Well, we had an uneventful journey home on Monday and I have nearly caught up with all the laundry. I am going to make occasional postings here when not wandering though so that the blog remains active.
We came home to a new bathroom which had been fitted in our absence and it is absolutely fabulous. Strictly speaking it is a shower room now, we have one of those walk in showers with a seat which can be lowered on one side to sit down whilst showering and grab rails to get in and out. We don't actually need it yet but we think it is well to prepare now for a hopefully long time away when we do. Neither of us has laid in a bath for years, we much prefer showers, so it has been done with only us in mind. I have a copy of The Wilton Diptych in the bathroom and that has decided the colour scheme. All the fittings are white (new modern lavatory and basin) and most of the tiles are too, there are a dozen or so tiles with a pattern of a three shades of blue in squares. The floor is blue with golden speckles and whilst in Malta I bought a large Maltese Cross at Mdina Glass which is the same blue as the floor and has bits of gold in it.
I feel like a top class interior designer!
However, the kitchen now looks shabby so I have surrounded myself with brochurs and graph paper!
Friday, 18 March 2011
Sunday, 13 March 2011
Photographs
I would like to say thank you to those of you who have posted comments - I feel very privileged to have shared this wonderful holiday. It has been an amazing journey and I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. For anyone who is interested in art and history it is an incredible place, and the food and drink are quite interesting too.
We brought my laptop which only has Windows2000 but Onslows Big Stuff at home has Windows 7 so that may enable some of his fabulous photographs to be posted.
We brought my laptop which only has Windows2000 but Onslows Big Stuff at home has Windows 7 so that may enable some of his fabulous photographs to be posted.
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Armaments and Art
Yesterday we got up early, had a light breakfast and set off for Fort Rinella. This journey entails a change of bus at Valletta and we are back in at the bus station. Apparently the temporary bus station was only because of Carnival, but the road up from Floriana is a building site. It is awful, but at least one knows where to find the bus again. We caught the number 4 which goes out through Marsa and Paola, skirts the Three Cities and ends up out at the wilds of Fort Rinella. A chap got on carrying a bird cage with a tiny little singing bird inside, he got off outside the women's prison at Paola - I wonder if he was taking the bird visiting?
At Fort Rinella a guided tour had just begun so we tagged on along at the back of it. The tour guide was dressed as a Victorian soldier and extremely easy on the eye. Probably in his mid twenties, he was extremely knowledgeable about the subject and had an enchanting accent and smile. I may be a grandmother but always had a penchant for men in uniform - after all, I did marry one. There is not an awful lot to see at the fort, a massive Armstrong gun held Onslow's attention for a while, and we wandered around the museum area where there was a very good exhibition of Victorian military paraphenalia. The officer's bunk had a gruesome stuffed cat on the bed and the common soldier's barracked bed brought back memories of my own Army service.
The really interesting things - to me anyway - were the demonstations. My young soldier, now known as Manoel and my new best friend, firstly showed how information was communicated via mirrors, lamps and semaphore. There was a tiny Asian gentleman who really had a problem understanding the mirrors and Morse - this chap could only have been about four feet high and he was weighed down with cameras, two of which had telephoto lenses which must been over a foot long. If you had put them all together I am pretty sure they would have been taller than he was. Manoel explained that the signallers were very highly skilled and protected from the worst of battle, the infantry and cavalry were much more expendable. Since my army service had me trained and attached to the Royal Signals I decided that I was obviously the Creme de la Creme and Onslow might stop calling me Monica (my obsessive list making as per Monica in Friends) and start calling me Miss Brodie any minute now. The second demonstration was of rifles, Manoel showed how they developed from flintlock all the way to breech loading over about four hundred years. He fired a few and big bangs reverberated in the fort, I could imagine that defence of a fortification like that would be extremely noisy.
