lira, so I made the decision to go ahead and do the change. Even though I didn't have a solid booking in England yet (I haven't gotten a reply from a B&B I contacted, where I currently have a reservation for July), my browsing and searching at the hotspot gave me the idea that I would be able to find something--perhaps not in London, but in another town/city that I could explore before returning to London to meet Susan.

Well, one of the Air Malta guys mentioned that they offer special deals in London, which they have worked out with some of the hotels there. So we checked the cheapest one (which will be about $80 a night) on TripAdvisor.com, and the first review of the hotel that came up was posted just last month and gave it thumbs up. So he sent a query to them (he can't do the booking himself) to see if they have a room available for the nights I will need, and he also instructed the computer system to route the reply to Air Malta's location at the Malta airport, which is open on Saturdays and Sundays, since the reply should come in tomorrow, when the other locations are closed. Then he gave me a phone number to call to find out if the hotel is available. If it is, all I have to do is take the bus to the airport and reserve the booking with my credit card!

So it's a big round of applause for the guys at Air Malta, for really being friendly and going out of their way to help me. And if the room isn't available, he said they might make an alternate suggestion. And if neither of those possibilities pans out, then I will know and can either go back into hotels.com and make a booking online or just head to Bath and find a b&b. Normally I would be a little leery of heading off with no booking in advance, but later in the afternoon, when I visited the domed church of St John the Baptist in a little town called Xewkija, I got into a conversation with a young English couple when they asked me what time it was. I was able to get their pointers on the situation, and they said they thought I could easily just take the train or bus to Bath from Gatwick, go to the information center in town, and find a b&b with an open room. (And since tripadvisor.com lists 86 [!] b&b's in Bath, they are probably right! Oddly, though, tripadvisor.com didn't give phone numbers for the places they have rated, so I wrote down a couple of names.)

Aren't you tired of my travel arrangements?

When I left Xewkija, I walked on back into Victoria for no better reason than to walk and to be in a town where there's a little bit of signs of life. (In fact, earlier in the afternoon, in a little cafe near the bus terminus, I found--for the first time since leaving the US, I think--a PLAIN CAKE muffin! It was quite good.) Along the way, I snapped this photo, which I'm pretty sure was in the city limits of Victoria. And yes, the sign really does say:



The house or business next door had a sign offering fresh rabbits, chickens and eggs. I think I can hear some of you groaning all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

Then, while waiting for the bus back to Ghajnsielem (which goes on to the ferry to Malta and gets a lot of passengers), I got into a conversation with another young couple also waiting for the bus. They are Canadian and had spent part of the day riding rented bicycles from Victoria up to the northern coast where the swimming is supposed to be good and the view great. They said it was beautiful up there, though part of the ride was very steep. We talked for 40 minutes while we waited for the bus, then continued talking on the bus as well. Her grandmother is Maltese, and they are visiting Malta and staying with an aunt. They had already been to London (or Paris) on their way to Malta, and will be stopping in Paris for one night again on their way back to Canada. We also talked about music and how so many music stores are vanishing. The young man has been to Austin and thought that the center of town there was in some ways like Ottawa, where they live. And we talked about Toronto (they don't like it much) and the whole French language thing in Quebec, and about my traveling, and about some of their other travels. They were a charming duo, and it was quite a delight to spend time with them.

Well, it's getting on toward midnight, and tomorrow is my journey back to Malta and into Valletta, not for my first time, but for my first time with lodging there! So I guess I'd better close out, eh?

The Citadel at Victoria, Gozo (and the Ups and Downs of My Crazy Day)

June 14, 2007

Even though I only arrived on Gozo yesterday, it seems like much longer ago. Not so much, I think, because I had a busy day (although I did), as because my mood was so up and down, which--added to yesterday's disappointments--led me to make some changes to my schedule. But first a question:

Do gnats bite? Or do they excrete something on your skin? Or are they just so annoying that you feel like they're biting you? I've got a gnat problem--not a serious gnat problem, but a minor gnat problem--in my room here at the hostel. I guess we're far enough from the sea, although we can see it from the little rear garden and overlook, that the wind doesn't quite carry them away.

Something did bite me today, though I didn't discover it until after I showered a little while ago. (And given that I was out until almost nine taking an evening walk, it may not have bitten me much before I showered anyway.) Right on the right ankle, making it look rather inflamed, though it doesn't feel feverish, as mosquito bites often do.

Anyway, the sun woke me this morning fairly early, as it did most mornings at Sliema. But I suppose I had been at Sliema long enough to feel a sort of routine to things and have a sense of how the day was going to go, and that made it easier to roll over and sleep some more. Here I did a little rolling over and maybe a little drowsing some more, but my mind was a little too active--a little too concerned still about my accommodations here and the need (well, it sure felt like a need to me) to decide if I was really going to stay here for 13 days. So I finally got up, shaved and dressed by about 7:40 and wandered downstairs. A friendly woman named Teresa showed up immediately and asked if I was ready for breakfast. So that was a good start--having someone here and ready to "take care of the guest". She made me toast and heated water for my oatmeal and tea, and when I asked if it was all right if I heated water in the evening for a cup of tea, she told me I was free to use the kitchen for tea or even cooking if I wanted to. Again, a nice feeling.

After breakfast and clean-up (I mean, cleaning me up, not cleaning up dishes), I got on the bus and went into Victoria, the capital of Gozo. I roamed through a little mall I passed and bought a relatively fresh roll (yes, I know--it had been less than 90 minutes since breakfast and I was already hungry: but traveling is stressful and hunger-making) and a bottle of water. With the help of another tourist and the tourist information center, I found a wifi hotspot in Victoria as well. I hadn't brought my laptop with me, since I didn't know what I would find, but at least I knew where to go. From there I went on to the Citadel.

The Citadel is the high part of the city (yes, like the Acropolis) which was the fortified area, going back I'm not sure how far. Certainly the Knights built it up. If I've got my facts straight there was a successful Turkish raid on Gozo in 1551, and after the battle many of the citizens were taken into slavery. The island was mostly depopulated for a while. (This would have been 14 years before the Great Siege at Valletta in 1565, the last Turkish attempt to invade Malta or Gozo.) But it was a fortified area even earlier, I believe, and certainly a settled area.

In terms of a place to wander around in, the Citadel reminds me of Mdina on the island of Malta. Unlike Mdina, there are open spots in the Citadel, but I don't know if they are places where houses have fallen into ruin or if they were garden plots or something like that. But one truly has the feel of being in a walled medieval city because one pretty well is. There are 4 state-run museums in the Citadel, one each for: the old prison; natural history; archaeology; and folklore. The old prison is reminiscent in some ways of the Inquisitor's Palace in Vittoriosa, though it's a much more straightforward prison, unlike the Inquisitor's Palace which was a palacial residence, and a prison, and a court. Other than the limestone architecture itself, which this photo will give a sense of:



the coolest thing here is probably the prisoners' graffiti. The Order of St John often sent their own knights here for prison terms when they got too unruly, assaulting someone else or something like that. And the British used the prison too, once they took over the islands in 1800. At some point (and I'm sorry but I can't remember exactly which point), a new prison was added to the old prison, and it continued in use until the 1960s, I believe, even after the old prison was not used anymore. The natural history museum is built in part of one of them (maybe the new one), and it may be that other things in the Citadel are as well--I was tired today; I was stressed; and I saw too many museums for one day, so I'm not remembering as much as I might otherwise.

The first bit of graffiti I want to show you is a ship. The historians theorize that some prisoners might have added a mast for each year they served:



This next one is a ship too, and it's maybe my favorite of the shots I have for you today. It's very simply done, but how smoothly and quickly the lines of the carving seem to move: like the little boat is zipping across the water. Do you think the three sails/masts mean three years in prison?



This one is a hand. Just as the cave artists and the Native American rock artists "signed" walls or, perhaps, said "I was here" by printing or outlining a hand, some of the prisoners carved hands because they were illiterate and couldn't write their names. This one is definitely from the British period, whether that's an 1808 or an 1868.



And this photo is converted into a "negative", because the carving showed up better that way. It's possible that all the long scratched across the top signify the number of days he was in confinement. What's kind of interesting about this is that, at the bottom of those scratches, he seems to have written his name once; then under that his name occurs again, written more forcefully and deeply; and then under that are his initials L L. The last name pretty clearly looks like Luglio, which I'd guess is an Italian name. But I can't make out the first name. It may be abbreviated--like they used to sometimes write Robt instead of Robert. But whatever it's supposed to signify, I can't figure out, unless maybe it's Lino.



Well, that's enough for the old prison. The natural history museum and the folklore museum were nothing out of the ordinary, though the building that houses the latter--an old house--is very nice: staircases, arches, etc. And the former has a collection of butterflies, some of which are quite beautiful. (And yes, I know it's cruel.)

The museum of archaeology is much smaller than the museum in Valletta, but it's especially interesting pieces are some small sarcophaguses (although these were made so simply I'm not sure why they don't just call them coffins), except they housed not bodies, but the cremated remains of bodies. There was also at least one ceramic jar with cremated remains in it. More interesting yet was the skeleton found underneath a large ceramic jar which had been split in half in order to be long enough to cover the whole body. Scholars can't say why the person was buried in that fashion, apparently fairly near the shore, but one guess would be that he died on a ship and was taken ashore and buried quickly.

(I write too much, don't I?)

The Gozo Cathedral is quite attractive inside, though much smaller than St John's in Valletta and much less ornate, while still being quite decorative. One of the interesting features is that there are six small domes over six chapels along the side walls, but the dome one seems to see over the altar is actually a visual trick--a painting to look like a dome. Of course the trick only really works from near the entrance because it's painted with perspective and all. Once one is closer, it's clear that it's either a trick or a really weird dome! There are also tombstones in the floor here, with burials underneath, but they are not burials of knights, but of other prominent citizens.

There is a cathedral museum (one buys a ticket that lets one into both of them) with houses a lot of silver items which have belonged to the church and have been used by various bishops, etc. There's also a collection of paintings, some of them at least 300 years old, and this, which was once the bishop's carriage! (You knew I needed a "car" in here somewhere, yes?)



And here, if you look carefully into the opening where the bell is, is an actual, living bell-ringer!



**

Well, some of you are wondering about my funk which set in when I got a good look at my accommodations and got worse when I spent some time at the grocery store. So here's the news, such as it is: I was able to talk to the woman who owns and runs the guesthouse in Valletta which has been highly recommended (not only by one of my travel books, but also by a German couple I met the first time I attended the Sunday morning concert in Valletta) and have booked myself into it beginning on Saturday night. As it stands right now, I have only Saturday through Tuesday nights. If she gets an opening for Wednesday, then I may stay Wednesday as well, though she may not know until that day what the situation is. In the meantime I have an email into the hostel I am supposed to stay in on June 26th, the night before I leave for London, asking if that room is open on June 20th. If it is, then I will probably go ahead and make that booking. And if that comes through (and maybe even if it doesn't), then I may change my London flight from June 27th to June 21st. (I would go for June 20th, in which case I wouldn't have to worry about a room in Malta that night, but Air Malta told me that flight is almost booked up, and it would cost a good deal more to switch to it. Of course if it's Monday before I can check with them again, and there are still open seats, the price may drop. As it stands, the June 21st flight has a lot of open seats.) I also emailed this afternoon to one of the B&Bs I'm supposed to stay in in July, asking if they have at least two nights open in late June rather than mid-July. If they do, then I may visit Hay-on-Wye before meeting Susan in London on the 27th, instead of afterward. So the clay pigeons I'm juggling right now are: where will I stay on the night of June 20th; will I move up my flight to London; where will I stay once I get to England? Susan and I are spending three and a half days in London before we go on the bus tour, so I don't really need more days there--especially if I can get out into a smaller place (where I can walk around and see the sights without such crowds and traffic) and where the accommodations are not so exorbitant.

