Archive: Posts about Malta
December 15th, 2007, 4 Comments »
Walking back from town yesterday, I found our village square to be abuzz with activity. There were no less than eight police officers consulting in front of our church. The only other time I’d seen that kind of police presence was when the President dropped by for a visit.
As I turned into our little lane, I noticed a blood trail. It must have been 100 meters in length–happily it veered right where our alley forks, and not down to where we live. You could see where the victim staggered at one point and leaned against the wall for a bit. I took a photo:
Julie got the gossip from the local shop, and I confirmed today in the paper that there’d been a shooting in Gharb. Apparently there a woman got pushed, and an argument ensued. Somebody went to get a gun, and kerblammo. Nobody died.
Inner city violence in a village of 900. Cool!
4 Comments »
December 10th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Don’t you hate it when this happens?
It’s a good thing that Julie’s grandma sends out her Christmas cards so early. This one left Abbotsford on November 19, 2007, stopped by Guyana and made it to Malta by today, December 10.
In case, like me, you thought Guyana was in Africa (I mixed it up with Guinea), it’s not. It’s north of Brazil.
Has your mail ever gone weird places by mistake?
9 Comments »
December 5th, 2007, 3 Comments »
I’m starting a regular feature called “Boring Facts About Me”.
Just kidding.
I mean, in a way, the whole site satisfies that description.
I just left money on our stoop for the water man. This process amuses me. Each week we put our two empty 19-litre water bottles outside the front door. I leave 3.58 mL (CAN $12.47) in cash under one of the bottles in an envelope. Early the next morning, the water man comes by, collects the empty bottles and money, and leaves two full bottles. No invoices, no online banking. We just pay the guy, and he brings me water.
Anyhow, we drink almost the water each week (oddly, it hasn’t been influenced by the cooler weather). So I figure that’s about 18 litres for me (a couple of litres remain in the ceramic basin). Is 2.5 litres a day a lot?
Ordering bottled water is a bit of a luxury in terms of living green. We tried and couldn’t get used to the taste of the water. I gather most of it is desalinated sea water, and it’s pretty bitter.
Speaking of Maltese Lira, this will be the second time I’ll be living in a country when it switches over to the Euro. We’re going to be Valetta on December 31st, and apparently New Years will be extra exciting due to the change-over. Maybe I’ll be the first Canadian to spend a Euro in Malta?
3 Comments »
December 5th, 2007, 2 Comments »
From our farmhouse, we can hear the bells of three different churches. The closest church, in our village of Gharb, needs to get some work done on their bells–they sound decidedly flat and clanky.
At first they kept me up at night, but I’ve developed a real affection for them. There’s a little symbolic power to something that the whole community hears.
Early on, we noticed that the ringing of the bells didn’t follow the usual nine-bells-for-nine-o’clock model that I was familiar with. It was actually an interesting puzzle, though I don’t think I ever thought particularly seriously about the odd combination of bells.
Eventually I asked someone, and they explained how the bells work. There are two sets of tones. The first set applies to the minutes, and the second set to the hours. The bells toll at fifteen minute intervals, with the minutes bell tolling one to four times, and the hours bell tolling one to six times. Here are a few examples:
1:15 - bing, bong
15:45 - bing, bing, bing, bong, bong, bong
18:00 - bing, bing, bing, bing, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong (the maximum possible notes)
Because the bells work on a six-hour rotation, it’s up to you to determine if it’s 3:45, 9:45, 15:45 or 21:45.
Do other parts of the world use this system? Malta is the only place I’ve heard it.
2 Comments »
December 4th, 2007, 5 Comments »
Our bedroom is on the top floor of our limestone farmhouse. There’s kind of an outdoor landing outside our bedroom door, which you cross to descend stairs into the rest of the house. We’ve occasionally seen cats on this landing, as they cross rooftops and balconies and lick their tongues into the corners of the evening.
Last week, on three separate occasions, we’ve found, well, piles of crap in various corners of this landing. Large piles of crap for a cat. If the location wasn’t accessible only to cats, you’d think a dog was responsible (some of the cats around here are big, muscular beasts). And, without getting too graphic, these cats were not getting enough fibre in their diets.
What to do? The cats come and do their business in the middle of the night. There was no way to fence off the landing, or access to it from the roof. There was only one solution.
I made like Farley Mowat, and marked my territory. We figured a little human urine might turn off the fickle felines.
And we were right. It’s been four nights now, and there’s no cat poo in sight. Darren 1, Feral Cats 0.
5 Comments »
November 30th, 2007, 2 Comments »
A couple of weeks ago, Julie went on a two-hour tour of the Gozo’s many religious niches–Catholic statues embedded in the facades of buildings. I was up for a one-hour tour, but that didn’t materialize, and I just couldn’t stomach two hours of historical niche study in a minivan full of British septuagenarians. Julie could, bless her, and took a number of lovely photos (she was also unknowingly photographed for the local paper). Here’s one:
That’s an inscription under this niche. A Maltese speaker can help with the translation, but I gather it says, in part, “say Hail Marys under this niche, and spare yourself a hundred days in purgatory”. I believe you can also roll again, unless you land on Park Place.
