November 7th, 2007, 5 Comments »
There was a serious rain storm on Gozo this morning. It didn’t last long, but it was tropical and torrential.
For the third time in four days, we found ourselves trying to redirect a small stream. It entered the house via the kitchen cupboards and exited out the back patio. There’s been some recent changes to the local drainage system, and we drew the short straw.
I moved over 300 litres of water from my clever collection system (yes, it featured another towel dam) in the dining room to the back patio. I counted the buckets.
November, it turns out, is going to be our busiest month of the year, work wise. I wasn’t keen on spending three hours swabbing the decks when we should be gettin’ paid.
Once the flood waters had receded, I had a stern discussion with our landlady about her anti-diluvian strategy. Happily, she also owns the farmhouse next door (in fact, I think they used to be one big building and got subdivided).
So, until the drainage system gets sorted, we’ll be cooking and eating on the main floor of her other house, and living and working on the upper floors of our own. It’s a risk of renting an old stone house, but I’m just glad not to be facing more bailing.
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November 5th, 2007, 3 Comments »
As we occasionally do, Julie and I spent a couple of hours today working in the lovely bar at the Kempinski Hotel San Lawrenz. I think it’s the only five star hotel on Gozo, and despite its peculiar location (there are no views of the sea), it’s quite posh.
I wasn’t using the web, but I happened to visit the hotel’s portal page for its wifi service. Here it is:
That looks pretty weak, doesn’t it? Why does a five-star hotel, with its spa smelling of sandalwood and lavendar, it’s beautifully-tiled pools and gorgeously-appointed rooms, have such a crappy-looking login page? The Kempinski isn’t unique in this peculiar disconnect–I’ve seen worse in plenty of four and five-star hotels.
It’s a tiny thing, but swish hotels aspire to get the tiny things right. The five-star devil, after all, is in the details. On the other hand, at least I wasn’t presented with an image of some kind of fruitophile.
Incidentally, I took that screenshot with a great little OS X program that Monique tipped me off on. It’s called Paparazzi, and all it does is make a full-length screenshot of any URL you enter. It saves you the trouble of stitching screenshots together.
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October 24th, 2007, 4 Comments »
James and I were walking down the lane outside our farmhouse on Gozo, and I happened to glance at a bag of garbage awaiting pickup. Look a little closer–what’s that inside?
Outside of Toronto, everybody hates the Leafs.
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October 22nd, 2007, 4 Comments »
It’s been occasionally windy here on Malta, and we’ve had a couple of storms. But last night was serious, which winds gusting up to 75 km/h. The back patio is covered in debris, and there’s a sizable tree limb on our balcony. I was surprised that our sun loungers ended up in the pool. They’re plastic, but they’re reasonably heavy:
It’s no wonder all the houses are built of stone here.
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October 11th, 2007, 2 Comments »
When we sat down to dinner at a restaurant in Xlendi, Monique noted an odd correction to the menu:
I have no objection to people eating horses–it’s just peculiar that they subsequently crossed it out. Did they run out of horse? What meat are they using instead?
In related news, Monique has written an exhaustive and illustrated account of her and James’s first week on Gozo. It’s pretty typical of what our guests do. Give it a read if you want to live vicariously through them. You may also want to check out their photo sets.
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October 8th, 2007, 1 Comment »
I recently discovered that the satellite photos of Malta in Google Maps are vastly improved. When we planning our trip, Gozo was just a big greenish-brown blur. Now the resolution matches other parts of the world I’ve looked at.
For hilly countryside full of terraces and few landmarks, the new satellite photos are a real blessing. There are a couple of spots I’ve been trying to reach on my bike, but was never quite sure where they are. The overhead view makes all the difference.
I started messing around with Google Map’s newish ‘My Maps’ functionality, labelling points of personal interest around the island. In no time, I was up to fifty points, complete with Flickr photos and the occasional link. Here’s my memory map of Gozo–it’s a work in progress:
View Larger Map
That interface is kind of a joy to work with. The joy, I think, harkens back to a childhood spent making Dungeons & Dragons maps.
