A visit to an even smaller island
May. 29th, 2012 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatWe went to Malta last Thursday, arriving too late to do anything much on Thursday night, except to peep out of the curtains, go, "Ooh! We've got a balcony! Not sure if we've got a view, though," and go to bed. Our hotel was a large, modern one tucked up against a bastion in Valletta - though tucked up against a bastion seems to be the default position in the entire Valletta area, and isn't something to write home about. From the street, we had to walk down about 40 steps to get to the hotel's front door, but even that only took us to the hotel's 6th floor, with sea level 5 floors below.
Breakfast was a pleasingly large buffet, which introduced us to the hotel's daily game: attempting to hold on to your plate long enough to help yourself to seconds. Waiters pounced on any sign of weakness like Knights of St John pouncing on Turks, although with more smiles and use of the word, "Sir," and a little less bloody mayhem. Sometimes three of them attacked from different sides all in the space of a minute. Sometimes even taking a small breather between your 6th and 7th rasher of bacon caused them to ask hopefully if they could relieve you of the burden of your plate. Maybe they have to collect dirty plates like soldiers collecting booty on a battlefield, and are paid in accordance with how many they collect.
Valletta was a hop, skip and a jump away, although access to the city was a little less than impressive, due to the current obsession the Maltese authorities have with "rehabilitating" their ancient fortifications, which we saw in site after site. This evidently involves shrouding them in scaffolding and doubtless feeding them dry bread and water and putting them through an improving exercise regime until they repent.
Our first port of call was the Co-Cathedral of St John. The "co" part of its title comes from the fact that it shares cathedral status with the cathedral of St Paul in Mdina. The Cathedral of St Paul in Mdina seems to dispute this fact, and trumpets itself as the one true cathedral of the entire island. I do hope they come to blows one day.
According to the audio guide, the Knights were in sober mood when they built the cathedral, so they made it all austere and bleak. Apparently they quickly cheered up, and went on a bit of a decorating spree.
The floors attempted to remain sober and bleak, being scattered with skulls, but even they were frequently in a jocular mode. Isn't this one having a simply glorious time being a skull? It also has access to a very good dentist.
I'm a little less sure about the mood of this one, who appears to be wearing glasses while trying to eat some guns.
The Knights of St John were organised according to nationality in "langues," which seem to have been rather like school houses. The
In the courtyard of the cathedral there was a plaque commemorating all the Knights who died during the Great Siege of Malta. I particularly liked some of the names of those from the Italian langue:
After the cathedral, we headed to the Grand Master's Palace, now the seat of Maltese government. There was precious little knightly austerity there, too.
The Palace had an impressive armoury, packed full of various medieval and Renaissance weaponry, which the knights presumably kept hold of just in case they came in useful later, like Pellinor with his Really Useful Boxes full of "obsolete computer stuff." When Napoleon came along, the Knights surrended without a fight. I'm inclined to believe that this was because they were drowning in 597 obsolete morions and couldn't find the boxes they'd just received from Modern Weapons R Us.
The morions had a cute little pointy bit on the top, as if they'd just been plucked from the branches of the morion tree. This helmet was even cuter:
I was impressed by the pert buttocks of this Hercules. Maybe Health and Fitness magazines should start working on the Twelve Labours Workout Plan.
After the Palace, we realised that it was round about 3 and we hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, so went into a little cafe and had their Maltese Platter - shedloads of food and a glass of wine each for just under 10 Euros - then went to the Museum of Archaeology. The wine made Maltese prehistory seem rather fuzzy, but the main theme seemed to be, "Um, actually, we don't have the faintest idea who these people were, what they were doing or where they went afterwards, but, hey, cool temples!"
After things closed, we went back to the hotel and attempted to enjoy cocktails by the seafront, but the outdoor bar closed at 6, so we went back into Valletta to stroll the ramparts. Here is an evening view of the harbour:
On Saturday we caught a bus to Mdina, the old capital before the Knights built Valletta, where I apparently took no photos at all, probably because the streets were all a bit narrow and the view from the walls a bit hazy. The cathedral museum seemed to consist of everything that the cathedral had happened to acquire over the centuries, coupled with random collections of vague Maltese relevance that various benefactors had given. All these things were then put in an enormous pot, then pulled out and exhibited in random order, with occasional half-hearted labels. Every now and then a new curator must have come along, naive and keen, and tried to institute some order, before bowing to the inevitable. There was an entire room of coins, for example, all labelled and in more or less chronological order, but even then, the spirit of the museum had reasserted itself, causing Pieces of Eight to scatter themselves randomly through the Byzantine Empire.
After tea on the ramparts, we went to a Roman Domus, whose signposts made me want to write Roman graffiti, a la Life of Brian. The authorities don't really have any idea what the domus looked like or who lived in it, but, hey, cool mosaic! Then we went to what the map called "St Paul's Catabombs," but although we saw some cats, no bombs happened. We did find some catacombs, though, which were dark and twisty and maze-like and rather atmospheric.
We then took a bus to the Hagar Qim and Mnajdra temples, examples of the work of the aforementioned "no-one knows... hey, cool temples!" people. They were very spotty.
Returning to the hotel, we checked our booking for the Hal Salflieni hypogeum, a huge complex of ancient underground chambers which have to be booked months in advance, only to find that I'd remembered the day wrong, and we were booked in on Saturday, rather than Sunday, as I'd thought. Oops.