We did not stay for the drill demonstations and instead headed back to Valletta to go to the Museum of Archeology to see the famous Sleeping Lady since our Heritage pass covered us for this. The chap on the desk gave us a couple of leaflets and told us to start at the top floor so we caught the lift up and there before us was the most enormous treat - an Art Nouveau exhibition featuring the work of Alphonse Mucha. I was not familiar with the name but recognised some of the work, the famous "Seasons" series of beautiful women lounging around in their nighties with symbols of the different seasons was one section. Some of the graphics from poster designs were also familiar, the Ruinart champagne advertisement in particular. There were also all the posters advertising Sarah Bernhardt's theatrical triumphs - I had never seen the "Hamlet" before. It was truly a magnificent exhibition and I could easily have missed it.
And then we went for an ice cream and caught our final ferry from Valletta back to Sliema. Today, our last day, we have nothing planned but the weather looks a bit wild and windy so I don't think we will get up to much.
At Fort Rinella a guided tour had just begun so we tagged on along at the back of it. The tour guide was dressed as a Victorian soldier and extremely easy on the eye. Probably in his mid twenties, he was extremely knowledgeable about the subject and had an enchanting accent and smile. I may be a grandmother but always had a penchant for men in uniform - after all, I did marry one. There is not an awful lot to see at the fort, a massive Armstrong gun held Onslow's attention for a while, and we wandered around the museum area where there was a very good exhibition of Victorian military paraphenalia. The officer's bunk had a gruesome stuffed cat on the bed and the common soldier's barracked bed brought back memories of my own Army service.
The really interesting things - to me anyway - were the demonstations. My young soldier, now known as Manoel and my new best friend, firstly showed how information was communicated via mirrors, lamps and semaphore. There was a tiny Asian gentleman who really had a problem understanding the mirrors and Morse - this chap could only have been about four feet high and he was weighed down with cameras, two of which had telephoto lenses which must been over a foot long. If you had put them all together I am pretty sure they would have been taller than he was. Manoel explained that the signallers were very highly skilled and protected from the worst of battle, the infantry and cavalry were much more expendable. Since my army service had me trained and attached to the Royal Signals I decided that I was obviously the Creme de la Creme and Onslow might stop calling me Monica (my obsessive list making as per Monica in Friends) and start calling me Miss Brodie any minute now. The second demonstration was of rifles, Manoel showed how they developed from flintlock all the way to breech loading over about four hundred years. He fired a few and big bangs reverberated in the fort, I could imagine that defence of a fortification like that would be extremely noisy.
We did not stay for the drill demonstations and instead headed back to Valletta to go to the Museum of Archeology to see the famous Sleeping Lady since our Heritage pass covered us for this. The chap on the desk gave us a couple of leaflets and told us to start at the top floor so we caught the lift up and there before us was the most enormous treat - an Art Nouveau exhibition featuring the work of Alphonse Mucha. I was not familiar with the name but recognised some of the work, the famous "Seasons" series of beautiful women lounging around in their nighties with symbols of the different seasons was one section. Some of the graphics from poster designs were also familiar, the Ruinart champagne advertisement in particular. There were also all the posters advertising Sarah Bernhardt's theatrical triumphs - I had never seen the "Hamlet" before. It was truly a magnificent exhibition and I could easily have missed it.
And then we went for an ice cream and caught our final ferry from Valletta back to Sliema. Today, our last day, we have nothing planned but the weather looks a bit wild and windy so I don't think we will get up to much.
Friday, 11 March 2011
Sausages and Ships
We are getting down to our last few days and only had two things left on the to do list. One was Fort Rinella and the other a harbour cruise for which we have a Captain Morgan voucher. So yesterday we got up, had a cooked breakfast and I packed up sandwiches and found drinks to make the journey out to Fort Rinella. I wandered on to the balcony to hang a bit of laundry out to dry and discovered that the sun was beating down, the sky was blue and it looked like a glorious wind free day. So we shoved the packed lunches in the fridge and went off to do a harbour cruise instead. It was good, but I think on balance the Luzzu cruise we did a few weeks ago was better. The Luzzu boats go up all the creeks and the Captain Morgan one only did about half the distance. There are more warships in Grand Harbour, we saw two Indian and one Korean as well as Cumberland - they are obviously here to rescue nationals who have been working in Libya.