If all of this last minute changing around is making you scratch your head, I can only say a couple of things: 1] as nice as the people seem to be at the hostel here (when I actually see one of them, that is), the accommodations are just depressing the heck out of me; and 2] even if I can stay another week at the guesthouse in Valletta, I really don't need more time in Malta. I could spend it pleasantly enough (given that I'm staying in a decent place, that is), but why not move on to England?

At one point this afternoon I actually thought to myself, "You're doing everything you can to stay out of that hostel as long as you can." The Europa is not a first-rate hotel, but I didn't feel the need to stay away from it all day and just crawl back into it to sleep. I felt okay there. But this hostel--

Another thing that's interesting is this: now that I know that tomorrow is my last full day on Gozo, I can actually think to myself, "Hmm, I won't have time to see everything here that might be nice to see." And that's not a bad feeling. I wouldn't mind coming back here--as long as I've got a traveling companion or two. If some of you want to visit Malta and Gozo some time in the future, I wouldn't mind coming back here. If Arnaud and Remi want to come over here Sunday or Monday and want me to join them, I wouldn't mind doing that. But I can't stay in this room many more nights, and I don't want to: 1] take another chance on another place that will just depress me; or 2] cost me as much or almost as much as a room in London or York or Bath. There is, for example, a Kempenski hotel here, out on the western edge of the island (which is probably only about 6 miles away), and the rooms there can run (for a double, at least) around $300 a night!

So don't be too disappointed in me for wimping out on Gozo. I won't be having any long Coleridgean walks along the rural coasts of Gozo, as I had thought I would. As much as anything, I'm getting tired of doing all this by myself. If one of you were here in this little monastic cell with me, we could giggle about it, and make jokes about it, and sit and read our books in the tomb-like silence. But since none of you are here, I'm getting the heck out! Wish me luck on my impending arrangements for June 20th and for England. I like traveling--I really do. But I need company!

And the inevitable disclaimer: I may go out of email and travel log contact for a day or two. If I make it to Valletta before noon, I might be able to get to an Internet cafe I know there before it closes (at one, I think). Or I might find another Vodafone hotspot. If not, it may be Monday before I get back to the Internet cafe in Valletta. My monthly connection I bought in Sliema expired today, I think.

Oh, by the way, there's a peacock here at the hostel.

Gozo: Take One (or, Don't Get Worried)

June 13, 2007

Maybe it should be Friday the 13th, instead of Wednesday. But more on that below.

As this morning was my last morning in Sliema and on the big island of Malta (unless plans change: more on that below) (until, that is, I return for the last night before my flight to London), I went down to Stella's and did a hurried round of email and posting. I got June 12's Travel Log entry taken care of and most of my email before heading back to Europa for a quick bite of lunch, final packing, and checking out of the hotel to make the journey to Gozo.

The bus ride from Sliema to Cirkewwa (pronounced something like cheer-keh-oo-wah) took somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour. I did a bit of reading, but also a fair amount of looking out the window, since I hadn't covered most of this terrain before. A lot of the towns to the northwest of Sliema and St Julian's don't really have historical sites: they are more for sunbathing and sailing and so forth--great fun if you're in a group, not so much if you're on your own. And there is even some countryside up that direction, not unlike what I saw going to Marsaxlokk and Hagar Qim. Mellieha, near the northern end of the island, has some history, but after wearing myself out on the sluggish ride to Mdina the last time I went, I decided the Mellieha sites could wait until I was on Gozo. Easier, I figured, to take the ferry from Gozo than lumber along like a rhinoceros in a bus for 45 minutes.

So I got on the ferry at Cirkewwa, and we headed on over to Gozo. We passed Comino, which people go to mostly for the day, to swim and sunbathe, and which has a very small resident population. This is a shot from the Gozo ferry, looking over at Comino. The tower is called, I believe, Santa Marija Tower.



And here is a shot looking from the ferry across to the harbor as we approached and up onto the island. Note those high churches.



Before we go on, I'll give you a couple more shots of those churches. This one is from below, closer to the harbor, looking up this wide gully that must carry a lot of rainwater down to the sea (when it rains, that is). I have no idea how many people live in Ghajnsielem, but it can't be a lot--yet that is one big church. Notice how in this shot you can see through the 'windows' on the tower on the right. I'm guessing that must be the bell tower.



I left some of the building below this other church (on the left in the photo from the ferry), so you can see how it's up on at outcropping. I've walked past the other church close up (though I haven't been inside yet), but this one I've only seen from about this distance. I haven't got things situated here yet, in terms of the way streets run and all that. (Just like on Malta!) So even though I've passed not too far from this church, I'm not all that sure how to get to it.



Anyway, the first thing I needed to do, once I got off the ferry, was find the hostel, so I could get the 30 or 35 pound backpack off my back! I walked up the hill from the ferry, as the directions on the website stated, not sure I was going up the right hill until I asked a construction guy who told me it was just a little farther. It's a steep hill, but it wouldn't have been an inordinate climb after all the walking I've done the past month. But with that backpack loaded on my back, it was a job! I was sweating and probably very red-faced by the time I made it to the hostel. I was about 15 minutes later than the time range I had guessed at, when I emailed the hostel, and there was no one in the hostel office when I arrived. There was someone in another office on the grounds (a counseling center, maybe?) and he called for me, but couldn't ring anyone up. So I waited for 30 minutes or so till a woman showed up who works there in some capacity, but is clearly not the person who checks guests in, and she tried to find the man in question--Father George--for me. About 15 minutes later, she had tracked him down.

Father George is, apparently, a Catholic priest. I gather that retreats and things like that take place here, maybe under his guidance, and I'm not sure what else goes on here, in those offices that don't deal with hostel guests. It seems to be an odd mix of regular old hostel (I found it, after all, on hostels.com) and church retreat center. At one time it seems to have been a Catholic home for "poor and orphan boys" on the island, but a newer facility was built several decades ago to replace this one. Those of you who know me personally probably wish that I was more often at a loss for words. I don't quite know what to make of this place!

Father George showed me to a room and asked me if it would be all right. I said yes. (Here it is, after I had already unpacked to some degree.)



It has louvered windows that look out over the entrance courtyard and over the gully into the main bulk of Ghajnsielem , but no A/C. (Neither did Europe, you'll recall.) The ceiling is quite high--maybe 12 feet--and as you can perhaps tell from the photo, they are white-painted stucco. The bed (which I'm sitting on as I type) seems to be just as comfortable as the bed at the Europa. But there is no balcony over the Mediterranean (although there is a back garden area, with benches, that overlooks the Mediterranean from a distance of a half-mile maybe), and there is no TV, not even Italian TV. (There is a TV in the lobby, which a teenaged girl was watching later in the afternoon, and it was playing That '70s Show in English! But later this evening when I tried to turn it on, thinking it might be nice to watch whatever and do some reading, I couldn't get anything to show up. Maybe you have to pay it.)

Here's a shot of the bathroom.



Yep, the shower is right down the wall from the toilet and toilet paper dispenser, and there is no curtain between them (one just has to be careful not to dowse the TP), and there is no demarcation on the floor to separate the shower "area" from the rest of the bathroom. The floor slopes toward the shower corner, where the drain is, but the drain doesn't drain fast enough for water not to surround the toilet as you shower, unless you turn the water on and off between soaping up and rinsing off--which I started doing, believe me. I didn't want the water going under the door and right out into the room. Now as most of you know, I lived ten years in two different RVs, and I'm used to small and fairly primitive shower set-ups, but this one takes the cake. At least at the Europa, the shower area was about an inch lower than the rest of the floor, and there was a curtain between it and the rest of the bathroom.

But the accommodations themselves are not what leaves me, almost, speechless. (Hehehe.) Other than Father George and the two kids, I think I'm the only person here. (Now that may change by Friday night, but for the time being. . .) I sat out back in the garden a while and read and talked to George, who was remortaring a wall there. (He just said no when I asked if he'd like a hand.) When he was finished doing what he wanted to get done, he went in. When I went in a few minutes later, he was nowhere to be seen, and there were essentially no lights on anywhere in the lobby. The main front door is locked, and I think I probably can't get out of it. He had already showed me earlier how to get in, if the main front door is closed, coming through a side door on the street and wandering through the backrooms of the place till I come to the game-room. I assume I can get out the same way if I wanted to, although there doesn't seem to be any reason to. Neither Ghajnsielem nor Mgarr, where the ferry is, seem to have anything going on but a few restaurants and bars. I certainly expected more activity where the ferry docks. But apparently everyone either only spends the day here, or they get straight on a bus or into a cab and go to Marsalforn on the north side of the island, which is the most resort-y place here. (And it may be where I have to go to get wifi--if I don't have to go back to Malta proper! Wish me luck. I'm hoping there'll be something in Victoria which is only a few miles away.)

Anyway, I kind of wandered around back in the back and heard talking--either live or broadcast, I couldn't tell at first. It was broadcast, I'm pretty sure, and so maybe that is where George went. I hesitated to call out, since I don't really need anything, except maybe a little company and maybe some generic information about the island, beyond what's in the books. There is a room just around the little corner from mine, and I heard some kind of noise in there--maybe radio, maybe TV--so it may be that either the boy or the girl is staying in there, but again, I hesitated to knock, just to say, "Oh, I just wondered where everybody is."

Anyway, it's pretty dang strange. I'm just sort of here, in the room, working on the Travel Log, with the fan pointed right at me, and kind of wondering what the heck is this place? I definitely gather that they do some kind of community work, church work, something. But it's also supposed to be a hostel, that anyone can book into--and it's as dead and quiet as a closed book. I guess, in the big scheme of things, that's not so bad, but I mean, after all, I'm a guest here, I'm alone and new to the island, and I might like to chat with someone for a minute! And while I was chatting with George in the garden overlook, as he worked, I mentioned that, if I can find a telephone call center in town, I will likely check to see if one of a couple of places back on Malta has a single room vacancy and thus shorten my scheduled time here on Gozo. For one thing, I think the folks were right who suggested there's not enough to do, unless I get pretty serious about some long walks away from the towns. For another thing, I'm not sure if I can find enough food here to stay healthy and full! When I went to the "supermarket" down by the harbor, I almost went into a funk because I kept looking and looking and thinking, "There's nothing here I can eat but tuna, deli ham and cookies or chips." I finally found a container of tomato juice, but it's a one-liter container and I would have to refrigerate it after I opened it (which Father George might let me do.) I finally tracked down a couple of bottles of baby applesauce, which I may buy if I can't find something better in Victoria (the capital), which I plan to visit tomorrow. Hmmm. For supper tonight I had a can of tuna and one of those single-serving boxes of Rice Krispies, along with some water and a vitamin. And I've had some plain vanilla cream cookies just now as I worked on this posting.

It will be interesting to see what breakfast is. George told me that "we" have breakfast from 8 until 9 or so, but he didn't tell me who else would be there. Maybe "we" just means there are usually others there. I brought some single serving packets of oatmeal with me, which I can mix with hot water if there's not something that I can eat with breakfast.

So it's been an odd and interesting afternoon and evening. Maybe I will be able to get a single room back on Malta and cut my visit here short. But I'm afraid the available rooms may all be too pricey since we are coming into the high season. If nothing else, I told myself this afternoon, I can keep staying here and ride the ferry and the bus back to "civilization" every other day--if only to check email, post the Travel Log and buy some food. There are at least a number of things to do here that I can focus on for three or four days--and then maybe chalk up to "experience" my blunder in booking too many days on Gozo. It even occurred to me that I ought to call Air Malta and see if I can bump up my flight to England and get over there a little bit earlier, but I'm not sure I can afford to stay there for any longer than I've already booked.

