December 28th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Another Fowleresque list. We’re leaving Gozo on Monday, and Malta for Morocco on Wednesday. I’ve got a few more posts about Malta in the hopper (meaning my head), but here’s one on things I’ll miss. It’s not comprehensive, but really more gestural:
- The awesome retro Coke bottles. The kind they drank from at the drive-in in American Graffiti. I actually just made it to the island on time for this one.
- The locals’ ambivalence toward their pets. Shortly after we arrived, I was talking to a neighbour about one of her cats:
ME: How many do you have?
HER: I’m not sure. Three or four.
ME: What’s this one’s name?
HER: I don’t know. Cat?
- The subsequent names we manufactured for the local cats: Dine ‘n’ Dash, Kitten (lovely, but afflicted with shocking flatulence and halitosis), Bread-Eating Cat (it would sneak into our house at night to raid our bread stash), Cairo (it looked particularly Egyptian), Bell Cat (it wore a bell) and Fat Albert.
- The bath tub temperature of the ocean in late summer.
- The fantastic (at least to me–I’m a noobie) snorkeling in that water.
- The fruit. I’ll never look at, well, nearly every fruit back in Canada, the same way.
- The temperature outside. On the day of Christmas Eve, I went for a walk in a long-sleeve t-shirt.
- Dwejra Bay, with its extraordinary settings and killer swimming holes.
- How everybody knows everybody.
- The resulting extraordinary trust. I had an item to ship back to Canada, and the courier came by to pick it up this morning. I opened the door, he said “are you Darren?” I said “yep, here it is”. He picked it up and left. No invoice, no waivers, no receipt, no nothing. And yet I have faith that it’ll make it back to the homeland.
- The peculiar array of cars. Due to some import taxes based on engine size, there are many, many tiny cars from all over the planet. I got a lift in a Skoda today, for example.
- The remarkable and intense Catholicism, which has been quite educational. More on this in an upcoming post.
- How everything is so close. You can walk across the whole island in under three hours.
- How Gozo busted some of my stereotypes about Mediterraneans. They drive very sedately, they’re not particularly fiery and they’re very prompt.
- The church bells, and their unusual patterns.
- Starting work at 13:00. Though maybe that habit will stick.
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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.
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November 6th, 2007, 9 Comments »
That’s the fact of the day. Via Digg, I read this column by Joe Brancatelli on the disappearing hotel bathtub, and the rise of ‘elaborate and dramatic shower presentations’:
For one thing, business travelers are just too busy for leisurely soaks. Liability issues make the tub-shower combo a magnet for lawsuits because a surprising number of travelers have trouble navigating the walls of an unfamiliar tub. Shower-only layouts are slightly more space-efficient than other bathroom configurations and that appeals to developers struggling with high real estate costs. Then there’s the “ick” factor: Hotel designers say travelers, especially women, are concerned about the cleanliness of hotel tubs. Even if they prefer bathing, they won’t do it in a hotel.
I agree on the ick factor. I wonder how they compare on water usage. The article concludes that families often want rooms with tubs. If you’re booking for a family, it’s increasingly wise to specify a room with a bathtub.
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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 22nd, 2007, No Comments »
Julie just spent five days at Fontana Del Papa, a cooking school outside of Rome (booked via the excellent folks at Responsible Travel). That’s kind of an anti-holiday for me, but she had a great time. She took a bunch of photos, and here are three of my favourites:
She also spent a day in Rome, and some time in Barcelona and the south of France. I quite like this photo of seats awaiting Catholic bums in the Vatican.
It’s really a photo-bloggy kind of day today, isn’t it?
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October 16th, 2007, 12 Comments »
Walking around downtown Toronto, I realized something about myself–I’m totally a country yokel now. Living in a small village on Gozo, I learned to smile at, nod to or greet anybody who you pass in the street. Everybody else does it, and I wanted to fit in.
I guess it doesn’t take very long for that behaviour to become habitual, because I’ve had the impulse to do it here in Toronto. Not on busy streets, obviously, but if I’m out walking early and pass somebody, my impulse is to smile and nod at them. That would never have been the case living in Vancouver.
