Malta - Hot and Spicy with added Dave
Aug. 31st, 2015 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dave_future_predatorMalta was... interesting. Very hot, day and night, and the town where we were staying had a festival going on all week, with a bit of a band-off on the Friday night - I've never been anywhere that treats the brass band as if it was the local football club or something, so that was all very interesting! Great to see hubby's brother, partner, and doggie, as well :D
I really didn't take an awful lot of pics, but here is a bit of Valetta (the not-pretty bit, LOL). Still, gives you a feel for the harbours and stone that give the island its character and history as a great port, home to the Knights Templar and all that. Valetta was good, I enjoyed seeing all the Caravaggios at the cathedral, which is ridiculously ornate inside.
Mdina is where I started taking a few more pics, I think. This is the walled city inland, famed as a location for King's Landing in Game of Thrones. Tiny place, with lots of little alleys, makes for a very nice visit. This is the gate at the bridge over the moat.
Mdina has an incredible view over the surrounding landscape, from our lovely lunch cafe we could see about a quarter of the whole island. Somewhere in this photo is the Mosta dome church, famous when a WWII bomb crashed through the roof during a service but never exploded.
Another King's landing street *g*
We visited the temples at Ħaġar Qim. They are supposed to be older than even Stonehenge. It was a baking day, and the temples now have a shade to try and stop them from eroding further, and made it bearable for the humans!! Amazing place. This should give a sense of scale, see the little people on the left.
And here is Dave, showing off an ornate doorway. Many of the stones were decorated with lots of little depressions. Of course, the temple complexes (and there are two at the site) are all lined up for a show at the equinoxes, etc. All very incredible. I think Dave is balanced on the rope-post :)
On that same coast, the west, we visited the Dingli cliffs. So very exposed and wild. With a cool radar station, that apparently has an underground bunker beneath it, built just before WWII, handily.
Obligatory trip to Comino to see the blue lagoon, although it was nuts with visitors and we stayed literally half an hour. The little ferry we took there had to queue to get into the bay, it was jammers with people swimming in the blue bit :) and almost no shade. We grabbed some fast food, had a quick dip, then got back on the next ferry out, that took us around the caves, with the little bays full of posh yachts. Nice to see the lagoon, but we couldn't get out of there fast enough!
Much more our thing was taking a visit to a crazy little museum at St.Agatha's catacombs. Before they took you down into the tunnels where they buried their dead from the 3rd century, and had wall paintings from the 12th, you got to look round the little museum, that had everything from dinosaur egg to samien ware, with a bunch of chasubles and Egyptian statues too 0_o. The crypt was really cool, and had perhaps the oldest church in the world down there, from the 3rd century.
And outside we saw a chameleon!! Apparently Jesuit priests brought them over.
Hubby's brother, partner, and greyhound/great-dane-cross puppy, live in Birkirkara. It's a town just outside the capital, and it was some big festival week (although this happens a lot, and everywhere, apparently) which involvces fireworks waking you up from 8am every day, and the main church lit up at night like it's Christmas. On Sunday, when the statue of St Helena was paraded through the street for 2 hours, everyone was out, dressed to the 9s, drinking beer, it was mad. This was the bandstand on Friday, 2 brass bands taking turns to play stuff. One played traditional music that got everyone singing and chanting, then the other one played something like OMI's Cheerleader (not a lie) or Avicii's Hey, Brother. It did, in fact, rock. My video sounds like it's underwater, but it was pretty much like this, if you want to share the bizarre experience *g*
We had a nice trip to Gozo (or, as hubby tended to call it, Gonzo) on Saturday. We swam in the inland sea, and took pics of the azure window :D The inland sea is a bay on the other side of these cliffs, through a hole, making a sheltered little harbour, well, inland.
On Gozo, we spent some time on a farm, where the owner showed us around, we got to taste wines, local foods, olive oil. It was really interesting, and he was a real character. Animals are kept mostly indoors on Malta, probably because of the heat and there is no grazing, so you would walk along a street and hear birds or a horse in a garage! Very odd. This guy had emus and pigs and goats all in shaded enclosures. The pigs escaped while we were there *g* And this is a caper plant. I had no idea what a caper plant looked like. Real, wild, capers taste fab, quite different to the jar we normally get here.
We spent much of Sunday at Marsaxlokk, where they have a fish market. Hubby talked bee keeping with the man on the honey stall. We took a lot of honey home, bought it all over the islands nearly every day, making a collection! The market was nice, very pretty and fun, with the traditional Maltese boats bobbing in the bay.
Monday we swam in Exiles Bay, St Julians, with the fish all around us, just perfect. It was near where we'd been a few days before with their puppy swimming after his rubber ducky :) It's lovely just to float in the water there. We were in the sea nearly every day, even if just for a few minutes. Cools you down perfectly. I enjoyed Malta - it was too, too hot but crazily interesting. Loved the brass bands! Really nice to see some local flavour instead of just the tourist sites. A good holiday, but my god, it was nice to see water falling out of the sky back in Liverpool - yeah, rain!!
