MALTA
December 07, 2016
to
December 12, 2016
Bob Francescone
2016-12-07
– WEDNESDAY- ISTANBUL-MALTA – Part One
Victoria
can’t have too many secrets left, judging from the displays in Ataturk Havilimani.
Boarding passes,
passports, backpacks, rollers, strollers, and mobiles in hand, real women with
significantly more covering, up to and including some in full burqa, pass below
the huge screens glowing with air-brushed, uplifted Dolly Parts and vapid faces.
Some people I know dismiss Islam because, they say, 'it disrespects women’. Valuing
women based on how well they fill D-cups doesn’t seem very respectful to me,
but, then, I like women, especially women who like themselves. The women in my
life enhance it. Because of them, my cup runneth over. Theirs don’t have to.
It’s not a long
drop from my high horse at Victoria's to the tiny table wedged between 'Starbucks'
and 'Sandviç'. Dennis goes for a cheese and veggie sandviç on whole wheat.
Olive paste and cheese spill out of the top of my pastry. Cappuccino
contributes caffeine. It’s 06:45 and we've been up for 2 hours. A jolt is
required.
Voyeurism
triumphs over early a.m. drowsiness. Several tall African men float by, floor
length robes billowing a pathway through the crowds. I'm guessing West African,
and Nigerian, from their embroidered pill-box hats. There are a LOT of Chinese
traveling, but then there are a LOT of Chinese. Period. The couple camped next
to us are from Canton, and now have a story of the funny looking foreigner who
spoke to them in Mandarin. In Istanbul.
My favorite sighting
is a venerable dowager, upholstered in black, clutching her purse, and
careening stone-faced, and accompanied by whistles, through the crowds on a
motorized wheel chair. Like another Victoria, She Is Not Pleased. I don’t
detect a funny story in the making for the folks back in her village.
'We did buy
PLANE tickets, right?’ That question permeates the bus to Turkish Flight 1369.
It has turned away from the tarmac and onto a narrow road. it’s paved, usually a
good sign but then the road narrows even more, as does my optimism. We go on and on and on. Two-way traffic becomes
a theory only. I try to remember if my US passport will get me into Bulgaria,
clearly not far off. But, we round a bend and those specks on the horizon are
planes, and presumably not in Bulgaria. We drive through the Bargain Basement
of Ataturk Havalimani, passing up Onur Airways, AtlasGlobal, and another
airliner, its name a jumble of consonants.
Turkish Airlines
Flight 1369 is open, ready, and crowded. Three of the passengers are nuns, in
full Nunsense drag, sack cloth habits, veils, and, gasp, full wimples, aka
hijabs on steroids. No one screams for the anti-terrorism troops, the color of their
European faces changing terrorists into Road Company Mother…. sorry, Saint
Mother Theresa’s.
Leather works
for the comfy seats, not so well for the scrambled eggs.
We fly west for two hours, gaining two time zones and 15 (Fahrenheit)
degrees, landing 15 minutes after we left and in early Spring, two full seasons
from late autumnal Istanbul. Who says time travel is a fiction.
2016-12-07
– WEDNESDAY- ISTANBUL-MALTA – Part Two
A guitar
case? The NUN has a GUITAR? Maybe it’s really an assault weapon in that case.
Could be. She's wearing a head covering. Oh, yeah, she's White and Christian.
Can’t be a terrorist. Think about the Holocaust and we might come to different
conclusion.
This nun is
kind. She does not whip out her guitar and terrorize our ears with treacly Nun
Music.
This part of
Malta is seriously over-developed. It is one big traffic jam. Bus service is
easy and comprehensive, and slow. Think turtle on Valium. Fatigue and
inattention help us get off Bus Number One before we should have and off Bus
Number after we should have. It’s only a short walk back along the pretty
harbor to Tony's Bar, the landmark in our host's almost perfect directions.
Young
Eugenio welcomes us to his spacious---make that huge---3-bedroom apartment,
offers to share his lunch with us, sorts out our wad of keys, gives us a run
through of bathroom, washing machine, kitchen, shows us how to use the
intimidatingly high tech coffee machine, introduces David, the other guest, suggests
a place for affordable munchies, assures us he’ll help us with anything, and
heads off. We’re booked for 2-nights at $28 per. Unless there’s a reason to
move elsewhere on this small island, we’ll probably stay on.