On Saturday night, we partook of one of the hotel's themed buffets, which on Saturdays has a general Mediterranean theme. We ate loads and loads and loads, and just as at breakfast, had to fight marauding waiters who were desperate to liberate us from the burden of our plates. One even tried to snatch away my pudding plate with puddings still uneaten. They also got mortally offended if we tried to pour our own drinks, but were very bad at noticing empty glasses and pouring us more drinks themselves. One waiter went as far as to wrest the bottle from Pellinor's hand when he was happily topping up his own glass. Then we had the audacity to ask for some dessert wine, and got sneered at horribly. Well, we did accidentally order an entire bottle of what was probably the cheapest wine on the menu, when we thought we were ordering a half bottle of something a bit nicer, but they really didn't need to sneer. I don't think waiters should even sneer, but should make the customer think their taste is impeccable, regardless.
The pool area was hosting a wedding, so we went and sat up on the bastion with our legs dangling, and watched them at their partying. Here is a picture of the hotel from the bastion taken the following morning:
The hotel faced Fort Manoel, which is where the King's Landing exteriors were filmed in the first season of Game of Thrones. At night, this was the only dark place on the entire bay, and it remained shady even in daylight. Pellinor decided that it was a haunt of the undead, and kept annoucning his intention to grab a boat and go and fight them, though admittedly he only ever did so after copious amounts of Maltese lager.
As well as Fort Manoel, this picture shows a very fally down building, whose doorway is clearly held together by magic:
On Sunday morning, we went to Fort St Elmo for a vaguely 16th or 17th centuryish re-enactment. Fort St Elmo is not normally open to the public, being a police training school. I liked this firing range, overlooking by an ancient cannon. Overkill, much?
And here are some re-enactors, including one with four legs:
Military commands, I concluded, sound a whole lot better when given in Italian than in English (though I'm not entirely sure why they were using Italian.) It wasn't anything more exciting than "Shoulder your halberds!" or "band, to the left!" but it sounded nicely poetic. But, then, everything sounds more poetic in Italian, to my English ears. I once saw La Boheme in English, and all those lovely arias turned horrid and prosiac, including an exchange that went something like, "You with me so far?" "Yup, carry on!"
At one point, all the various bigwigs kissed the banner of the Order. I hope none of them had colds. How often did the Knights wash their standard? Did they have to go into battle behind a dirty drippy hideous flag, alive with the grime and germs of generations of commanders? Hopefully none of them wore lipstick.
After the re-enactment, we did a rather longer walk around the seafront than we'd intended, before hopping on a bus to go to Birgu, the old home of the Knights before they got round to building Valletta. We had another of our "Oops! We forgot lunch and now it's after 3 o'clock!" lunch-cum-dinners, in a cafe down on the waterfront. It took rather longer than intended, since the waitresses completely ignored us after we'd finished, and ignored all our attempts to actually pay. Once we'd finally persuaded them to accept our money, we had a quick pop around the Maritime Museum, took a boat back to Valletta, had a drink in a cafe overlooking the Grand Harbour, and wandered back to the hotel for a very early night, since an enormous mountain of buffet food the night before did not make for a good night's sleep.
On Monday, we embarked on the long journey - bus, ferry then bus again - to get to the Citadel on Gozo, where we wandered the ramparts, admiring the view. Here are two Citadel lizards, since I can't decide which picture I prefer:
We visited the old prison and the Museum of Gozitan Archaelogy (more of the "nobody knows... hey, cool!" sort of stuff) then got a bus to Dwejra, which has exciting cliffs and exciting deep holes in the water, from which divers periodically pop out, like Venus from the waves, if Venus wore flippers.
Obligatory photo of the Emerald Arch:
Here is Pellinor looking like an English tourist abroad, minus only the handkerchief on his head. A little earlier he was wearing his shoes tied around his neck, but he removed them before I thought to take a picture.
Barely five minutes from the Arch, we shed all the tourists and were able to wander over vegetation-infested bare rock, while lizards skittered away all over the place, making me jump. Notices warned us that boats and divers were likely to be passing under arches and holes in the cliffs below, and asked us not to throw things at them.
And here are some cart ruts, yet more of the "no-one knows..." school of Maltese archaeology. Basically they're ruts, and they might have been made by carts, but might not have been, but, hey, cool ruts! At times like this, I find myself wishing that some hideous disaster should befall our civilisation, just so future archaeologists can have something to be baffled about, since they only seem to be happy when they can throw wildly conflicting theories at each other, based on very little evidence at all.
Back in the Citadel on Gozo, we ate in a restaurant on the ramparts (at 4 p.m. - yet another unholy lunch/dinner combination) where we had a very nice dinner of Maltese specialities. Pellinor had rabbit stew, and the chap serving us told him that the traditional way to eat it was with his fingers. He duly obliged, but part of me wonders if it was part of "let's see what crazy thing we can get the tourists to do this time!" bet. Pellinor gave a rather generous tip, which resulted in him being commanded not to leave until we'd been plied with some rather nice carob liqueur - "the good one from my special stock - not the stuff we give to tourists." Then it was time for the long journey back to the hotel, for a drink or two, then bed.
Today we travelled. We almost failed to leave Valletta, since neither the ticket machines nor the drivers would accept paper money, but got out of it eventually, to queue, fly, queue, drive, queue, float, and walk our way home.
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Date: 2012-05-29 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-29 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-29 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-29 09:13 pm (UTC)Oh, and we also found a plaque to mark the place where Nicholas Upton died - something that we see happening in the novel (though I have to admit that I'd forgotten about this until I did my quick skim just now.)
Gozo's a lot bigger than I'd imagined it from the book...
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Date: 2012-05-29 10:30 pm (UTC)I might just begin that series again very soon indeed. :-)
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Date: 2012-05-29 08:38 pm (UTC)It's amazing how quickly people think 'Oh, stuff austerity - let's paint it gold!'
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Date: 2012-05-30 08:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 09:29 am (UTC)Spotty Temples of Mystery are much less bother, apart from the fact that they're a bit gloomy, on account of wearing hats.