We came back to the flat and had our packed lunch and then I went wandering off to do some food shopping, probably the last we will need because we go home on Monday. I bought some interesting looking sausages, very coarsely ground pork which looked as though they had spices dotted around. The butcher told me that they were special Maltese sausages with pepper and "things" mixed in - his own secret recipe. They were quite large so I asked for three and they weighed just over 400g, plenty for two greedy people. I then went to the greengrocer for some potatoes and a cabbage but the cabbages were all huge and as I pondered about them the chap just chopped one in half, cut off the outer leaves and then weighed my portion. Not a habit I am accustomed to in the wilds of Worcestershire.
The sausages were fabulous, porky, peppery, garlicky and quite salty with a very firm texture. I made some onion gravy using a cup a soup and an onion and was quite impressed with it, an emergency gravy when camping or self catering which was very palatable.
We now have Saturday and Sunday left and only Fort Rinella to do before going home on Monday.
We came back to the flat and had our packed lunch and then I went wandering off to do some food shopping, probably the last we will need because we go home on Monday. I bought some interesting looking sausages, very coarsely ground pork which looked as though they had spices dotted around. The butcher told me that they were special Maltese sausages with pepper and "things" mixed in - his own secret recipe. They were quite large so I asked for three and they weighed just over 400g, plenty for two greedy people. I then went to the greengrocer for some potatoes and a cabbage but the cabbages were all huge and as I pondered about them the chap just chopped one in half, cut off the outer leaves and then weighed my portion. Not a habit I am accustomed to in the wilds of Worcestershire.
The sausages were fabulous, porky, peppery, garlicky and quite salty with a very firm texture. I made some onion gravy using a cup a soup and an onion and was quite impressed with it, an emergency gravy when camping or self catering which was very palatable.
We now have Saturday and Sunday left and only Fort Rinella to do before going home on Monday.
Thursday, 10 March 2011
St John's Co-Cathedral
Yesterday afternoon we went to St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta. It was fairly high on the list of places to see but every time we went into Valletta a cruise ship had docked and the queues were a bit off putting. There was no queue yesterday so we went in, it is absolutely unbelieveable. Outside is a plain limestone building with no clues about the ornate decoration inside. It was for over two hundred years the conventual church of the Order of the Knights of St John and all eight langues vied with each other to produce the most ornate chapel. The Grand Masters and Knights donated wonderful gifts of major works of art. Preti is the main painter contributing but there are lots of other works, including a Carravagio. There are over four hundred tombs covered by marble heraldic shields as a floor, even the protective carpeting has Maltese Crosses in the design. There are quite a few marble monuments, one to Nicholas Cotoner is particularly fine, there is a length of chain mail carved from the Carreras marble which is incredible.
I have never before seen such a wonderful High Baroque interior. One of the chapels was not open because of restoration work so I will just have to return in a couple of years and see it, and the rest of it again. There was a separate exhibition of tapestries and vestments, we saw an amazing collection of these at Avignon some years ago but the Grand Knights' collection can hold its own. Some of them were worked in silver thread and must have been rather heavy to wear.
We felt we deserved an ice cream after all that culture and headed for the posh place in the square but I got sales resistance at the prices. For a cone to eat whilst walking about it was E3.80 so I did not even look at the sitting down prices. We turned the corner and went to Marks and Spencer cafe and got a big bowl for £2.30, the day's English newspapers were thrown in too. They have an unusual method of ordering food and drink in the cafe, you go to the till and order and pay and then take your receipt to the counter and are served. We could do with that system in Worcester, I have given up using the cafe there because the coffee is always cold by the time you have queued to pay.
I have never before seen such a wonderful High Baroque interior. One of the chapels was not open because of restoration work so I will just have to return in a couple of years and see it, and the rest of it again. There was a separate exhibition of tapestries and vestments, we saw an amazing collection of these at Avignon some years ago but the Grand Knights' collection can hold its own. Some of them were worked in silver thread and must have been rather heavy to wear.