Malta sits
smack in the middle of the Mediterranean, rubbing coastlines with Sicily and
North Africa Walls never worked here (at least not for long), and Malta is
richer for it. Everybody---Phoenician, Roman, Arab, French, Spanish---has been
through here, dropping genes and cultural nuggets. It's a stew. I have always
liked stews.
Cribbing
from the guide, I offer these Maltese tidbits. The language is Semitic, but
written in Roman letters, with a huge contribution from Italian, Sicilian, and
French. English is universal, Italian common. 98 percent of these Semitic
speakers are Roman Catholic, but divorce and same-sex civil unions are legal,
though abortion is not. And from today’s news comes this: Malta just became the
first European nation to not only ban 'gay conversion therapy', but to also
mandate fines and prison sentences for the effort. Now, THAT is a stew.
The Guide
claims that Malta owes its cuisine to Italy, oh, happy news. Fresh pasta, and
pizza are the de facto national foods. That demands hands on research. We don’t
find the place Eugenio suggested for lunch, but, with our usual dumb luck, did
very well on our own, thank you. Enter Bianco's and its gorgeous waitress. Cold local beer goes down well with my fresh
spaghetti in red sauce and rabbit, and Dennis' fresh tube pasta with herbs. The
portions are huge, the cost a bit less than in the US. We pass on the desserts,
but I lobby for a return visit, shamelessly drooling over a menu that offers
pizza with gorgonzola and fresh grapes. My webbed belt is expandable and very
forgiving.
The
half-hearted sprinkle becomes an uncommitted drizzle, but wet is wet. We spring
for cheapo umbrellas, matching in low price and, even lower quality, but not in
color. Along the way two large croissants go in the bag for breakfast with
coffee from the far too sophisticated machine in the kitchen. We find a semi-sleazy Chinese take-out, a
burger place, and a kebab joint, potentials should we tire of Malta's
Italianate delectable. Yeah, right.
2016-12-08
– THURSDAY, MALTA DAY 1
Our 'el
cheapo' umbrellas execute Olympian back flips so fast they rate a perfect 10.
They have
lasted one trip from a sweatshop in China and one gust of wind on a rainy
morning in Valletta, Malta. Around us, a
street full of Maltese holding twins of our umbrellas, rush soddenly, sloshing
into any open door.
Our port in
this storm is a restaurant, hot cocoa on tap.
Lunch is
classic Malta fare, fitir, a meal held together by two halves of a thick,
crusty role. Ours is stuffed with warm pulled pork, cheese, and caramelized onions. Fitir. The word and its relatives turn up on
menus and street stalls in Egypt, and Ethiopia, describing some version of
bread under or wrapped around a meal. In Egypt, it’s pitr, like a filled pizza,
with a crust any Italian would recognize.
In Ethiopia, it’s a thin crepe folded around an omelet filling, and
clearly a linguistic and culinary cousin. I wonder if that family tree extends
to other cousins…the 'too similar in sound and execution to be an accident’
pizza of Italy, and the hollow, but stuffable, pita of India. Taste buds don’t
care. Ours are very happy.
Valletta is
too delicious to be missed, rain be damned. Satiated, chocolated, and a bit
more than merely damp in parts, we slosh out.
Optimism, perhaps misplaced, suggests our umbrellas might still be
useful, even in their spiny condition, in the light rain. They come with us.
We hike up
and down the stony streets of this charming city. Not far down any street we can see white caps
on the sea over the top of the massive walls that contain the city. Valletta is
the smallest capital city in Europe, maybe the world, a little over half a mile
long and a third of a mile wide. The streets are narrow, paved in stone, or
stepped to climb the steep hills. The main street is for pedestrians only.
Signs and
conversations are in Maltese, Italian, English.
Among the Roman churches (my favorite name is St. Paul Shipwrecked) is
an Anglican one, a synagogue, a mosque. Hanging from every building are covered
balconies, cousins of those in the Arab cities. These have windows rather than
carved wooden shutters.
We walk
along the walls overlooking the harbor. The gusts that destroyed our umbrellas
create a rumpled blue and white seascape to the far, greyed out horizon. It’s
odd that in this place, such a small rock wrested from that horizonless sea,
there is no smell of the sea.
The
umbrellas? In such a place, rain doesn’t matter.