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October 3rd, 2007, 8 Comments »
We have this cat that spends about 40% of her time in our farmhouse. I recently discovered that she had several ticks, grossly engorged with blood, attached to her head and shoulders.
I alerted the cat’s owners–two retired British fellows who live down the street–but they seemed a little prissy on the removal. So, I consulted the Internet, put on some gardening gloves and got to work. The quarter is for scale (it, happily, didn’t come out of the cat), and to instruct my victims of the nationality of their killer:
I was quite pleased with myself–this sort of hands-on-mammals stuff really isn’t my domain of expertise.
There was a little parable in how we went about it, too. For the first tick, one of us held the cat while I tried to pull out the offending insect. There was plenty of drama, as the cat doesn’t like to be held, and I suspect she could tell everybody was tense. So, there were several aborted attempts and she only let us do it once.
The next time, I just walked up to her while she was sleeping and quietly went to work. She let me take out all three without so much as batting a, uh, claw. The lesson, I guess, is that sometimes a haiku beats a sonnet. Or is that too abstract?
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September 19th, 2007, 1 Comment »
We’re having breakfast on our back patio this morning, and I smell something odd. I say to Julie, “what’s that smell? It’s a bit like rotting fruit.” We speculate that possibly the gardener next door is using some fancy composting. I don’t for a moment consider that Gozo is full of vineyards.
See, it wasn’t the smell of rotting fruit. It was the smell of fermenting fruit.
Like so many Maltese farmers (of the full-on and hobby types) seem to, our neighbours a couple of doors down are making wine.
I’m often surprised at the variety of wines that come from Gozo–an island the size of North Pender Island, with a population of 28,000. There’s at least twenty in the shop (this photo from Rabat’s market shows 18). Plus, the house wines in restaurants are often unavailable from the shops–they’re sold directly from the farmer to the restaurant.
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September 16th, 2007, 3 Comments »
While snorkeling yesterday, I saw the most remarkable thing I’ve seen underwater:
It’s a Cassiopea jellyfish. That’s not my photo, but the one I saw looked very similar. It’s strikingly large–the one I saw was probably a foot in diameter. Its undulating motion was hypnotizing. Two interesting facts about this species: juvenile fish often make take temporary shelter among its tentacles–you can see some sand smelt (I think) doing this in another photo. The other fact comes from Wikipedia:
Sometimes this jellyfish is picked up by a crab (Dorippe frascone) and carried on its back. The crab uses the jellyfish to defend itself against possible predators.
I’ve become addicted to the Facebook version of Scrabble, Scrabulous. After playing a word, the app loaded new letters into my tray. Entirely at random, look what it spelled:
What’re the odds? And when is Hasbro going to sue whoever made that Facebook app?
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September 4th, 2007, 5 Comments »
This weekend we visited the Ġgantija temples, the world’s oldest free-standing structures. The older of the two date back to 3600 BC, predating Egypt’s oldest pyramid by about 800 years. From Wikipedia:
The temples were possibly the site of an Earth Mother Goddess Fertility Cult, with numerous figurines and statues found on site believed to be connected with that cult.
In the Maltese language, Ġgantija means “belonging to the giants”. According to local Gozotian legend, the temples were built by the giants who resided in Gozo during ancient times. It is said that the temples themselves were used by the giants as watchtowers.
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Interestingly, it took a Brit to first excavate and protect the temples in the 19th century. I find this is often the case with archaeological finds–they often require foreigner interest to preserve them.
You can see a few more photos in this Flickr set, and here’s an aerial view for some context.
To be honest, the idea that these are the oldest buildings in the world was more powerful than the experience of seeing them. They are essentially neatly organized piles of crumbling rubble. There is a sense of history about the place, but I didn’t feel the way I felt at, say, the Theatre of Dionysus or even in old growth rain forest on the West Coast. Those places seemed to have a far greater spirituality for me.
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