Or who knows? Maybe I'll find a great little Internet place and a nice grocery in Victoria and things will look better tomorrow.

(PS: Don't get too worried. I'll write later about today, but things are looking up, not least because I got a booking in Valletta for next Monday and Tuesday nights (and maybe Wednesday, if there's a cancellation). Meeting the woman who fixed my breakfast this morning also helped, but basically the place I'm staying is just too strange. So I'll be here four more nights, but only 3 more full days--Friday, Saturday and Sunday--and on Monday I'll hightail it to Valletta. More with the next posting.)

More photos, less talk

June 12, 2007

This morning I had the pleasure of meeting the pharmacist at Stella Maris Pharmacy, a couple of blocks from the hotel. In Malta one doesn't buy vitamins, aspirin or sinus medicine at the grocery, but at the pharmacy or chemist. There are pharmacies scattered throughout the neighborhood, mostly small. Only the pharmacist herself was on duty at Stella Maris, and it may be that that is always the case. When I asked about multi-vitamins, she showed me the various types she had for sale, all arranged in glass-front cases, and gave me time to compare ingredients so I could find what was closest to what I've been taking. While I looked at labels, she served another customer who came in behind me. My accent made me an obvious foreigner, so she asked if I was on holiday. We talked a bit about my trip and about her brother, a doctor in South Carolina. She said he and his family had also lived in Texas and Nebraska before settling into SC and had been, all together, about a decade in the US. She was quite pleased that I have found much to enjoy in Malta. Next time you're in Sliema, be sure and stop by.

My previous trip to the chemist had been in search of eye drops. Then I visited a larger shop which had at least two employees, but even so, the woman who was showing me the two types of eye drops they carried took me to the pharmacist to let her look at what I had brought from the US for comparison to what I should buy here. No 45-minute waits to talk to a pharmacist!

I also spent some time this morning on the shore with my camera. Crabs mostly seem to scamper away when a human comes near, but this fellow didn't mind being photographed:



Another thing that's interesting about the shore here is how soft some of the rock is. There are a couple of outcroppings, not far from the hotel, which hardly even qualify as rock. You can scrape them up with the sole of your shoe. And yet the road and the seawall is built on top of them! This beautiful piece of rock art/graffiti gives an idea of how soft even the limestone is. Even in soft rock, this must have been a good bit of work. You can tell it once said Kristina, although it looks like someone decided to try and make it read St. Na.



This second bit, apparently just someone's initials, looks in this photograph as though the letters are raised up, but they aren't. This too is carved into the rock:



And here's a chunk of the raw rock which the waves have worn away. If you squint right, it almost looks like a photo shot out the window of an airplane flying over really rough terrain:



This is just a piece of broken glass, lying in the sand, but I found the color bright and rather charming.



Moss:



A bit later in the morning I walked up to Tigné Point again to the park to do my chin-ups and push-ups. After that, I sat for a bit and worked on two sketches, this time using a rollerball pen, as well as a pencil for shading. This one turned out better than the other, so here it is. Maybe my niece Camille will like it.



And how about some real plants? After lunch, I took a long walk around to the other side of Sliema to practice getting to the hostel where I'll spend my final night here, in a couple of weeks, before flying out for London. Coming back I roamed around through some streets I didn't know, and got lost for a while, and then finally ended up not at all far from my hotel, as I pressed on. Once or twice I saw street names I recognized, but either couldn't remember where they went to, or decided they didn't go where I wanted to go.

Anyway, about those plants: I stumbled across the Anglican Church in Sliema, a fairly small and attractively "English"-looking place. I'm trying to remember exactly how the sign was worded: I believe it said "The Anglican Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe." Even though Gibraltar is considered part of England, as far as I know, I guess they use the "Anglican" name since it's not exactly English soil, per se. After going inside the church to look around, I wandered around the outside to the back and--are you ready for those plants?--looked over the rear wall of the property and down and across into this little garden, tucked away in the middle of urban Malta. If one lived in a completely concreted and built-up area, it would be very nice to have access to this, wouldn't it?



I also splurged a bit, buying my next book even though I'm still reading Ghost Stories of Henry James. I had thought I would buy either of two Agatha Christie novels: one is set in Ancient Egypt (and is called, I think, Death Comes as an End) and the other is Murder at the Vicarage, which sounds like a great place for a murder mystery. But I ended up stumbling across Appointment with Death and deciding on it, because the murder takes place in Petra, an abandoned city in Jordan which is quite a tourist attraction and which I would like to visit. I've already read the first few chapters, and I think it will be good light reading, as a counterweight to Henry James who can be very heavy going. Right now I'm reading The Turn of the Screw, a novella from the James book. It's written in an incredibly convoluted style, but is quite interesting.

Tomorrow (as I write; but maybe today when/if I post) is my "move" to Gozo. Bear with me if there is a lapse in communication! But I hope there won't be.

Casa Rocca Piccola

June 11, 2007

When I arrived at Valletta this morning, a colorfully garbed middle-aged man had this machine playing while he solicited donations:



Functioning like a player piano, with a long sheaf of folded pages (rather than a roll) causing the music to be made, it had a couple of drums as well as a tune-playing thing. You can probably make out the doll-like figures standing front and center, under the Maltese cross on the upper register at the top. There was some kind of little engine near the wheel at the left end. The man cranked it up and then easily began to roll it to a new location. Later in the day I saw him inside the gates, a block or so into the city walls, still playing and holding out his tip jar. At that time I saw a man with a little boy, a toddler, who seemed a little unnerved by the noise it made.

As I made my way down Republic Street toward my main visit of the day, I came to where St John's Co-Cathedral and the Courts of Justice are on opposite sides of the street. And there was a bomb disposal van parked in front of the Courts. The seal on the side of the vehicle was military, not police, so it may be that such matters are always handled by the military here. But if there was any real "threat" going on, no one seemed too concerned by it. The street--which is mostly a pedestrian way at that point--was not blocked off at all, and I was practically at the vehicle before I even noticed what it was.

My "main" visit of the day today was to Casa Rocca Piccola. This is a private residence, built in the 16th century for one of the knights but long since owned by the de Piro family. The current owner is the 9th Marquis de Piro, who is also the 9th Baron of Budach. I don't know exactly what this means. Malta is some kind of a parliamentary republic: it has, at least, a parliament, a president and a prime minister. Does it also have a hereditary nobility? I'm not sure. When the barony was created, about 300 years ago, the Order of St John still controlled the island. What would have been the terms under which a priestly military ruling order would have created noble titles? You got me! Maybe one or two of you will Google the information up and put it in a comment for the rest of us to read. Because it's a private residence, there are only certain rooms one is allowed to enter, and then only on the guided tour. This means you don't really get to look around as long as you might like in the various rooms. I, for one, would have loved 15 minutes to browse the library where I glimpsed a lot of poetry volumes. But when you're in someone's home, they get to set the rules, yes?

Only one of the rooms still has the original flooring exposed: in the others it has been tiled over. This room is the Sala Grande (Great Hall or Great Room), which isn't actually terribly big, but has--the guide told us--the highest ceiling in the house. It looked to be about 15 feet high. Throughout the rooms we were allowed to enter were paintings, some of them of family members, some with religious significance, others simply paintings; old furniture, including one piece made in Malta in the 16th century; and various cases displaying objects from the family's (or Malta's?) history. Perhaps most interesting was a case containing several different chess sets in various designs.

One room features the bed upon which one of the baronesses gave birth to nine children, all of whom lived--quite an achievement in past centuries. It's considered a good luck object for that reason, and we were encouraged to touch it. An old crib, with a wooden frame, was also in this room. Another room is (was?) the family chapel. The guide told us that one of the younger sons in each generation was always urged into the priesthood. (And in fact, the Order of St John was essentially made up of younger sons of the nobility, who would not have inherited lands and titles from their fathers in the normal run of things.) The guide today mentioned that a man had to be at least fourth generation nobility in order to enter the Order.

Before we went into the library, the guide took us through the Archives, which contains books about the family's past. Some of the books in the cases were quite tall, with aged and exposed bindings. It would have been interesting to see inside some of them as well. The house also has a sedan chair, and the guide mentioned that being a sedan chair carrier--who might have been a Turkish or African slave--was considered a plum assignment, since they didn't usually have to carry the master very far, over to another knight's house, or sometimes from one place to another within the house!

The only room in which we were allowed to take photographs was the dining room, a newer addition to the house, full of windows and light, and therefore not requiring flash. Here is your place setting, and the little stand with swords and shield indicates whose place that is.



This photo looks down the length of part of the room, showing most of the table, the statue at one end, and a glimpse into the next room:



And this photo, looking at the same end of the room, but tilting up, shows (I think) the 8th Baron and Baroness, although it might be the 9th--the current ones. The 8th Baron & Baroness, when they would have been relatively young, were invited to Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and in one room there are photos on display of each of them at that time. The 8th Baron died in the '90s (or there wouldn't yet be a 9th!), but his widow is still alive. I believe the guide said she is 89, and she lives in the house with her son and daughter-in-law.



Perhaps more interesting that the palace itself, at least for me, was what's under the palace, part of which we also got to see. Under the palace, in the old days, were two cisterns (remember that Malta is a desert), and there are a number of passageways and staircases which, I suppose, were used for getting to and from the cisterns and doing various duties. The cisterns are included on the tour because they were converted in World War II into bomb shelters. The family emptied out the water and set up one of the cisterns for the family and their servants to use during air raids, and the other one was opened for up to 150 members of the public to hide out in. It was a little bit like being back in the Hypogeum or St Agatha's Catacombs walking through the passages and looking down into the former cisterns. Lots of rough limestone carving down there: very appealing in a troglodytic sort of way. When we came up the stairs out of the "underground", we came up into the family's courtyard, a lovely place surrounded on all sides by the house. It would have been a very peaceful place to while away an afternoon.

There were only two of us on the tour with the guide. The other was an elderly Maltese woman who said she was pretty sure the family also owns a residence in Mdina, although the tour guide (a fairly young woman, maybe even a high school student) wasn't sure about that.

The family also makes money from a restaurant in part of the house (which looked very nice) and from the gift shop where the tour begins, which sells books, jewelry, CDs and so forth, connected with the history of Malta.

**

After lunch I visited a photography exhibition at the Italian Institute of Culture (which may not be the exact name). The photographers were all Maltese, and this was the 40-something-th annual contest. Some of the photos were from other parts of the world (the photo of 3 young Buddhist monks probably was), but most seemed to be Maltese people or settings. There were some very well-done photos of older Maltese people, very expressive character studies, and some beautiful natural scenes. All of them were technically accomplished, though some of them seemed over-the-top to me: trying too hard to make something more beautiful than it really ought to be.

And yesterday or the day before I visited a couple of other exhibitions as well. One was all the work of one Maltese painter who apparently does mostly watercolor. Some of them were likewise too prettified, but they showed skill. Many of them had already sold. The other exhibition was at a school, formed in 1852. It seemed to be more or less what we would call a vocational school, except that the arts, not just technical fields, are offered. It was founded to assist young Maltese in preparing for the future. The first room of the exhibit featured paintings, mostly abstract or near-abstract. I say "near-abstract" because some of the works suggested to me Maltese street scenes: buildings, etc. The second and third rooms were life drawings--pencils and pastel crayons--mostly nudes, though a few were semi-nudes, much like the studies many artists do as they prepare to create a painting. They too showed a great deal of skill. There is certainly no lack of artistic talent in Malta.

**

Yikes! Today a group of 28 Austrian (or Australian?) girls with their 4 adult sponsors checked into the hotel. I hope they sleep late or get up very early in the morning, so that the breakfast room won't be swamped!