2016-12-09 – FRIDAY - MALTA DAY 2 – To Gozo
Malta and
her sister islands have not been good for travelers.
Paul, early
Christianity’s misogynist proselytizer, was a famous shipwreck on Malta, in
60AD. (Thus, the many churches named St. Paul Shipwrecked.) He should have read
Homer. A thousand years earlier, Homer’s hero, Odysseus, and his shipboard
buddies, landed on Gozo on their way back from the Trojan War, sought shelter
in a seaside cave, and spent 6 or 7 years ensnared in the cave and bewitched by
the beautiful sea nymph, Calypso. Apparently, Odysseus was no misogynist. (I
wonder what he told his wife, the patient---and gullible---Penelope when he
finally got home. 'Sorry I’m late, honey, there was a little problem at the
orifice….)
We’re
planning only one night on Gozo. Calypso may be long gone, but I’m taking no
chances. If you don’t hear from us in a few days, give us, say, until after the
2020 elections before you panic.
Leaving Gozo
may be a problem. Getting here is easy….
We load onto
Bus 222 for the 45-minute ride from St. Julian's to the western edge of Malta
and the 20-minute ferry to tiny Gozo. Rising, then, dropping, then, rising and
dropping again we ride the hills, leaving the traffic jammed streets of St.
Julian’s and its crowded sister communities. Malta is hills and deeply indented
coastline, its sheltered inlets and harbors the prizes of numberless wars. Bus
222 follows the swerving coast. I search
the horizon for a glimpse of the top of Sicily to the north, but it is hidden
by clouds, or just a smidge too far.
The
countryside is dry, and stark. Century plants are in bloom, sending up their huge
twenty-foot valedictory flower stalks, Gulliver Swift's asparaguses waiting for
heavenly hollandaise.
Striping the
landscape are veins of the soft-colored limestone that is raw material for
almost all the buildings on Malta. The color is elusive. It would send the
Paint Chip People into paroxysms, scrambling through their lists of twee nouns
and pointless modifiers to create meaningless, diabetes-inducing abominations.
Ecru Ice? Buttercup Froth? Café au Lately? The Maltese just build with it. The
towns and cities are of a piece with the landscape, extracted from the earth,
reverse quarries piled into angular, hand-made mountains.
The island
ends in a sheltered harbor. The Gozo ferries leave every 45 minutes. You go
over for free, pay only on the way back.
Landed in
Mgarra, Gozo, we hop on---and stay on---the top deck of a Hop On, Hop Off bus
to tour the tiny island, dripping in sunshine, not raindrops, our injured
umbrellas safely stowed. Earplugs tell us the stories. Our eyes have more fun.
The landscape
is Mediterranean, small, patchy fields, hilltop villages crested with churches,
tight towns of narrow streets and small piazzas. Pagliacci, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Madama
Butterfly are on at the opera house, the latter with Miriam Gauci, Maltese, and
internationally famous diva. There's money here. From exported tomatoes and
imported vacationers, the earplugs tell us. Our eyes tell us it’s beauty that
might be the attraction. Maybe it wasn’t a sea nymph at all that kept Odysseus
here.
'That's far
and very difficult’ says Bearded Guy in Xargha's piazza when we show him the
address of our AirBnB. He sorts us out with an Internet password. We wait in
front of the church. There’s a nativity scene with very white-faced people
oohing and aahing over an even whiter, blond baby Jesus. These faces don’t even
resemble any in this piazza, let alone the Middle Eastern Jewish faces in that
original stable scene. God's mother wears a head scarf.
Our AirBnB host, Floriana, whirls into the
piazza, jumps out of the car, loads us in, and zooms us off, arpeggios of good
humored laughter our welcome. Back at the flat her handsome partner has dinner
ready for us. 'He cooks. I clean.' The huge (5 bedrooms?) flat is spotless, and
the food (spaghetti with red sauce and green peas) is delicious. We are very
lucky.
2016-12-10
SATURDAY - MALTA DAY 3 – Gozo to Malta
There were
giants here.
Or so the
story, goes. How else to explain 50 ton stones, quarried, trimmed, and moved to
this high hill overlooking a fertile plain and the sea?
I touch one
of the huge stones. Its neighbors are anchored in a wall several time my
height. People quarried this stone, down there behind me, near the sea, and hauled
it to the crest of this hill, then did it again with another, and again,
creating these two multi-roomed buildings. We don’t know the Who. Legend has it
was giants, and the place is named for them, Ggantija, with that double 'g' to
make the point. There are carvings that tell us they were artists.