This is obvious, but big cities obviously discourage this kind of friendly behaviour. It’s a bit of a pity, eh?
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October 14th, 2007, No Comments »
I got into Toronto last night and had an extremely satisfying evening. I ordered fish and chips from room service, and watched Hockey Night in Canada to stave off the jet lag. Happily, the Leaves [sic] lost and the Canucks won (Trevor Linden, I love ya buddy, but maybe it’s time to hang them up?).
Today I did some work, wandered around downtown doing some random minor shopping in the Enormous! Shiny! Malls!, and then went and saw the aforementioned Once.
And I’m a little chilly! Excepting recent dips in our increasing icy pool, I honestly haven’t been cold since late May. Not even a little chilly. It’s 13°C in the Centre of the Universe, and so I’m reveling in the very slight discomfort of being cold for a change.
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October 7th, 2007, 15 Comments »
Just a quick note to say that I’ll be in Toronto next week for a speaking gig and some meetings. Plans include:
- October 14 - I’m having a geek dinner with Will Pate and other Toronto luminaries. Will hates all sports, so I trust the conversation about how much the Leafs suck will be brief but florid. Location to be determined.
- October 15 - In the evening, I’ll give my 1100 Stacies talk another crack at Third Tuesday Toronto(or Facebook, if you prefer) meetup. Curiously, that’s a Monday. Thanks to Joseph for organizing that. It looks like the event is fully booked, but maybe Joseph can squeeze you in if you ask himi nicely.
On October 16, I was supposed to speak at the 2nd annual Word Up conference, but I was notified a few days ago that they were changing the date (I gather the website has not been updated). That was disappointing, as it was a major reason I was coming to T-dot. I’m unsure why the date was shifted. I’ve helped run dozens of events over the years, and we’ve never changed a date. It is, I think, the most sacrosanct part of the event planning.
Free Time for Work and Pleasure
So, I find myself with a day or two of free time in the Canada’s biggest city. If you’re a Torontonian who’s interested in the same stuff I am, let me know and we can probably have coffee.
By the same token, I’ve spent almost no part of my adult life in Toronto. I plan to see The Hockey Hall of Fame and The Art Gallery of Ontario. I have no interest in the CN Tower. What else do you Central Canadians recommend?
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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.
Contents
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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September 4th, 2007, 5 Comments »
The folks at Lonely Planet pitched me on this, and I actually thought it was pretty cool. They’ve launched a new service called Pick & Mix (currently only for Mexico, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, so I guess it’s in beta) which enables you to buy individual chapters of their guidebooks. From the email I received:
To give people a chance to try Pick & Mix, the first chapter from each guide is free. Also, because we know how important it is to travel with current information, chapters are available prior to the release of the book. Right now, the new editions of the Guatemala and Baja guides are available via Pick & Mix in advance of the book release.
This is a pretty smart approach, because I often end up hauling around guidebooks and only using a small portion of them. For example, we bought a Hungary guidebook for our recent trip to Budapest (there were no Budapest-only books available on Malta). We barely left the capital on our trip, so eight-tenths of the book was just dead weight.
How Much Does It Cost?
I was checking out the Pick & Mix books, and noticed that there were some significant differences in price. Some chapters cost about four cents a page, while others cost as much as ten. I asked my Lonely Planet contact about it, and he said:
We considered different models, including iTunes-style flat pricing, but it just didn’t seem fair to charge the same for a 10-page chapter as for a 100-page chapter (our longest chapter, believe it or not, is a 244-page monster). So in the end we opted to base chapter prices on the price of the book, and the length of the chapter.
So, a long chapter with more information costs more than a short chapter. And a chapter from a $30 book costs more than one from a $15 book (assuming they’re a similar number of pages). About 80% of chapters ended up costing between US$2-4.
Is this a more environmentally-friendly option? I’m not sure. The printing industry no doubt has some efficiencies which means that the cost of printing one book is less impactful than printing out a hundred pages on your printer. But then you do avoid the resources expended on printing the cover and gluing the book together.
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