**

Feet: Today while riding on the bus to Valletta, I was reading some of the time, and so my head was tilted down, and at one point when I glanced aside from the book, I saw what seemed to be enormous feet. Over the next few minutes, I tried to slyly look a few more times. The man in question wasn't terribly big, though he was big-boned, I suppose. His sandals exposed most of his feet, which--when I studied them a little more--weren't all that big either. The thing was that, at a glance, they looked big because so much of the foot was toes! Perhaps a sixth or seventh (or a fifth?) of the whole length of his foot was the toes. I'm sure he could learn to write with them, and maybe even to play a toy piano! I promise you these were toes that could grace a Michelangelo statue.

St Catherine of Italy and the Windmill Brass

June 10, 2007

This morning the Windmill Brass performed at the Sunday morning concert at St Catherine of Italy Church. In case any of you have been wondering what the church looks like, here you go:



The Windmill Brass is a quartet formed of three English and one Maltese. The English seem to be husband, wife and daughter: they settled in Malta in 2005, near the northern end of the island, and the quartet came into being last year with the addition of the Maltese player. The woman I take to be the wife and mother was the introducer of music, if you will, and she mentioned that most composers write brass pieces for quintets. The quartet has to adapt, therefore, and sometimes one player or another has to do double-duty in their adaptations. For the concert today, they played pieces by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Gounod and other classical composers, as well as work by Gilbert & Sullivan, George Gershwin and the Beatles ("Lady Madonna"). St Catherine is a small place, and I imagine the stone walls add a lot to the resonance: the foursome filled the place with their music, making it sound as though more than four people were playing.

While the music played I worked on another sketch (and read a bit of Jewel of the Seven Stars), and after the concert a man asked to see what I had been working on. So I showed him and his wife the sketch, and they seemed to like it. (They didn't offer to buy it, though. Hehehe.) It's my not terribly accurate impression of looking from the left side of the chapel into the altar area. A bit of shape-and-pattern work, I suppose:



Today's performance will have been my last, I reckon, since the performances run on Sundays and Thursdays, and I will be on Gozo for my remaining Sundays and Thursdays in Malta. It's been very pleasant having such small-scale live performances to go to, while I've been in Malta. I hope I will find something similar in some other places as well.

**

St Catherine is right near the Upper Barakka Gardens where I snapped this photo of a memorial monument. It commemorates a doctor who died in 1850 while treating patients during a cholera outbreak. Various officers and other military men had the monument erected, so I assume he was treating soldiers and sailors. Since it can't be more than 157 years old, it's interesting how much erosion has taken place near the base of the monument and on the pillars at the top:



Also at the Upper Barakka was this noontime napper, enjoying the warm day in a time-honored fashion:



**

Today, 27 days after I arrived in Malta, I bought a map! So, you're thinking, is he nuts? Not entirely. My Rough Guide/Directions book has a number of small maps in it, and I have mostly been working with it as I have visited various sites here on the main island. But Gozo is more rural, with far fewer people, and should offer greater opportunities for longish walks in the countryside. In fact, the owner of the antique shop I visited yesterday told me that he had recently made a complete circuit of Gozo, staying as close to the coast as he could, and taking four days to do the entire walk. He said he spent about 7 hours each day walking. I don't know that I will do the complete circuit, but I would like to see some of the countryside on foot. Apparently the terrain of the coastline can be quite rugged, making it no simple matter to walk the island, even though it is not very large. The map I bought seems to show minor roads as well as major roads, along with important sites in the various areas, so it should come in handy. I may also, as odd as it may sound, visit the northern end of Malta, which I have not yet done, by taking the ferry from Gozo, which is quicker, I think, than taking the bus from here.

**

This plaque is on the facade of the Palazzo Parisio, which now contains the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hey, Napoleon slept here!



**

Along my way back to Sliema, walking again today, I took these two photos of parts of the fortification walls near the eastern (I think) edge of Floriana. Perhaps they make an interesting study in contrasts. This first one, blocking access to the highlevel of the wall, makes me think of East Berlin (even though I've never been to East Berlin):



And this one provides a nice splash of color. If you look carefully, you can see how the fortifications were built upon existing limestone outcroppings.



After one descends the slope that leads from Floriana down to Piet´ and Hamrun, one has to make a right turn and head toward the marina to head the shortest path, more or less, back to Sliema. This two gentlemen were spending their warm afternoon in a slightly more active way than the Barakka napper:



**

Today I've felt like I'm trying to fight off a sinus meltdown, making me wonder if the weather is about to change or if, maybe, all that rain last Monday made a bunch of deserty sorts of weeds blossom out. Wish me luck.

It's been one of the warmest days yet, and those of you in Texas will laugh that "quite warm" for Malta right now means 80 degrees, or thereabouts. It is sticky when it's warm and the wind isn't blowing, but nothing like as sticky as Dallas or Houston. July and August (by which time I won't be here) are considered quite warm, but I wonder how warm that is, given that so many buildings here, including my hotel, don't have air conditioning.

And being at sea level doesn't seem to be a boon for arthritis either: my finger joints are as tender as ever.

Catman

June 9, 2007

Happy birthday, Melanie! Actually Melanie's birthday is June 11, but this post won't go up until June 10th, so maybe Melanie will see it on her birthday. Perfect!

Production note: Don't forget that on June 13 I head for Gozo. I won't know my Internet/email situation there until I get there, so if I seem to drop out of contact, bear with me. Hopefully I'll find a wifi spot quickly and easily.

**

I keep forgetting to tell you about Catman. He looks to be maybe 40, with longish hair and one of those kind of biggish, squarish faces that women often seem to find attractive. For some reason he looks French or maybe Belgian, but I don't have the slightest idea where he's from. I've seen him maybe half a dozen times on the streets of Sliema, most often right down from the grocery store (probably because there are lots of pedestrians there), and he's always asking for "Money for the cats!" Does he work for an animal organization? I don't know. Is he a beggar who thinks that people will more likely give for cats than for him? I don't know. One day this week I heard him saying something to one passerby about going to heaven or hell, presumably based upon one's generosity toward "the cats".

**

I took a longish walk this morning, going toward St. Julian's, and then up a road I haven't walked up before, thinking I'd: 1) walk; 2) see some different sites; and 3) maybe visit the newsstand in St. Julian's. Well, of course, once I headed off up the road I hadn't walked on before and made a turn somewhere, I ended up getting lost, though I didn't know I was lost until I realized I was somewhere I had been before which was not at all near where I thought I was. So I was sort of lost and not lost all at once. Then I headed up another street, and another, and followed a "St Julian's" street sign, and hazarded a guess based on the name of a very attractive apartment building, and -- there I was: in St Julian's, in a place I recognized immediately. The peninsula that St Julian's and Sliema are on must not be as wide as I thought it was. As I was walking along I was taking photographs of things I thought might interest you. Here for example are two door-pulls. Is one of them also a knocker? I don't know. I didn't try it:



Not too much farther along this same street was another set of fish door-pulls, though they were a little more stylized and less realistic looking. A big fish is also on the Maltese lira coin, though it is the lampuki fish, which is apparently plentiful in these waters, and I don't know if these door-pulls are lampuki or not.

Many of the intersections feature, on one of the four corners, a statue of a saint, and given the way Maltese often drive, a saint may come in handy. Notice the mirror below and to the right of the saint: that's so drivers can see around the corner (though I'm not sure if it affects their actions). Many drivers, on these narrow streets upon which every corner has obstructed vision, honk as they near the intersection:



Remember that many of the houses have names. I thought you librarians and reading teachers might get a kick out of this one:



When I finally came out into a part of St. Julian's I recognized, just across the street from the harbor, I walked up along the street where there is a string of shops and so I noticed a sign I hadn't seen before, for an antique shop. It was a cool-looking building, so I walked up the hill to it, passing along the way a "Sisters of Mercy" school. This school overlooks a kind of dry creek bed, quite wide, with what looked like a small old ruined house in the bottom along with what may have been small fields for planting. On the other side of this gully is the enormous Le Meridien hotel I wrote about the other day.

The antique shop is on two floors in a building the owner told me is probably no more than 200 years old. Although Malta's history is quite old, St Julian's would have been quite a distance from Valletta and Vittoriosa and the fortified areas in the days of the knights. Just a village, the owner said. He had some beautiful old prints in the shop, as well as two simple but beautiful lace-vendors' boxes from the 19th century. They were made and used on the island, he said. He also had quite a large bookcase with glass doors in the shops which was made in Malta in the 19th century. The price tag on it was 2200 lira (something like $6700 or more), and it was marked SOLD! When you visit Malta, the shop is quite worth a visit:



After a good bit of wandering I headed back to the hotel for lunch and a bit of reading; then down to Stella's for tea, emailing and Internetting; then over to Books Plus for my next selection (Ghost Stories of Henry James). I also went to the phone center and called a bed and breakfast/hotel in Gibraltar which I think I will go visit while I am in Spain. I will need to call them again tomorrow or the next day and firm up a reservation.

**

I had a late afternoon walk down through the Independence Gardens, overlooking the harbor on the north side of Sliema, right about where it changes into St Julian's, I think. These are among the nicest gardens I have seen on the island: bricked walkways, lots of benches, shade and play areas for the kids. On this walk I took some photos too.

Now, come on! You knew I couldn't resist a cute little Morris Minor station wagon. You may not be able to tell from the photo, but the work around the rear doors and the wagon windows is wood:



This is a poster of San Gorg Preca who was canonized last Sunday in the Vatican. The poster is quite prominent in Malta, and the Maltese are very proud to have a Maltese saint.



This one cracks me up. Yes, the Maltese speak Maltí, but they also speak English, and you'd think the utility company would realize that its name might make folks cringe just a little:



This is either a beautifully redone older building or a brand-new one. Lovely in either case:



And this one kind of disturbs, though in a different way from enemalta. I saw this crane both Friday and Saturday evenings, and it gives me the willies. Those are, to all appearances, quite large--and therefore quite heavy--blocks of limestone, and I can't for the life of me see what is holding them in the crane, which is--by the way--angled out over the street!



And yes, this is a gas station: just a pull-over lane on the side of the main road along the harbor. There's another on the other side of the street and a bit farther along. There are, to be sure, gas stations with their own buildings and a little bit more space.



And this is St Julian's Tower. It's along the seawall promenade overlooking the sea. It was built in 1658 by order of the Grand Master of the Knights. Temptations is the kiosk on the near side of the photograph, and there is another kiosk on the far side, which you can perhaps see a bit of: that one, a coffee shop, seems to be the one that has the tables and chairs set up on the three sides of the tower from which you can see the water. I can't tell if they have actual usage of the building itself. If so, their access must be on the sea-side. It may be that the tower is simply closed up, with the cafe using the decking around it.

National War Museum: Remembering World War II

June 8, 2007

Get out the NERD posters: today at the National War Museum I actually took notes so that I could remember more clearly some of the things I wanted to let you know about.

The War Museum, not unlike many of Malta's museums, houses a really interesting collection in a building which needs some work. Unfortunately there is work going on at this museum at the moment, which put some of the exhibits off-limits. World War II is not a period of history which I've been terribly interested in, but the War Museum does a fine job of showcasing Malta's importance in the war, as well as the incredible amount of destruction that went on here. We in the United States here a fair amount about the "Battle of Britain", when German warplanes were conducting bombing raids over England for what must have seemed an eternity to the English people. We don't hear (at least I don't think I ever heard) about the bombing raids conducted against Malta at more or less the same time. This air war was the second "great siege" of Malta, after the Great Siege of 1565, when the Ottoman sultan was determined to conquer Malta and destroy the Order of St John.