The
How? Determination, and muscle power,
maybe rolling the megaliths on stone spheres, ancestors of ball bearings. We can guess at the Why. These buildings are
complex, with inner rooms, hints of walls colored with ochre (indirect proof of
roofing). They were maintained and expanded over several centuries. Such labor
suggests a devotion to something bigger than one laborer. We call them temples.
We do know
the When: 3600bce, or 5700 years ago. These are the oldest free standing
buildings in the world, a thousand years older than the pyramids, and five
hundred years older than Stonehenge.
And I touch them.
Floriana
drops us off at the temples about 10:30. Hugs fly, then she's gone in a flurry
of hands. It’s her day off from her job Supersizing at McDonald’s. We are her
second AirBnB guests. As we did with. Marina in Athens, I've left her with
detailed directions (and bus schedules) she and Gerard can send to their next
guests.
The
efficient Maltese public transportation system does its magic and bus 322 back
to the ferry arrives where and when the sign post says it will, 12:51. A half
hour later, we’ve paid the 4.5 Euro fare, crossed the gangplank and found the
cafeteria, emphasis on the cafe. Hot coffee (or so it says on the menu) and
pastry are a second breakfast over the chug-chug of the ferry as it pulls out
of Mgarr into Blue Lagoon deep blue. The trip from tiny Gozo, passing tinier
Comino, to Cirkewwa on Malta takes 20 minutes but I sail back four thousand
years. Odysseus, for sure, possibly Homer, and, just maybe, even Helen of Troy
(ever hot to trot or get on a boat with her Stud Muffin), traveled these same
waves.
Our AirBnB
is a bright purple room in a stone house in Sliema, Malta, run by a crowd of
funny and hospitable Macedonians. Bernard makes us tea. Eddie and Marina drag
us out into the mustardy yellow atrium so they can smoke and we can trade
travel stories. Iris, a Chinese woman studying 'media' in Glasgow (????), joins
us. Accents fly. A grand time is had by one and all. Macedonia gets a BIG pin
on our 'Go There' travel map.
The
Macedonians head off to do some work on the house. Iris joins us for beer and
then delicious rabbit. I offer apologies to Bugs, and Easter.
When we get
back, there is Macedonian Mayhem. The guys are moving stuff. Marina is
laughing. 'They move stuff from here to there. Next year they move it from
there back to here.' She shrugs. A good time is had by all.
Indeed.
2016-12-11
SUNDAY - MALTA DAY 4
The room is
very purple.
Our Merry
Macedonians have spared no excess in Five Trees AirBnB. Tinkerbell flits on one
wall, waving her spells. On the other, Ganesh, India’s Elephant God, Remover of
Obstacles, adds his trunkful of assurances. Only incense is missing to waft us
back to the Sixties, Macedonian-Maltese style. It’s time travel on the cheap,
without jet lag, and in our beds. Dr. Who, eat your heart out!
Later in the
afternoon we lust for any transport, even Dr. Who's Phone Home variety. We and Iris,
our Chinese lady friend from Glasgow, are on our way to Malta's Blue Grotto,
and its 5,700 old stony neighbors. We just miss the bus that goes directly
there, but the helpful bus chaperone in Valletta’s central bus terminal
suggests we take another one that will drop us 'nearby' and walk from
there. He's wearing a uniform. We trust
him. 'Nearby' is a vague concept under the best of conditions. The moon is
'nearby' when compared to Mars, but I wouldn’t want to walk there...which is
what we seem to be doing.
The view
annihilates fatigue. Malta drops abruptly from great heights into the sea. The sea meets the perpendicular coast, all
angular and hard, with a lacey jumble of white froth and spume. Neither
'sapphire' nor 'lapis lazuli' are adequate descriptions of the color of the Mediterranean
here. Perhaps 'blue diamond' gets to the crystalline purity of the color.
The Blue
Grotto owes its fame and beauty to physics. At the right time of day, rays
bounce off the white sands beneath the clear water and the waters glow
luminescent aquamarine. The sun is
already too high, the angle too steep for the sunlight to do its magic but the
day is glorious for a sea voyage in a dinghy. We strap on life vests and launch
onto the Mediterranean. Our dinghy captain Knows Something, and we skittle over
the blue to a cave where the angle is just right. The sea glows.