We felt we deserved an ice cream after all that culture and headed for the posh place in the square but I got sales resistance at the prices. For a cone to eat whilst walking about it was E3.80 so I did not even look at the sitting down prices. We turned the corner and went to Marks and Spencer cafe and got a big bowl for £2.30, the day's English newspapers were thrown in too. They have an unusual method of ordering food and drink in the cafe, you go to the till and order and pay and then take your receipt to the counter and are served. We could do with that system in Worcester, I have given up using the cafe there because the coffee is always cold by the time you have queued to pay.
Mosta
Onslow is getting a bit fed up of churches and hates the number 65 bus with a venom so I got up early and left him in bed and went off to Mosta on my own. One of the lovely things about Malta is that I feel quite happy wandering around on my own, because everyone speaks English and they drive on the left it all seems very unthreatening. I regularly leave the flat at around 0745 to go to the supermarket and the lady who lives round the corner has started ambushing me for a chat so I built in time to talk to her on the way for the bus. She has three sons, all of them married to tarts apparently, who never visit her. Her grandchildren have not been properly brought up and she very seldom sees them either. Human nature eh? It is the same the world over. She is very nice to me (I am obviously not a tart and would make a fine daughter-in-law) and we regularly spend ten minutes sorting the world out. If I am accompanied by Onslow she never appears. I think she must look out of her side balcony window, spot me turning the corner and rush down to greet me.
Mosta - incredible. I was there for just before nine and the Dome (or Rotunda) was practically empty. There were a couple of men at their devotions so I simply put my scarf on and sat quietly at the back whilst I took in the full splendour of this beautiful church. It is huge, I think the only domed church I have been in which is larger is St Peter's in Rome. I counted the rows of chairs in front of me and then counted the number in each row and a bit of mental arithmetic revealed that there were at least 1400 seats so celebrations of Mass could take in most of the district. There are six side chapels and the altars would be needed to provide communion for so many at one service. The side chapels themselves are sort of half dome shaped and have three major paintings in each, and the parts of the church separating them have another three each. Then the main entrance with the glorious statues and the main altar with wonderful paintings and the fantastic painted Stations of the Cross means that there were about fifty major works of art to enjoy. And the domed ceiling with the gold bosses leading up to the blue and gold petal pattern was just awesome.
I am so glad that I went early, by about 0940 tourists by the bus load appeared and the beautiful peace was shattered. There were four tours of about thirty or forty people in each group in the church by the time I left, two German, one Italian and one British. All the leaders were lecturing their groups and it sounded like the Tower of Babel.
I know that I am a tourist too, but at least I am a quiet one.
Mosta - incredible. I was there for just before nine and the Dome (or Rotunda) was practically empty. There were a couple of men at their devotions so I simply put my scarf on and sat quietly at the back whilst I took in the full splendour of this beautiful church. It is huge, I think the only domed church I have been in which is larger is St Peter's in Rome. I counted the rows of chairs in front of me and then counted the number in each row and a bit of mental arithmetic revealed that there were at least 1400 seats so celebrations of Mass could take in most of the district. There are six side chapels and the altars would be needed to provide communion for so many at one service. The side chapels themselves are sort of half dome shaped and have three major paintings in each, and the parts of the church separating them have another three each. Then the main entrance with the glorious statues and the main altar with wonderful paintings and the fantastic painted Stations of the Cross means that there were about fifty major works of art to enjoy. And the domed ceiling with the gold bosses leading up to the blue and gold petal pattern was just awesome.
I am so glad that I went early, by about 0940 tourists by the bus load appeared and the beautiful peace was shattered. There were four tours of about thirty or forty people in each group in the church by the time I left, two German, one Italian and one British. All the leaders were lecturing their groups and it sounded like the Tower of Babel.
I know that I am a tourist too, but at least I am a quiet one.