The bombing strikes began on June 10, 1940 (this Sunday is the anniversary) at 6:55 a.m., not quite seven hours after Italy declared war on Great Britain at midnight. For the rest of 1940, Italy conducted the air strikes alone, though in January 1941 the German Luftwaffe became part of the attacks. The greatest intensity of the strikes continued through 1942 and sharply dropped off in 1943 and 1944. The Allied Forces invaded Italy by mid-1943, which was an immense help to the Maltese, of course. During the two and a half years that the strikes continued in their greatest intensities, the air raid sirens went off more than 3000 times, something like 3 or 4 times a day for two and a half years! 1 in 200 Maltese was killed; 1 in 70 was injured. The Axis planes dropped 16,000 tons of bombs, and 35,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. (Can you see why I needed to take notes?) You may recall a couple of photos I have posted previously which show the Grand Opera House, in ruins in Valletta. This photo (which I photographed) shows what the Opera House looked like after being bombed:



Imagine it: all of this destruction is on a small archipelago of islands which even today only has about 400,000 people. This simple placard in the museum will give an idea of the battle waged over such a tiny bit of soil in the middle of the Mediterranean:



At the beginning of this phase of the war in 1940, there were only four military airplanes on Malta for its defense. Of the four, only one survives--Faith. (And yes, two of the others were named Hope and Charity.) These were Gloster Gladiator fighters (a name which may mean something to Cary Phillips, Ron McDougle and Jack Lindus!) For years Faith was preserved in "skeleton" form, but in 1974 it was given a "skin" again. As you can see in this photo, the main hall of the museum is not wide enough for the wings to be attached, so what we have here is Faith's fuselage:



Apparently Malta's first real break against this onslaught didn't take place until the summer of 1942. Operation Pedestal involved 14 ships coming to break the siege and help the people and the military on Malta, but the ships were, of course, repeatedly attacked by bombers as they moved eastward through the Mediterranean. Only 5 of the 14 made it to harbor in Malta in August 1942.

By 1943 the Allies were preparing for the invasion of Sicily and Italy. This photo shows Gen. Eisenhower's Willys Jeep Husky which he used on the island before the invasion of Sicily:



Keeping with the transportation theme, here is a camouflaged motorcycle with sidecar:



There was only one sea attack on Malta during the war, in July 1941. An Italian "light flotilla" attacked Valletta, but the Royal Malta Artillery defeated it.

This display case shows some of the uniforms in use at the time:



One of the unusual small items on display in the various cases is a pack of envelopes, tied together, with a piece of shrapnel stuck into them. This survives from the first day of attack and was apparently in the military supply room in one of the towns.

There are also two smaller items in the museum, which I think must be enormously pleasing to those Maltese who take an interest in history. King George of England (signed George R.I.) awarded the George Cross to the Maltese people while the war was still being waged. As you might be able to make out, the letter reads: "To honour her brave people I award the George Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history." The Cross itself is in the case above the letter:



The other item, as displayed here in the museum, is an enlarged reprint of a political cartoon. Hitler, in the background, is shouting, "Haven't you two cleaned that up yet?" as an officer scrubs at Malta with a brush. The small box in front says "Blitz Powder"; the bucket with the smoking plane in it is labeled "Luftwaffe Spring Clean"; and there is an eraser labeled "Bomb Rubber" next to it. The cartoon is dated May 14th, 1942, just a month after the awarding of the George Cross, and the source is given as "Express Newspapers".



While the museum principally commemorates Malta's important role in World War II, there are a few items from the First World War as well, including this German torpedo which was fired in 1915 but did not explode. I paced it off as being somewhere between 22 and 25 feet long!



This last photo from the War Museum did not have an explanatory card with it. I suppose it is the carving of captured German soldiers on a cell-wall, giving--as it does--Germanic last names on the left and town names on the right. But I suppose it might have been done by an English-speaking jailer, since it is headed "P.O.W.", which presumes the English prisoner of war. Given the spacing, though, the POW might have been added later, so that it would not be forgotten what the list meant.



There was also an interesting map of Malta which had belonged to the Italian military. It was a relief map, three-dimensionally showing the elevations of the island. About half of the surface labeling had been worn away, leaving the upper part of the island unlabeled. It was interesting to see, on what remained, the Italian spellings of various town names, and one of them made me wonder about Marsaxlokk, the town with the fish market. While that name was printed in small letters on the map, above it was given the Italian name Marsa Scirocco. So I wonder if Marsaxlokk is a Maltese corruption of an earlier name acknowledging the African scirocco winds that Mediterranean people dread, or if perhaps the Italians had provided a sort of "sound alike" name which meant something to them, but had no meaning to the Maltese.

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I know, I know--you're tired of photos of houses and flats. But here's one more: a ruined home/flat/what-have-you in the middle, with two being lived in right on each side of it. This photo comes from the seaward end of Valletta's peninsula, not far from Fort St. Elmo, where the War Museum is. There are a number of blocks of buildings on this end of the peninsula which need a lot of repair.



At the other end of the spectrum is this advertising placard, on Tigné Point in Sliema, for a building of flats about to go up. I'm not sure how much you can make out in the photo: the floorplan shows two living areas (one of them combined with the kitchen); four bedrooms and three bathrooms. The flats "start at" 80,000 Maltese lira, which is roughly a quarter of a million dollars.



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The manager (owner?) of my local coffee shop Stella's explained to me that Thursday was not Independence Day: it was a commemoration of a day in the 1920s when some Maltese were beginning to protest against British rule. During a protest on June 7th, the British fired on the protesters (the manager wasn't sure exactly why) and four protesters were killed. The parade along Republic Street in Valletta was in honor of those deaths.

Hagar Qim and Mnajdra Temples

June 7, 2007

This is Arnaud (on the right) and Remi (on the left):



Both are interns, working in Malta this summer as part of their college programs at the University of Poitiers in France. Arnaud interns here at the hotel, so I have gotten to know him over the past few weeks as he has been on duty, usually at the front desk. He receives no pay for his work, but is given accommodations and 2 meals a day at the hotel. His degree program is in business management. Remi's program is in marketing. He works elsewhere and lives with a family not too far down the road from the hotel. He and Arnaud are good friends in France, so they have enjoyed being able to visit and stay in touch while they are both here. Remi and I just met today as the three of us took a trip across the island to the temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra.

Hagar Qim (pronounced something like AH-JAR EEM) and Mnajdra (here's a guess--mmNAYdrah) are only about 500 yards apart on a hillside overlooking the west coast of Malta. (Which, by the way, isn't all that far from the east coast. Malta is only 6 or 7 miles wide.) Both were built by the same culture that built the Hypogeum and the Tarxien temples, a culture that vanished (or, at the very least, stopped building) about 4500 years ago. The people had been building for more than 1000 years before that time, making these some of the oldest buildings in the world. To put it in comparative terms: this culture was done with its work a few decades before the Great Pyramid was built. They began their building at various sites before either the Sumerians or the Egyptians had invented writing. This photo shows what looks to me like the main entrance to Hagar Qim, but who knows how its people thought of it? If you let your eye roam on into the opening, you can see that it looks like a processional path.



As you can see, this is a much more wall-like building that what we see at Stonehenge, although the format is similar in places: two standing stones with a third stone laid over them horizontally. Does this mean there was cultural contact, or is it simply that this is a basic architectural form that predates the arch and so forth? Probably the latter, since the scholars say they have no way of linking this culture with anything preceding it or following it. There doesn't seem to have been outside influence on these early Maltese, nor do they seem to have influenced others. This shot looks to us like an altar, don't you think? Was it? Again, who knows? Notice the blending here of the megalithic (big rock) construction with the much smaller stones. The question is much the same as wit Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid: how'd they do that?



Unfortunately for simple tourists like Arnaud, Remi and me, the Malta authorities won't let you go inside these ruins anymore, unless you're on a special tour with a special guide. Wonder how much those cost? We had to do our looking and photo-taking from the outside.

Mnajdra is downhill from Hagar Qim and much closer to the water, although both are a good ways above the water. There is a sharp dropping-away below Mnajdra of I don't know how much: I didn't get close enough to look. Maybe 100 feet? I couldn't say. This photo may give you some sense of the "gap" between hillside above and water below. Here too you can see the mixture of large and small stones. That cluster in the upper right looks more Stonehenge-ish, don't you think?



This is the same cluster, I believe, shown much closer up.



You can see how the weather has worn the stones over 5000 years--it seems to be a fairly soft limestone--though the holes in the standing stone were presumably (at least I'm presuming) put there by the people, rather than worn through later. There is a larger hole at one point in Hagar Qim which the scholars call the "oracle hole," presuming that it was used for messages from the gods or what-have-you. Given the prominence of female statues from these sites, the people may have been listening for messages from the Great Mother! According to my Malta guidebook, there is an oracle hole at Mnajdra as well, though maybe it is somewhere inside, where we were not permitted to go. My guidebook, published in 2005, says nothing about being restricted to the outside of the temples and even displays a photograph of an altar which we did not see. So the restrictions must be fairly new.

Here's another photo showing what looks like a processional way. (The ropes and poles are, of course, modern!) Wish I could have gone inside. . .



The three of us had our picnic lunch--I had tuna and applesauce; they had sandwiches they bought from one of the seawall kiosks before we left Sliema--on a stone wall overlooking Mnajdra and the sea. It is definitely a pleasant place to sit, visit and eat. After eating and finishing up our time at Mnajdra, we headed across the slope overlooking the sea to the Congreve Memorial. It looks like a large tombstone, but Congreve--a British Governor of Malta--was actually buried at sea just off the coast here, so the marker is just a memorial marker.

Going on toward the southeast, we came to Hamrija Tower:



This is yet another of the Knights' defensive structures, built in the 17th century, I think, and affording quite a view of the sea to the west and south of here. I don't know what kind of communication system they used: whether they sent riders out with messages if a potentially enemy ship was spotted, or if perhaps there were watchtowers in a line of sight that employed mirrors or fires. I'd love to convert a building like this into my house and used bookstore.

After visiting the tower, we headed back up the slope, a fairly strenuous climb, and then back to the main road, down the main road to the Blue Grotto cut-off, then down the cut-off to a cluster of restaurants and shops where boats embark to show tourists the Blue Grotto. Remi has been on the trip on a previous occasion, and the boats weren't running today anyway, because the wind was so high it's dangerous for them to enter the grotto. We ordered Coca-Colas at one of the cafes (all of us had long since drunk all our water) and were promptly brought three Pepsis! After a bit of a rest for our feet, we climbed back up to the main road and walked a little farther along it to a very nice lookout point. This is not the Blue Grotto, which is a legitimate cave which the sea washes into, but it is still a nice view, don't you think?



And of course it's the perfect spot for creating stories about doomed sweethearts or something like that: yet another Lover's Leap!

We were all pretty tired, I think, by the time we got back to the hotel. I headed down the road to sit at Stella's cafe, drink tea and answer email and work on the Travel Log. But Stella's was closed! Today is a holiday--maybe Independence Day--and many of the stores were closed. At the Plaza, only McDonald's was open. So I had to sit on the seawall in the shade and try to do my Internetting. It was not terribly pleasant. The wind was roaring, blowing dirt and leaves and even a very light haze of sea spume on me and the computer with a good deal of regularity. So I was pretty quick about doing my major "business" of the day and closing down much more quickly than I normally would. Tomorrow I will have to try to catch up on what I didn't do today.

Yep, the wind is roaring again. It was pleasant enough on the west coast, walking up and down hills in the heat of the early afternoon, but it's quite unpleasant here at Sliema, with a little bit of a feeling of being salted! My fingers were actually getting sticky as I typed on the laptop keyboard, so I wiped it down once I got back to the hotel. No nice evening walk today; no last cup of tea on the seawall. Better to sit in the hotel room and look at the waves smashing the rocky shore across the street. If these waves aren't bigger than any I've seen so far, they are at least as big as any I've seen so far. Yesterday the Mediterranean was at least as smooth as a lake; today the waves are whitecapping like the Gulf of Mexico. But the temperature is pleasant, and the skies are blue, so those are both pluses!

