Dear Everyone,
I know only a week has gone by, but we are on a touristy
trip, so there is enough happening to warrant another letter (and many
photographs!)
The weather here has been quite variable. There have been high winds (gusts up to 35
mph), and a lot of days with rain showers.
Temperatures have hovered around 60.
This is as green as it gets around here.
The first few days this week were not particularly
interesting. We investigated a couple of
other grocery stores (Welbee and Foodville) and now have a pretty good idea of
what we can find or not. We looked at a
health / fitness club called Cynergy, in
San Giljan (St. Julian). It’s associated
with a hotel, and so has an indoor pool, a sauna and small steam room, lots of
aerobic exercise and weight equipment, a large room for classes, etc. We saw a decent number of people our age exercising. The annual fee is pretty reasonable, so I
could see joining if we lived nearby.
Thursday, we went to the Farsons brewery experience. This the main brewery in Malta (there are also local craft breweries). Farsons is a corporation formed by three separate brewing families (Farrugia [Farsons], Simonds, and Scicluna [Cisk, from a mispronunciation of the Maltese word for bank checks]). Beer culture started in the early 1900s and was always associated with the British military (the Simonds family). The Farrugias became involved after the 1919 independence riots (caused by WWI food shortages) that destroyed their flour mill. The Sciclunas had a competing product (mostly export) until WW2, when the combined company won a non-competitive bid on a contract for a lucrative Libyan brewery, which enabled their expansion in the early 1950s. Supplying beer to sailors at anchorage was an important (vital!) part of the war effort. The brewery had s specially sized three wheeled truck (the Scarab) to delivery beer to the many bars of Valletta.
The tour was an audio guide through a section of the 1950s
brewery that had been carefully designed to take advantage of gravity, so the
mashing tuns were on the fifth floor, and the various brewing steps descended
to the basement where bottling took place. At the end we had flights of five
beers (with a great bartender), and then we went on to have an okay late lunch
(with craft beer), but a great dessert - - dates paste in a flaky fried pastry,
drizzled with local honey, served with ice cream.
Friday Cindy woke to an email indicating that her credit
card was compromised. She had to cancel the
old account and they are issuing a new card. After some back and forth with Chase,
she decided to have the new one sent home, since we can’t guarantee the
security of mail delivery at our Airbnb. Since she left her secondary card home
to guard against wallet loss, we are solely dependent on my card now!
Later that morning, we took a bus from Swieqi to
Rabat/Mdina. We got to the bus stop
early, and when our bus arrived it was already filled (mostly tourists like us,
Mdina gets 3 million tourists annually).
I ended up standing for the 60 minute ride, ugh.
We went to Mdina for a few hours last October, but there
were things we did not visit, and importantly, this time we joined a small
guided group. First, however, we went to
see the Roman domus. A domus is like a villa, but was also the
administrative center of the area, so I guess you could consider this the
Governor’s palace. The site was discovered
when the British were building a railroad from Mdina to Valletta, and
unfortunately this was not during an era of careful archeological excavation,
so much of the domus was inadvertently destroyed. Still, there are the remains of a very nice
mosaic floor and statuary representing the Claudius family.
We had lunch and then
visited the National
Museum of Natural History, housed in the palace built by one of the Knights
of Malta in the early 1700s. This was disappointing. There is a large display of rocks and
minerals, displays of fossils (with associated storyboards from the 1970s
discussing evolution), a few small rooms with animal skeletons, insects, and fish,
and a large room with a great variety of bird specimens. It is like the dusty display halls of the Field
museum that few people ever visit, but much smaller (the entire museum would not be even one hall’s worth of the Field).
Then we had a very nice tour of Mdina and Rabat by a local
tour guide, Chris Galea. Phoenicians
were the first to build a fortress at Mdina, because it is one of the highest
points in Malta (you can see the whole island from atop, and even Sicily, 200
miles away on a clear day when the wind is right and there is no Sahara dust in
the air). I had no idea that the Carthaginian
empire was actually the Phonencian empire (the word “Punic” is actually Roman
for Phoenician). The Phoenician empire
extended from the Levant along North Africa all the way to Gibraltar, with
important outposts in Sardinia. Their
culture actually survived after the Punic wars, and they adopted Christianity
before the Romans did (St. Augustine was from Hippo, a Carthaginian city).
When the Romans, the Arabs, and the Normans took over Malta
they continued to use Mdina as the administrative center. (Mdina is Arabic for “walled
citadel”, and rabat means “suburbs of the Mdina”). However, the Knights decided to build
Valletta when they were given the island by the Aragonese, because they were a
mercenary sea power, and not interested in agriculture (also, they had to pay
only minimal tribute to their kingly overlords). This significantly weakened the power of the
land-based local nobility, especially as the Knights paid higher wages to the
local population.
Over the centuries the local nobility became increasingly
impoverished, and the population of Mdina decreased. There are fewer than 100 people living in the
city today (although the ‘official’ number is 300, the bare minimum to have an
established polity), and other than selling parcels of land, they make a living
as tourist entrepreneurs. Perhaps the
most well-known is Fontanella,
a tea garden established in 1975. The Baroness
owns three Mercedes, and her son is the mayor of Mdina, but other nobles own
restaurants, BnBs, souvenir shops, etc. It's almost impossible to change even the insides of many of these antique palaces. The external doorways are also often very small; I don't know how you would get new furniture inside, let alone construction equipment
Then we went into Rabat, where we saw several churches and
monasteries. The three recent popes have
all prayed at the Basilica St. Paul.
After the tour we went to the Confessions
bar (full of Christian statuary) for cocktails and nibbles. We had an
interesting conversation with the owner, who would love to open a distillery,
but they are not allowed in Malta—only breweries and vineyards.
Malta is a Catholic country, and so they have a large (five
day) Carnival celebration. We went into
Valletta Saturday morning to see some of the floats. The mornings are more kid-based, with
dance competitions from the different children’s krewes. Everyone seemed to be
having a good time, and it was quite crowded.
I’m sure it is crazier at night when the more adult-themed partying
takes place (and the celebrations in Gozo are reportedly even more satiric).
After this we had time to visit the main
Maltese public library in Floriana, Malta.
It was even more disappointing as the natural history museum. Most of their holdings are electronic (much more
expensive), with around 100K physical books.
This sounds like a lot, but that’s only several small rooms. I don’t know how many the Hinsdale (population
under 20K) public library has, but probably double or triple Floriana, and
there is access to the SWAN library network, which has 8-10 million books. Clearly, I won’t be giving up my library privileges
any time soon!
We spent most of today dealing with various electronic
frustrations - - getting visas to the UK, train tickets, airport pick-ups,
etc. Still, was easier than it would
have been (if not impossible) even a few years ago.
Love, H.
No comments:
Post a Comment