The temples
are 'nearby', another half hour walk overlooking the blue. These are less
complex than those on Gozo, without inner chambers, maybe a bit 'younger' by a
century or so, but who’s counting. The stones in part are pockmarked with tiny
round indentations. Why? Declarations?
Calendar? I feel again the magnetism and the frustration of archeology. There
were people here, they did human things. They have something to say. But there is a mist between us and them that
muffles their voices.
We don’t
miss this bus, and bounce out of a catnap at the last stop in Valletta. Iris
uses her ticket to transfer to another bus. We want another ferry ride across
Valletta's splendid harbor, this time at sunset. The moon rises over the walls
of the city, huge. Nearby.
2016-12-12
MONDAY - MALTA DAY 5-ISTANBUL
What can
follow bobbing in a tiny dinghy on the blue diamond/aquamarine waters where
Ulysses sailed?
Last night,
it was the Chicken Shawarma and Coke Zero Special (E6.50---$7.15---, with
salad, wrapped, napkin optional, drooling guaranteed) at a Lebanese restaurant.
Kebabji is crowded, no, jammed, the faces
varied. The guttural consonants of Maltese, the sibilant plurals of English,
the trailing vowels of Italian clatter into the air already stuffed with
delectable smells. The Kebabji Guys, brothers from their shared dark and
handsome looks, toss skewers, platters, knives, whirling in a true Arabesque. Youngest
sibling, baseball cap brim to the back, assembles our shawarmas. 'All salads?'
It's not really a question. His hands blur over a dozen containers. Tomatoes,
onions, mint, parsley, chopped salads, yoghurt sauce fly up to join the chicken
on the huge warm wrap. Roll, fold, package, plate takes another blurred second,
and we’re history. It’s delicious.
Napkins are necessary.
Malta makes
gelato. 'Nuff' said.
The drooling
suggests laundry. Back at Five Trees, we take advantage of our last chance for
machine washing. We strip. Helpful Bardo sorts out the washer (soap goes here,
softener there, plug it in, press this, 90 minutes) and dryer (switch plugs,
press that, two and a half hours). We press 'this' to wash, will press 'that'
in the morning.
And so, here
we are this morning, looking at the hours until we lift off for Istanbul at
18:05. There’s a lot more to see in tiny, ancient Malta, but, it’s drizzling,
and we’re in a hangout mood. At the moment,
I’m looking at Tinkerbell. Church bells ring the hour (7am). Later, maybe,
we’ll walk down the hill and watch the boats in the harbor. First, I press
'that', but are fuzzy on the setting. I choose one towards the middle, so
should be short of incineration.
Omar Sharif
serves us mochaccino (why have just coffee when chocolate is also on tap?) and
cream with an apple/custard turnover for breakfast as we continue our descent
into shameless caloric indiscretion.
Across the
road, ferries stir up the harbor under the motionless hauteur of a yacht in
blue, white, and polished wood, sails furled. I have found a website that
offers AirBnB accommodations on small, private, ships. I want THAT one.
'Stay as
long as you want. There are no check ins coming. Just leave the key in the
door'. And, sweet, kind Bardo ascends into our pantheon of Host Gods. He
unfolds his akimbo legs and goes off to make us tea. (English? Milk? Sugar? ) I
wish I had a granddaughter to whisk his sweetness into our family.
Like so many
of the places we've been, Malta is now a specific person, a specific face, a
specific laugh.
In 2000, we
elected a President who boasted he had never been out of the United States and
for whom the world contained not faces, only numbers to crunch. We will live
with his legacy of ignorance for decades…if we survive the ignorance of the
current deplorable President-elect. Oh, wait, there are women to grope out
there, so his tiny hands may be too busy to push that red button. Ivanka's may
not be.
If we’re
facing Armageddon, we’ll go well fed. Lunch is fresh tagliatelle with Sicilian
sausage and mushrooms (not buttons, but something from the forests) married
with cream. Fennel creeps in, then the earth of the shrooms. Sighs are not
enough. My people can cook.
Then it hits
me. 7,000 years ago, the first people came to Malta from Sicily. It took them a
while, but by 5700 years ago they were ready. They didn’t build temples. They
built restaurants. Remember all those little holes no one can figure out?
That’s where they tacked the daily specials.