St John's Co-Cathedral: A Second Visit

June 6, 2007

Today is the 63rd anniversary of D-Day, a horrific battle that fortunately led to the ending of an even more horrific government.

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St John's Co-Cathedral may have been the first "historic" site I visited after arriving in Malta a little over three weeks ago. But I got there not long before closing time and did not see everything. Besides, I wanted to see once more some of the things I did see the first time through, not least being Caravaggio's enormous painting of The Beheading of John the Baptist. This time I checked one of the books in the gift shop and found out that (presuming I'm remembering correctly) the painting is something like 360 cm by 520 cm, which would be something like 12 ft by 17 ft. Maybe I'm remembering the figures wrongly, because the painting certainly looks a good deal larger than that, if only judging by the size of the Oratory, where it is located. But then again, maybe I'm just not good at estimating. You'll have to find a Caravaggio book yourself, to have a look at the painting: photographing the painting is strictly not allowed.

In other parts of the church, one can take photographs, but without flash. Now if one is blessed with one of those complicated cameras with which one can set the exposure time, then one can get a decent photograph in low light by using a longer exposure time. But I am not blessed with such a camera (and probably couldn't figure it out if I were): the only setting on my camera which seems to turn the flash off is the "sports" setting, which takes photos very quickly. Why does this matter? Because I did indeed take some photos today and will put some of them here, but they will not look terribly good because I had to make the photo program on the computer compensate for the lack of light.

One of the things I wanted you to be able to see was the richly decorated tombstones which cover almost all of the cathedral floor space. Scenes like this one are not uncommon: the knights didn't seem to have any interest in pretending that death was anything but death:



The artwork is done in marble, sharply and beautifully: the haziness of the photograph makes the details look blurred. D.O.M. (the top line in the inscription here) is obviously some kind of conventional abbreviation that shows up on more than one tomb, but I don't know what Latin phrase it stands for. You can see that there is plenty of information included on the stone, for those who read Latin.

This one, with its cherubs, is more cheerful than the other, but note the skull and crossed bones at the top. When this motif was adopted by pirates, I don't know!



This painting of St George after he killed the Dragon is not at all dark and dingy (though there are plenty of paintings in the cathedral that are): the culprit again is the lighting. While we tend to associate St George with the English, the chapel in which this painting hangs was not for the English-speaking knights, but rather for the Spanish (or was it the Italians?)



In addition to the framed paintings which decorate the church, it is also loaded with murals painted directly onto the walls and ceilings. The main body of the church, the nave, is a barrel vault. Mattia Preti of Italy painted the vault, dividing it into 6 broad bands, or panels, of scenes. Each of the panels has a painting on the left side, as you face the altar; on the right; and directly overhead in the center. All of the scenes relate to the life of John the Baptist. I was able to get a photograph of a section of the vault, but it is so enormous and the photo taken from so far below that it didn't seem worth putting in: you simply can't tell enough about it.

This painted crucifix hangs in the passageway which leads from the nave to the Oratory, where the Caravaggio paintings are kept. It's essentially two-dimensional, of course, except for the thickness of the wood and seems to have some characteristics of Byzantine icons:



It's almost impossible to convey how ornately decorated this church is. There are some flat marble surfaces on the pillars in the nave which are simply marble surfaces, but almost every other surface in the church is decorated--painted or carved. You could look for hours, and in fact I spent about 90 minutes there today.

One of the things I had not seen on my first visit was the collection of enormous tapestries. There is a set of fairly narrow tapestries--maybe 6 feet wide and 15 to 20 feet high--each of which depicts one of the 12 apostles. Then there is another set, depicting scenes from the life of Christ, which are more or less square--15 to 20 feet on each side. The designer/artist was from Northern Europe--they are called the Flemish Tapestries. Together they form the largest complete set of tapestries in the world, according to the audio tour, and they are displayed in two different rooms at the church. One of these rooms also features the Choral Books: hymnals if you will, for the choir. They contain hand-painted illuminated illustrations and are bound with leather over wooden boards. Because of the poor condition of some of the bindings, you can actually see the boards and nails under the leather. But the pages--at least the pages the books are open too--are in very good condition and are quite beautiful. The books are something like 32 inches high! The other tapestry room has cases of priestly garments from the days of the knights. I learned that a chasuble is essentially a poncho.

There is also a hall of paintings, which I had missed on my earlier visit, but I don't recall any paintings here which wowed me. The crypt where several of the earlier Grand Masters to rule on Malta are buried is currently closed to tourists for preservation reasons. Rats! I would have loved to have seen that. Part (all?) of the crypt is underneath the altar and sanctuary at the front of the church.

The website is at http://www.stjohnscocathedral.com

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Here's a little photo for you readers of Acts of the Apostles: I'm not in Damascus, but this is indeed a street called Strait!



**

Today the weather was lovely--pleasant in the morning; warm once the sun was well up; cloudless, blue skies. The waves were still crashing this morning, but had calmed down this afternoon. The sun-bathers were out again, and some folks actually got into the water. This morning, as I walked from the hotel along the seawall, I also saw what was apparently a scuba-diving class or group swimming near where a kind of corner is formed as the shoreline juts out into another little peninsula.

And I'm sure you're all dying to know that I am almost finished reading Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders and today purchased my next book: an anthology of mummy stories called Return from the Dead. It contains, principally, Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars along with four shorter stories including two by Arthur Conan Doyle. According to the back of the book, Doyle's "The Ring of Thoth" was the inspiration for Boris Karloff's original The Mummy movie.

The Great Rain of 2007

June 5, 2007

Well, as it turns out, yesterday's rain was even more momentous than I gave it credit for. Photos of flooded streets ran in both of the local papers I looked at today, along with a good bit of data which I'll hope to remember correctly.

They measure rainfall in mm (millimetres) around here. It takes 25.4 mm to make one inch. Yesterday's rainfall totals varied from place to place, to be sure, but it was in the neighborhood of 57 to 58 mm--or more than two inches. Now that kind of thing happens in Dallas with some regularity, though not nearly as often in El Paso. But in Malta? Yesterday's rainfall did more than set a record for the day: yesterday's rainfall total was more than has ever been recorded for the whole month of June altogether! One article cited two different locations, with different record totals for June: in one location, the record was around 28 mm, less than half of yesterday's total. In the other, it was 34 or so, still only about 60% of yesterday's totals. And again, both of those totals are for the entire month of June. In one location, the record books go back 140 years! So it was quite an event. Add to that the much smaller rainfalls on Saturday and Sunday, and this June already has almost 70 mm of rain: something like 85 times a normal June total. According to the newspaper, a normal June here is 0.8 mm--less than 1 mm! Or about 3/100ths of an inch. Astonishing.

Today was a much nicer day: no rain, and the clouds eventually broke apart to give us a nice sunny day. Still cooler than normal, and still quite blustery, but much better than yesterday. The waves are still crashing several feet higher than usual, so this storm, which came out of Italy, is having quite an effect on the whole general area.

I spent today in Sliema, walking around a bit, reading, doing email and the blog, generally taking it like a retired person. I spent about an hour after lunch working on another pencil sketch, but I won't make you suffer through this one. Hehehe. I had also intended to give you a photo of the outside of the hotel and of St Julian's tower, about 3/4 mile down the seawall from here, but apparently when I thought I was taking the pictures, I was not pressing down hard enough on the button and only got a light reading! Peculiar, no? But here is a photo of a building that sits off on the end of another peninsula more or less north of here (the other direction from Valletta, anyway), and gives me the feeling that I ought to be in Greece:



But judging by the sign, which I don't believe you can make out in this photo, it's just a casino. I'm wondering if this is the one the Australian couple visited a couple of days ago and were very unimpressed by.

Here's another photo, from yesterday's visit to the Armoury. This shows some of the engraving on another cannon: I don't know if it's the name of the maker or not. It says Rotenberger, a good German name that ought to translate out to something like Man from Red Mountain:



I also did a bit of Internet research today to find out about the Maltese canonization: St. Gorg Preca was canonized on Sunday, along with 3 others from other nations. Pope Benedict made a bit of his address in Maltí, which must have really pleased the Maltese people gathered in Rome for the ceremony. From what I read St. Gorg Preca is considered second only to St. Paul in his importance to Christianity in Malta. As most of you probably know, St. Paul is credited with bringing Christianity to Malta in 60 CE, after being shipwrecked here on his way to Rome. (I think my visit to St. Paul's Grotto in Rabat must be on the Travel Log for something like May 18?) I was told that Preca is buried under the floor of one of the churches in Floriana, next to Valletta.

I've got an email query out to a small hotel in Córdoba where I might stay for a few days in August, and I made my first Spanish booking today: August 5-9 in Granada, in a small hotel recommended by Lonely Planet. I need to email my travel agent and ask her about my Eurail Pass: the timetable only lists major cities, and I'm hoping that doesn't mean that I can only use the pass for those places. Most of the places I want to go are reached by smaller trains. Wish me luck!

PS: Have I remembered to tell you about the fast foods that are here (McD*n*lds, etc.) or not?

The Palace Armoury and Awful Weather

June 4, 2007

Because today's weather has been so hideous (more below), it was a great day to be inside at the Grandmaster's Palace, in the Armoury. (Unfortunately, getting there wasn't so pleasant.) You may recall that I was disappointed in the State Rooms at the Grandmaster's Palace. The Armoury, on the other hand, deserves a visit. I spent at least an hour and a half there, and I didn't even listen to all of the informational "clips" on the audio tour or read all of the instructive placards. I made the mistake of coming too close to lunch time! After spending at least 45 minutes in one of the two galleries, I went and sat in the entrance hall to snack on my "morning coffee" cookies and drink some water. Thus replenished, I waded back into history.

The gallery I spent the most time in displays a great quantity of armor: helmets, cuirasses (breast- and backplates), leggings, and several full suits of armors, some of them richly engraved. One thing one learns, wandering through this gallery and listening to the audio device, is how armor changed over the centuries, sometimes for comfort and effectiveness, sometimes for style. There are the "close-helmets", which are probably the kind most Americans think of in association with armored horsemen. These helmets pretty well cover the entire head, but were, of course, hot and difficult to see out of:



Then there are helmets that are more like the modern idea of helmets: covering the top and parts of the sides of the head, but leaving the face open. Most of us probably imagine them when we think of the Spanish conquistadores in the Americas. Many of these had "combs", or crests, on the top: a protruding ridge (sort of like a rooster's comb). Some also had small "brims" around the edges. There were other helmets, similar to these, but equipped with an attachable face-covering made of several hinged pieces which could be clipped up to protect the face, or let down for cooling or better vision. (I forget the name of these.)

Then there is the armor itself. Just inside the entrance of this gallery are two suits of chain mail, an early form of the knight's armor. Solid rings were linked with open rings which were then riveted to form the suit. I found it remarkable that the mail looks sort of like thickly corded wool! (Is that an effect of rust, perhaps?)



As plate-armor developed, and given that the higher ranking knights had more money at their disposal, knights began to order richly engraved armor. Unfortunately, with the low light in the galleries and the reflective glare one gets using a flash, my photos of armor mostly didn't turn out well. This is a cropping of one of them, showing a section of engraved metal. This engraving runs along the ridge that ran vertically down the center of the breastplate:



One of the mini-lectures given on the audio tour provided a great summary of the Great Siege of 1565. The Knights of St John had been a thorn in the side of the Turks for a good while, and the Turkish sultan (I believe it was Suleiman) also wanted to capture Malta as a base from which to invade Sicily and Italy. Grandmaster Jean de Vallette Parisot (after whom Valletta is named) knew that the attack was coming and summoned all the knights who were away to return. But apparently they didn't all make it: when the Turkish fleet arrived, with 40,000 soldiers, only 500 knights were on the island, supported by 8500 Maltese fighters. The siege began on May 18, and the help promised by the viceroy in Sicily didn't arrive until September 8. Up until then, the knights and the locals were on their own. Amazingly, they held off the Turkish fleet, and then, with the Italian and Spanish reinforcements, defeated it. This was the last time the Turks tried an invasion in the western Mediterranean, although their attempts to spread farther into Europe by land did not come to an end until the 18th century.