2 Comments »
November 22nd, 2007, 13 Comments »
I just wrote a letter to the editor of the Malta Times, pillorying Fiona Galea Debono for some dodgy reporting. She wrote a profile of Maltese singer Ira Losco (she covers The Cure’s “Love Song” on her MySpace page), and introduced the subject of music piracy:
The DVD will be available from leading record stores and off her website… but, sadly, probably also from the marketplace at a fraction of the price.
Indeed, piracy is a scourge that even Ira has to contend with; it is destroying the industry and makes her blood boil.
Ira sells well and not enough fake CDs are printed to hurt her, so she need not devise a strategy to counteract piracy - in the same vein as international stars, who are basing their earnings on live performances. But it is still an irritating issue.
Do you get the feeling that Sony set up this interview, and told Ms. Debono (and/or Ms. Losco) to dedicate a few column inches to the piracy issue? Here’s my letter:
Dear Sir:
Ms. Debono’s profile of Ira Losco read like a thinly-veiled propaganda piece for the record industry. Despite music piracy not impacting Ms. Losco, Ms. Debono introduces the subject into her article and claims–without citing any evidence–that it’s “destroying the [music] industry”.
This simply isn’t true, and it’s lazy, shoddy journalism to claim otherwise. There are many reasons for the downturn of the music industry–declining radio listenership, free music via the web (YouTube and such), diverging audience tastes, the missed opportunity of legal file sharing, rising video game and DVD sales and so forth.
Besides, a recent independent study comissioned by Industry Canada indicated that file-sharing doesn’t put downward pressure on purchasing music. In fact, fans who download music tend to buy more.
According to Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group in Rolling Stone magazine, “The record companies have created this situation themselves.”
Here’s a lesson for Ms. Debono: I’ve just built an argument based on considered supporting evidence. Perhaps she’ll try this approach the next time she wants to trot out hollow, deceptive claims
Every time a journalist (or a blogger or whoever) mindlessly parrots a corporate party line, it lessens the profession.
13 Comments »
November 19th, 2007, No Comments »
Before we left for Malta, I wrote about my difficulties getting our international telephony strategy sorted out. We never really did get it 100% right. We’re using SkypeOut for outgoing calls and that works great. On the incoming side, we just have brief, expensive calls on our cell phones.
Troy, however, has got it figured out. He just spent a week in Paris, and wrote about his telephony successes. If you’re interested, read the whole post. Here’s how he finishes:
But that very small issue aside, it means that with a laptop, skype, Gatherplace (for screen sharing), Simulscribe, a good DSL connection, and a Vonage adapter - have equipment, will travel.
I hear that Puerto Vallarta has good DSL… Or maybe Costa Rica….
Simulscribe looks like a good option, and provides what I was going to use Vonage for: forwarding voicemail messages to email. The voice-to-text conversion is an added bonus. I’ve signed up for the service to see how it works. I’ll report back.
UPDATE: Dave from Simulscribe is one smart social media monitoring cookie. He contacted me and hooked me up with a Vancouver number so that my calls don’t have to be forwarded to a US one. Plus, he gave me a 30-day free trial, and offered the same to you, my dear readers. Here’s the sign-up if you want to try it out. That looks kind of like an affiliate link, but I don’t get anything but good karma.
No Comments »
November 17th, 2007, 6 Comments »
The other night we were headed over to a friend’s house for dinner. Julie had made a tasty peach and apple crumble for dessert. She went to the local shop to buy some ice cream to go along with the crumble. She didn’t see any in the freezer, so she asked the proprietor:
“There’s no more ice cream. The ice cream is finished.”
Puzzled. Julie walked down, passed the church, to the other shop. Same question, same reply.
Whiskey tango foxtrot?
As it turns out, they don’t sell ice cream in our village between November and May. And I thought these Maltese were a civilized people.
6 Comments »
November 16th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Last week I watched The Brave One, an unremarkable but enjoyable revenge thriller starring Jodie Foster (and her awful hair) and directed by Neil Jordan.
CAUTION: What follows probably constitute minor spoilers. If you know the film’s premise, then they’re not going to harm your viewing pleasure, but I feel obligated to warn you just the same.
As is my habit, I went home and read a few reviews of the movie. Roger Ebert’s review features this line:
One day she buys a gun and practices on a shooting range where you can see fear turning into anger in her eyes.
In the version of the film I saw, there was definitely no shooting range.
Later, there’s a scene where Foster’s character goes after a guy on the roof of a parking garage. He ends up on pavement six floors below. In the film I saw, they exchange a couple of blows, Foster goes at the other guy with a tire iron and the film immediately cuts away. I was surprised by the cut–it seemed out of sync with the scene’s pacing. Plus, I was left puzzling over how she hauled him over the railing–she’s not a big woman.
If you saw the movie (somewhere other than Gozo, obviously), did this scene conclude differently?
I’m aware that films get edited differently for different countries, but it’s a little frustrating to not know what I else missed. I’m not sure if this qualifies as censorship–I think it probably does if the film is edited to suit a particular nation’s (apparent) morality.
2 Comments »