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
St Julians and Marsaxlokk
The weather is bright and sunny and quite warm but the sea is pretty vicious at the moment and none of the boat trips are happening. No matter, we just adopted plan B and yesterday took the bus to St Julians which is not very far away and just around Spinola Bay from where we are in Gzira. St Julians has a modern Augustinian church which is only open for masses, it looked very interesting though in a Paddy's Wigwam sort of way. There is also a yacht harbour full of rich men's playthings. There are two separate harbours, one for motor boats and the other for sailing boats and a happy hour was spent wandering around in the sunshine looking at them. We came across a delightful bronze statue of a fisherman mending his net, trying to extricate a small fish from the net and being extremely closely observed by a little bronze cat a few feet away. Charming.
We thought we would have lunch out and Onslow spotted McDonalds so we went there. It was a rather odd McDonalds, at the front overlooking the harbour is what is called "McCaff" and this has people serving coffee and cakes, quite a decent selection of both. Behind that is the traditional McDonalds and upstairs there is a party room - it sounded as though a few hundred small people were celebrating the end of Carnival up there.
We came back to the flat and I went for a lovely long swim, I was in the pool for a good hour and never saw another soul. The sun was shining in through the glass walls, I could see the skyline of Valletta every other length and it was one of the best swims I have ever had.
We got up this morning intending to do the other harbour cruise we have a voucher for but it is still pretty windy out there so no boats were working. We instead took the bus to Marsaxlokk and spent a pleasant hour just sitting by the sea and watching the fishermen. The water there was very calm and the sun was beating down and it is only about six miles away. We opted to have lunch in Marsaxlokk and found a table by the quayside outside Cafe de Paris and ordered a set lunch. Onslow had fish soup and I had garlic bread as a starter, his soup was broth like in consistency but very strong on flavour, my garlic bread was simply a slice of bread spread with garlic butter and then sprinkled with cheese before baking for a few minutes - both were fabulous. We both then opted for the mussels and chips, a very large plate with about twenty five mussels in a garlicky buttery sauce, a heap of chips and a generous portion of salad. A basket of bread and butter on the side completed the food. Three glasses of wine, a large diet Coke and a coffee brought the total cost to just under seventeen Euros. How do they do it?
We were early for our return bus, which is just as well because the bus left five minutes before it was even due to arrive! Bus timetables are regarded as a challenge by the drivers I think because they seldom work as per the schedule I have.
We thought we would have lunch out and Onslow spotted McDonalds so we went there. It was a rather odd McDonalds, at the front overlooking the harbour is what is called "McCaff" and this has people serving coffee and cakes, quite a decent selection of both. Behind that is the traditional McDonalds and upstairs there is a party room - it sounded as though a few hundred small people were celebrating the end of Carnival up there.
We came back to the flat and I went for a lovely long swim, I was in the pool for a good hour and never saw another soul. The sun was shining in through the glass walls, I could see the skyline of Valletta every other length and it was one of the best swims I have ever had.
We got up this morning intending to do the other harbour cruise we have a voucher for but it is still pretty windy out there so no boats were working. We instead took the bus to Marsaxlokk and spent a pleasant hour just sitting by the sea and watching the fishermen. The water there was very calm and the sun was beating down and it is only about six miles away. We opted to have lunch in Marsaxlokk and found a table by the quayside outside Cafe de Paris and ordered a set lunch. Onslow had fish soup and I had garlic bread as a starter, his soup was broth like in consistency but very strong on flavour, my garlic bread was simply a slice of bread spread with garlic butter and then sprinkled with cheese before baking for a few minutes - both were fabulous. We both then opted for the mussels and chips, a very large plate with about twenty five mussels in a garlicky buttery sauce, a heap of chips and a generous portion of salad. A basket of bread and butter on the side completed the food. Three glasses of wine, a large diet Coke and a coffee brought the total cost to just under seventeen Euros. How do they do it?
We were early for our return bus, which is just as well because the bus left five minutes before it was even due to arrive! Bus timetables are regarded as a challenge by the drivers I think because they seldom work as per the schedule I have.
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