The historical information at the Armoury also notes that the first half of the 16th century was the final heyday, as it were, of armored knights, but that breastplates were still in use as late as the Napoleonic Wars. I suppose this comes as a surprise to us Americans, whose battles with the French, the "Indians" and the British were fought unarmored. I think many of us get the idea that armor went out with the arrival of flintlocks and muskets. But in fact, as the Armoury points out, a number of the breastplates on display bear the dent-marks of proof-firing, when a new suit of armor was tested by firing a gun at it, and armor-makers had to adapt to the existence of guns by adding plating to armor to make it less susceptible to piercing.

At the rear of the armor gallery is the display, intended--I suppose--to give one a sense of what it might have been like to see a unit of knights ready for action:



There is also in this gallery a display case featuring weapons and two suits of armor captured by the knights from the Turks. The Turkish curved sword was there, and it was interesting to see the differences in the armor styles. Unfortunately the display case was too dark for my photo to be worth using.

The other gallery at the Armoury is the weapons gallery. I suppose there must be at least two or three hundred different weapons on display here, and maybe many more. I'm not good at making those sorts of estimates. There were quite a few flintlocks and muskets, as well as a number of pistols, many of them in pairs. In their later days, the knights often carried a pair of pistols as well as flintlocks. Some of the pistols are two feet long or more! Imagine trying to aim one of them while on horseback.

Just inside the entrance to this gallery were two or three cabinets displaying cross-bows, with explanations of how they worked. Many of them had such pressure that they had to be "loaded" using a lever to pull back the cord. Once loaded, of course, they could be fired quite easily:



This photo shows some of the "pole-arms" of the knights: a pole-arm is a weapon put on a pole! They were inspired apparently by farm instruments in the early days. These in the photo are not made of gold, by the way; the rich tone of those arms on the right is simply an effect of my having to increase the light in the photo to make it easier to see:



This gallery also includes quite a number of cannons, some of the small, some of them quite large. The flash, which I used with this shot, seems to have gone right up the muzzle of this one:



This photo, taken without flash, shows how elaborately decorated the knights' cannons could be: designed for destruction, but beautiful nonetheless:



And this is a close-up of some of the engraving:



One of the cannons had two fish on it, apparently formed to be handles for the cannon to be maneuvered by, and another had (I can't remember) lions or dragons on it.

Someone whose stomach wasn't as empty as mine and who simply had a more intense interest in hand-weapons than I do could have easily spent 3 hours in the Armoury. It really is a fascinating place. Tellingly, though, even as impressive and valuable as these displays are, the walls in the galleries (which are at least 15 feet high) readily show the need of upkeep: peeling paint, stains, etc. Hopefully the surge in tourism in Malta will bring more money along for the renewal of their public places. Almost every one of the buildings I have been in, even the truly wonderful ones like the National Museum of Archaeology, need interior work. Of all the historic sites I have been to only the Hypogeum and the Roman Villa have truly first-rate structures housing the historical treasures.

**

Today's weather has been awful--like a mid-April day in Dallas. (Or, as one of the locals said, "It's like November." He said he had never seen rain like this in June.) The first rain started about the time I left the hotel this morning, about 10:15. By the time I got to Valletta and entered the Armoury at the Grandmaster's Palace a little after 11, it was still raining, light and steady. By the time I left the Armoury about 12:45, the rain had actually stopped, but started up again, much more intensely, including thunder and lightning, at 1:45 and didn't stop until almost 4. Coming home from Valletta about 2:45, I was for the second day in a row in a bus driving through curb to curb water, but this time the water was moving, and the rain was still coming down. There were blocks' worth of standing or flowing water. Around 5 or so, the third rain came, and the fourth about 7:30. No evening walk today. And my poor "Malta hat" may never be the same: for one thing, the liner in the crest of the hat (scalp protection!) has come almost completely unglued. Straw just wasn't made for weather like this.

The waves are crashing and roaring; the water level on the beach is up several feet; and no one was tanning today.

Scenes from a fish market, and other tales

June 3, 2007

The Fish Market at Marsaxlokk

The famous fish market, at Marsaxlokk on the south coast, takes place on Sunday mornings and is only a small part of the market overall, which also includes fresh produce, handmade Maltese lace, typical flea market sorts of things (clothing, sunscreen and other sundries, collectibles), and even a couple of guys selling CDs of Maltese folk music. (Does every folk music in the world use the accordion?) The market is crowded with both tourists and locals--when I got on the bus to leave Marsaxlokk for Valletta, a number of folks got on with bags full of purchases.

Marsaxlokk, by the way, is pronounced something like mahr-sah-SHLOAK and is abbreviated on signs M'Xlokk. Xlokk may mean something, as there is also a town called Marsa. There were some nice-looking houses in Marsaxlokk, and we passed through a bit of countryside on the way there, though most of the route took us through town after town. Quite near Marsaxlokk is what appears to be a winery called Marsovin.

Some of you may may adore freshly caught fish; some of you may not. I suspect my brother-in-law Richard, my nephew Ross, and my nephew-in-law Randy would have loved to have been here.

Yep, octopus:



Yep, eels:



Big fillets, no? And as far as I can tell, that's a head in the rear left of the photo. I was told by two different men at the hotel (the cook and the Maltese-Australian guy) that these were probably swordfish fillets:



I call these "ugly fish":



And this sleek fellow looks almost like a small shark, doesn't he?



**

I didn't get as many good photographs of boats as I had hoped to. Some of the Maltese fishermen still paint their boats in traditional ways, some of which may eventually go back to the Phoenicians--the eyes on the prows, for example.

This one was up on the dock, making it easy to photograph. The brightly colored hulls are characteristic, and many--like this one--are wooden:



This one has horseshoes on the prow. I don't know if that's the name of the boat, or perhaps the fisherman's hometown, painted just below and to the right of the boat's number: Tal-Karmnu. I have gotten the impression from various signs and placards that tal means of or of the, but of course it's possible that there's more than one meaning for the word:



This shot looks out into the harbor a block or so south of the fish market and just about at the end of the rest of the market.



You can see there aren't slips for boats; they're just sort of parked in the water. I assume they use smaller boats to row to shore from their "parking spaces". I noticed this same set-up in St Julian's (San Giljan in Maltese) although there it seemed more out of place. St Julian's, quite a tourist hotspot, is completely urbanized, and so it felt sloppy to me to have boats anchored all over the place, with their spots marked by floating plastic bottles.

I took this photo in Marsaxlokk too, though it's another type of transportation. This pickup belonged to one of the men selling fresh produce. In case you can't make out the logo, this is a Land Rover pickup, from the mid-'60s maybe?



And this photo does not come from Marsaxlokk, but while we're on the subject of transportation, why not slide it in? I snapped this while taking a long walk home from Valletta this afternoon. I think I may have been in the town called Gzira. It looks to be about 40 or so years old as well, but it's either a Morris or an Austin pickup. (And I think those two may be the same company anyway.)



**

Here are a few neighborhood scenes. First I have two photos, both of which come from the town called Pietá, I think. (Sometimes I'm not at all sure which town I'm in.) These may give a much sharper idea than some of the earlier photos of how a maintained house or building will abut one in much worse shape. In this first one you may be able to read the sign in the building on the left--for sale or to let. Apparently this building has been recently redone and is set up for multiple residences or businesses. The building on the right, to say the least, needs work.



In this second photo, both buildings seem to be individual houses. The one on the right is in much better shape, though close up one can tell that it's probably been a while since the white paint job (especially on the balcony) was done. But the difference in their condition is still striking.



I took this photo simply because the name of the store amuses me. How could you resist shopping here? (When it's open of course.)



**

The streak continues! While last night I was able to sleep well (with ear plugs of course), and the shouters to the right were still on fairly good behavior, I seem to have new neighbors to the left. And they, true to form, came in just a while ago (about 8:30, say) and turned up their television so loud that it's rattling out their door into the hall and through my door. I can't imagine what circumstances would require such volume on such a tiny television set. Perhaps they are sitting on the balcony with the door closed and still want to hear the television! I'm really tired of tourists who can't behave like anyone else lives in the world. (Note: I finally went down to the front desk and asked the man on duty to call the room. He did, and the folks turned the TV down.)

Buildings? Buildings!

June 2, 2007

This afternoon (early morning California time) I talked to my sister Jane whose birthday is tomorrow. Happy birthday, Jane! She is looking forward to a good day, and since it's a Sunday, my brother-in-law doesn't even have to be at work. Y'all have a great day.

**

The weather today was odd: cloudy, still and warm this morning; giving way to cloudy, blustery, chilly and wet; giving way to drying with some break in the clouds, but still chilly. A longish shower during the "wet" time, though nothing like what I hear has been going on in Texas. A good day for staying close to the hotel, having tea at Stella's, reading and doing email and Internet.

**

I sat for a little while this morning in the park at Tignè Point and worked on this drawing until it began to sprinkle.



**

This photo will give you a bit of an idea how the condition of the houses can vary within any given block. Although here the variation is not as extreme as in some cases, you can see that the home in the middle has either been renovated or consistently maintained, whereas on each side the homes have allowed their stone to become stained and weathered.



In this photo, the second floor balcony (actually the first floor, they would say here) has a recent banister/fence around it and has nicely done flower pots. Likewise the balcony to the right has a very attractive and heavy stone fencing. The ground floors show obvious signs of fairly recent cleaning and tending, but the upper floors are weathered and stained.



This photo shows where a new house or business is being put into a space where, I presume, a previous structure has been torn down. You can see that limestone blocks, of that lovely creamy yellow, are going to be used in the new construction as well as cinderblocks, especially, it seems, on the side walls which will be hidden from view.



**

Was it only the English who used to name, rather than number, their homes, or was this a common practice in other European countries as well? Whether the influence comes from the period of English control, or dates back to the time of the Knights, one can see homes, especially on the side-streets away from the newer construction, with name-plaques as well as numbers (which I'm presuming are newer). While many of the house names are clearly English--St. Clair, Daisy, Clarence, and this one--



others show different linguistic backgrounds, some of which may be Maltese. But are these 19th century (or earlier) survivals, or the signs of more recent purchases by folks from other countries? I'm assuming, for example, that the house I saw in Rabat named "Vie en Rose" is a fairly recent naming. Many of these houses off the "main drag" are two-story, plus basement: nice-looking, sturdy-looking edifices. Mind you, they are not separate buildings with yards, but separate buildings built right up against their neighbors and right up to the sidewalk. Many have double sets of front-doors: that is, there is a double-door at the sidewalk with, about two feet back, a second double-door, which presumably leads directly into the house or to a staircase to a first-floor-above-ground dwelling. The thickness of those cinder-block and limestone walls helps to explain how they can stand to live so close to one another: there is at least some muffling of the city noise, once one is behind one's own doors.

**

Out-Bellowing the Bellowers: Yes, that's right. The Bellower has been bested. Early this morning (3 a.m.) I was wakened by the two young men who came in talking as loudly as New Yorkers discussing the Mets on a Manhattan street corner during rush hour. When it continued without abatement, I stepped out into the hall to see if they were sitting in the chairs grouped near the staircase. That's when I discovered they had moved into the room directly next to me (the room once home to the Bellower's parents) and were presumably the same guys who woke me up at 1:30 a.m. the day before. They were in their room, still talking as they needed to be heard over the roar of an approaching subway. So I knocked on the door. One of them opened the door, apologizing profusely, and they did actually quieten down. Then this morning, when I went down to breakfast, their "Do Not Disturb" tag was hanging on their door. Ah, if I were a crueler man I would have stood there and screamed bloody murder and banged on their door! (The "Do Not Disturb" placard was still hanging there when I returned to the hotel at noon to have my lunch.) Now they are awake, with the TV blaring. I hope I get to sleep all night tonight. Apparently I have been consigned to the Absolutely No Social Awareness At All wing of the hotel. Too many people here seem to think life is a screaming contest.