I really didn't take an awful lot of pics, but here is a bit of Valetta (the not-pretty bit, LOL). Still, gives you a feel for the harbours and stone that give the island its character and history as a great port, home to the Knights Templar and all that. Valetta was good, I enjoyed seeing all the Caravaggios at the cathedral, which is ridiculously ornate inside.
Mdina is where I started taking a few more pics, I think. This is the walled city inland, famed as a location for King's Landing in Game of Thrones. Tiny place, with lots of little alleys, makes for a very nice visit. This is the gate at the bridge over the moat.
Mdina has an incredible view over the surrounding landscape, from our lovely lunch cafe we could see about a quarter of the whole island. Somewhere in this photo is the Mosta dome church, famous when a WWII bomb crashed through the roof during a service but never exploded.
Another King's landing street *g*
We visited the temples at Ħaġar Qim. They are supposed to be older than even Stonehenge. It was a baking day, and the temples now have a shade to try and stop them from eroding further, and made it bearable for the humans!! Amazing place. This should give a sense of scale, see the little people on the left.
And here is Dave, showing off an ornate doorway. Many of the stones were decorated with lots of little depressions. Of course, the temple complexes (and there are two at the site) are all lined up for a show at the equinoxes, etc. All very incredible. I think Dave is balanced on the rope-post :)
On that same coast, the west, we visited the Dingli cliffs. So very exposed and wild. With a cool radar station, that apparently has an underground bunker beneath it, built just before WWII, handily.
Obligatory trip to Comino to see the blue lagoon, although it was nuts with visitors and we stayed literally half an hour. The little ferry we took there had to queue to get into the bay, it was jammers with people swimming in the blue bit :) and almost no shade. We grabbed some fast food, had a quick dip, then got back on the next ferry out, that took us around the caves, with the little bays full of posh yachts. Nice to see the lagoon, but we couldn't get out of there fast enough!
Much more our thing was taking a visit to a crazy little museum at St.Agatha's catacombs. Before they took you down into the tunnels where they buried their dead from the 3rd century, and had wall paintings from the 12th, you got to look round the little museum, that had everything from dinosaur egg to samien ware, with a bunch of chasubles and Egyptian statues too 0_o. The crypt was really cool, and had perhaps the oldest church in the world down there, from the 3rd century.
And outside we saw a chameleon!! Apparently Jesuit priests brought them over.
Hubby's brother, partner, and greyhound/great-dane-cross puppy, live in Birkirkara. It's a town just outside the capital, and it was some big festival week (although this happens a lot, and everywhere, apparently) which involvces fireworks waking you up from 8am every day, and the main church lit up at night like it's Christmas. On Sunday, when the statue of St Helena was paraded through the street for 2 hours, everyone was out, dressed to the 9s, drinking beer, it was mad. This was the bandstand on Friday, 2 brass bands taking turns to play stuff. One played traditional music that got everyone singing and chanting, then the other one played something like OMI's Cheerleader (not a lie) or Avicii's Hey, Brother. It did, in fact, rock. My video sounds like it's underwater, but it was pretty much like this, if you want to share the bizarre experience *g*
We had a nice trip to Gozo (or, as hubby tended to call it, Gonzo) on Saturday. We swam in the inland sea, and took pics of the azure window :D The inland sea is a bay on the other side of these cliffs, through a hole, making a sheltered little harbour, well, inland.
On Gozo, we spent some time on a farm, where the owner showed us around, we got to taste wines, local foods, olive oil. It was really interesting, and he was a real character. Animals are kept mostly indoors on Malta, probably because of the heat and there is no grazing, so you would walk along a street and hear birds or a horse in a garage! Very odd. This guy had emus and pigs and goats all in shaded enclosures. The pigs escaped while we were there *g* And this is a caper plant. I had no idea what a caper plant looked like. Real, wild, capers taste fab, quite different to the jar we normally get here.
We spent much of Sunday at Marsaxlokk, where they have a fish market. Hubby talked bee keeping with the man on the honey stall. We took a lot of honey home, bought it all over the islands nearly every day, making a collection! The market was nice, very pretty and fun, with the traditional Maltese boats bobbing in the bay.
Monday we swam in Exiles Bay, St Julians, with the fish all around us, just perfect. It was near where we'd been a few days before with their puppy swimming after his rubber ducky :) It's lovely just to float in the water there. We were in the sea nearly every day, even if just for a few minutes. Cools you down perfectly. I enjoyed Malta - it was too, too hot but crazily interesting. Loved the brass bands! Really nice to see some local flavour instead of just the tourist sites. A good holiday, but my god, it was nice to see water falling out of the sky back in Liverpool - yeah, rain!!
