June 29th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I was perusing the newspaper today, and happened upon an article about a new seaplane service that will operate between Mgarr harbour on Gozo and Valetta on the main island of Malta. This piqued my interest, as it would reduce our travel time between home and Valetta (near Malta’s international airport) from about three hours to less than one.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I’d already used this company’s service, back in BC:
Operated by Canadian company Harbour Air Seaplanes, the aircraft is initially planning to run five round trips a day from the Waterfront to Mgarr harbour. Flying time is around 20 minutes.
The aircraft will be landing outside the harbours and taxiing in like a boat to moor alongside a pontoon. The 14 passengers will pay Lm15 [about CAN $50] for a one-way trip.
What are the odds? According to HarbourAirMalta.com, they’ve got a first-time-flyer discounted rate of Lm12. Do I qualify, having flown with them a number of times around BC’s islands?
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June 4th, 2007, 11 Comments »
While en route from Gozo to Budapest, we stayed overnight in Malta’s capital city of Valetta. We also took the opportunity to watch Pirates of the Caribbean in the local very modern and pleasant multiplex.
It’s modern in all respects but one–there’s an intermission in the film. I’d read this online a few months ago, and didn’t really believe that it was true.
And yet, during a tense scene between Kiera Knightley and Chow Yun Fat (that’s not a spoiler as far as I’m concerned), while Kiera (who’s beautiful, but always looks like she has too many teeth for her mouth) was in mid-line, the film stopped. The screen displayed one groovy graphic that read “Intermission”, and most of the audience wandered outside for…what…cigarettes, refreshments and the toilets.
In the middle of a scene. The intermission seemed more or less randomly selected. Or, maybe it’s stipulated that it’s exactly two-thirds of the way through the film. In any case, it struck me as utterly ridiculous.
There are plenty of times when you shouldn’t judge another culture’s practices, but this ain’t one of them. Nearly all films are created to be viewed in one sitting, uninterrupted (the only exception I can think of is Kenneth Brannagh’s four-hour Hamlet). I’d have no complaints if filmmakers planned on intermissions the way playwrights do, but they don’t.
I must ask some of my Maltese colleagues what the deal is with this practice, and whether they prefer it.
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May 2nd, 2007, 1 Comment »
We arrived in Malta yesterday, a national holiday. It’s Workers Day, or Labour Day to us, and the country’s in a celebratory mood. Many people are wearing red, the colour of the country’s labour party. Others have fashioned skirts and shawls out of the labour flag.
In the evening, there was a big open-air concert at Valetta’s city gates. Earlier there was a pretty good rock band playing–kind of a Maltese Gin Blossoms. Then there was some truly awful Europop (I mistyped that as ‘Europoop’, which is closer to the truth), and now it’s a kind of a rave thing.
It’s a very rowdy introduction to a country that will, I think, turn out to seem quite sleepy.
On first impression, the capital city of Valetta feels like a combination of Barcelona, Havana and Athens. It’s got a remarkably consistent asthetic, with everything made from limestone and very few new buildings. There’s a wonderful mix of gothic and orthodox cathedrals, and plenty of palatial facades that occupy entire blocks.
The people are friendly, and speak excellent English with an accent somewhere between Greece and Italy. We appeared to be the youngest arrivals at the airport–Malta seems to be a bit of a tourist destination for the bluehair set. We’ll see what things look like tomorrow, when we check out some villas on the sleepier, smaller island of Gozo.
Postscript: Things should return to normal around here next Monday, when the Internet man comes by to connect our magic Internet pipe.
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