**

Of the newer hotels here, Le Meridien in St Julian's (San Giljan in Maltí) most impresses me. (There is also a Le Meridien, aka The Phoenician, just outside the gates of Valletta.) Instead of a boring high-rise block, this Le Meridien feels like two joined pieces, only one of which is loosely rectangular, the other having a sidewall which juts off at quite an obtuse angle. Le Meridien looks like a sequence of tall vertical units, most of which protrude from the core at different distances, creating a kind of wavy flow, instead of the flat outer surface so common to high-rise hotels. I suppose the architect was simply adapting the structure to an existing lot structure, but when you add to this staggered front the balconies on every outside room and their smoked glass sliding doors, pillars built onto the multiple corners, and a stucco or faux-stucco exterior, the overall effect is eye candy. And the hotel is, in fact, absolutely enormous. I can't imagine how many hundreds of rooms it must have.

Walking?

June 1, 2007

Pay day! A good feeling, even for a retiree. . .

**

I've been reading Dracula, and so naturally this derelict, locked-up mansion on the western (I think?) side of Rabat reminded me of Carfax, one of the houses Dracula buys in the London area to use as a base. You may think of 1313 Mockingbird and The Munsters, if you prefer.



**

I took a middle-length walk from the bus terminus in Rabat, just outside the walls of Mdina, along the main road that leads more or less west (as far as I can tell) and out into the countryside. Because this road, unlike so many others, is a no-parking road, the traffic can move more freely (read: faster) which can make for a pretty scary experience for a pedestrian. The sidewalks are narrow, mostly 30 inches or so, I suppose, though occasionally dropping back to about 18 inches--and that's including the curb. When a car going 30 mph or so passes by only 18 or 20 inches away, it's kind of unnerving. When one of them honks, or squeals the tires, in between the high stone or concrete walls of the buildings on both sides, that's kind of unnerving too. Partly I walked this way because I just wanted to do some walking, and partly I wanted to see the Dominican monastery my guidebook showed as being on the road. According to the book, the monastery only has about 20 monks left. I don't think I saw any of them, though I did see some people coming and going. This photo shows the columns and arches along one side of the courtyard:



I couldn't help thinking that this courtyard and its colonnades would be a great place to sit, read and drink tea. I think the brothers ought to open up a coffee shop to soothe the weary tourist and bring in a little extra money. Places to sit and read outside (or inside, for that matter) are rare in Malta. The parks--often called gardens--are not plentiful and are not generally large. The trees in the gardens are often relatively small (owing, perhaps, to the lack of rainfall) and, frustratingly, are often not positioned to provide shade for the benches! The best shade along the seawall in Sliema, for example, comes in the last hour or so of daylight, when the highrises across the street (one of which I'm staying in, of course) block the setting sun.

Three of the four upper walls overlooking the monastery courtyard displayed plaques like these, apparently designed as calendars or some other sort of astronomical observation. Perhaps one of you will recognize what this is and tell us all by leaving a comment:



I was also curious about the significance of the years listed at the bottom of the larger plaque.

This photo comes from the front facade of the church next door, which I presume belongs to the monastery, which makes me in turn presume that the saint here is Dominic. You will notice that pigeons don't even respect saints!



**

It wasn't terribly far beyond the monastery when I came to the edge of Rabat and walked for a while in the countryside. Here there were no sidewalks, which made the walking a little more nerve-wracking. I couldn't help but feel that the drivers, who so often drive right down the middle of the street if there is no oncoming traffic, were deliberately hewing close to the shoulder, simply to irritate the crazy pedestrian--me. I passed stone walls, some in better repair than others, and I could hear sheep bleating behind one of them. I don't know if these sheep, or another group of animals somewhere else, provided me with such a strong aroma of poop at one point. There was no open "range" that I could see--everything was broken up into walled-off fields. Just about at the point I stopped and turned around, I found this lovely little fixer-upper for any of you who are handy with home repair:



**

Back in the city I had a little lunch and then roamed around in Mdina again. It's such a beautiful and tiny place. As I mentioned to my sister in an email, Valletta is very much what you expect an old European city to be: tall buildings, narrow streets, shops on the ground floors with dwellings above them. And I like Valletta very much. But Mdina is truly like stepping into the past or onto another planet. It is all of a piece--the limestone walls that surround it, the limestone (or faux-limestone?) walls of the "blocks" within it. If you didn't know better, you might think it was an elaborate and expensive movie set. There aren't, as far as I can tell, individual homes in the sense that we think of it or even, as in Valletta, separate buildings in different styles which share side walls: there are, instead, big blocks with continuous outer walls, and I gather that individuals own their own "chunk" of it. So that, for example, one chunk may be beautifully repaired and restored and another chunk adjoining/attached to it may need some work (while still looking ten times better than a lot of the buildings in Sliema). Mostly it looks really cool. The residents are allowed to drive their cars in, but not the tourists, so there is mostly foot traffic.

One of the shops I roamed in for a bit today is Mdina Glass. It sells art glass--decorative glass--vases and bowls and dishes of all different colors; clocks whose glass faces display Maltese scenes: glass "canvases", as it were, of Madonna and Child. Mostly I wanted to see the inside of the shop which itself would make (and probably once did make) a beautiful home: two floors connected by a triple-turning staircase; big windows letting in lots of light; high ceilings; and the natural insulating capabilities of limestone.

**

Today's trip to Mdina and Rabat, my third, was the first on which I have gone "directly" to the two cities, rather than stopping and getting off the bus somewhere else along the way. It was not exactly a marvelous experience. Because of the state of Malta's roads, and the necessity of a bus to make frequent stops, and probably because the bus was taking a weaving route to cover a certain number of cities, the ride to Mdina took 50-55 minutes, and the distance--I would guess, as the crow flies--is probably no more than eight miles. The return trip was shorter--only 45 minutes!--but I spent 30 of those minutes standing because a tour group of German high school students and sponsors (I think I heard the leader tell the bus driver there were 22 of them) were on the bus as well, making it more than normally packed. And in case you are wondering, German high school students don't offer their seats to standing adults. (Nor, for that matter, despite the 200+ years of Malta being ruled by knights, does chivalry seem to be alive among adult men either. I've let women take my seat, but the practice doesn't seem common.) If one is sitting, one can read or watch the towns and countryside passing by; if one is standing and lurching, it's pretty dang hard to read, and the angle that one sees out the windows doesn't offer much of a view either.

**

My Maltese-Australian friends have booked themselves a week in Tunis. They talked to a travel office that offered a package including airfare, one week's accommodation in a resort with golf course, and two meals a day for 140 Maltese lira a piece. At 4 Australian dollars to one lira, they'll be spending a bit more $1000 Australian for the week, but for a couple that's not bad at all. They'll be doing this the first week I'll be in Gozo.

**

June 1st and 2nd are the birthdays of three of my cousins: Cheryl, Holly and Danell. I hope you all have great birthdays and a great year to come. (My sister Jane's birthday is Sunday, but don't tell her I told you.)

Cheerio!

Music at St Catherine of Italy and HMV

May 31, 2007

I've ridden the shuttle ferry from Sliema to Valletta several times now and walked up into (or down from) the city by passing through this arched gateway, but this is the first time I've consciously noticed the dating plaque on the surface inside:



Yep, it says 1568, only three years after the "Great Siege" when the Knights of St John and reinforcements from the mainland fought off an Ottoman fleet.

When one walks up toward the center of Valletta from the dock where the shuttle comes and goes, one of the streets that's easy to use is St John Street, or Triq San Gwann (I think I spelled that correctly). As one climbs this street from sea level where the dock is, up to the hillcrest in the center of the city, one passes the Hollywood Market, which I've mentioned before; Caffé Café, where I've had tea once; and this small record shop:



The Antonio D'Amato Record Shop has been in existence (whether in this exact spot or not, I don't know) since 1885, as the engraved stone on the entrance floor notes. It warms my heart to see a real record store like this, even if, once one is inside, most of the "pop" is the same old radio hoohah once seems to hear everywhere in the world. For a store of its size, it has a fairly sizeable classical collection, a great deal of it on the "budget" Naxos label, and on some out of the way shelves to the left of the entrance, I saw the tell-tale spines of LPs! The shop also sells DVDs, which is probably essential for its business nowadays. I took a photo of the front of the store, below these signs, but once again my camera program is balking at downloading the image. It shows the label at the top of the main window which says HMV & MGM Records. I have to wonder how old that label must be if MGM Records would be considered a draw to customers!

**

I attended another performance at St Catherine of Italy after lunch. Marita Bezzina, a Maltese operatic soprano, sang 10 different composers' settings for "Ave Maria," accompanied by Michelle Cachia Castelletti on harpsichord. Castelletti was supposed to play the beautiful small organ there in the church, but the hostess said it was not functioning properly: one of the stops was not working, she presumed because the variations in the weather here in the past few days.

It was a lovely concert, featuring both the -- to me -- most famous "Ave Maria" settings, those of Schubert and Bach/Gounod, but also containing settings by Verdi, Fenech (a Maltese composer), and Mascagni, whose name I didn't recognize, but whose tune I did. After the performance I asked Bezzina if it has been performed with another set of lyrics, and she told me no, but that it comes from Mascagni's opera Il cavalieri rusticane (I swear I've misspelled that). I'm pretty sure a performance of it is on the Movies Go to the Opera CD from the early '90s, and I'd imagine quite a few of you would recognize it too. It's quite a remarkably lovely tune. Bezzina said it's often performed by orchestras as an instrumental piece.

While listening to the concert, I worked on this sketch, inspired by a section of the fortifications down by the shuttle dock. You will note that I have wrongly arched the church roof seen through the window! Ah, me, perspective!



The ugly mess on the row of stones under the window is my attempt to reflect the unusual weathering on many of the stones here, which makes them look somewhat like the coral the rock may once have been.

**

I had a post-concert snack in the Upper Barakka Gardens and got into a conversation with a mother and grown son from one of the suburbs of London. I gathered that this is their first visit to Malta, unlike most of the English I have talked to here. They are quite enjoying themselves and recommended that I take one of the harbour tours, which I have not done so far. The mother also mentioned vacations to the Channel Islands with her children when they were young. Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, is on my itinerary for July as I go from England to France.

**

A pleasant (though very small) surprise when I checked my credit card billing this afternoon: the dollar has inched up (actually it's more like it's millimetered up) against the Maltese lira since I arrived two weeks ago. My bill for my final 15 days here at the Europa, which I'd imagined would be something like $383-384 when converted from lira to dollars, was actually a little under $381. Ah, the small joys of retirees!

**

How the other 1/10th of 1 percent live:



**

I have now been in Malta longer than I have been anywhere except the United States. I was in Canada for a week in '76; the Bahamas for a week in '79; Germany and Austria for 6 or 7 days in '86 (sponsoring high school students!); and my visits to Mexico have been only just over the border, and never for a night. The cruise was 16 nights, and tonight is my 18th night in Malta. I wonder how to "place" the cruise: some of the time we were in US waters; sometimes in Portuguese, Spanish, French or Italian waters; and some of the time in international waters. What do I call it: dislanded? After Texas, I have spent the most time in Arizona (where I lived for one school year and which I have visited several times). After that, it's probably California, Florida, and New Mexico in a pretty tight cluster. And then, I reckon, it's Malta. An odd thought.