The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the Fifth: Tying Up Malta

Oh-ho, look! It is a blog post! How amusing!
On my last full day in Malta, I planned to go and visit the ancient walled city of Mdina (pronounced “meh-DEE-nah”), which has existed in some form or another since the Normans conquered malta in the late 11th century. But, when I arrived at the Valletta bus termina, bright and early at 10:30, I found that the bus I had intended to take had vanished from its apportioned spot, and that the bus schedule I had nabbed yesterday did not really correspond to either the official posted schedule or the schedule offered in broken English by the bus drivers when I asked. My schedule and the offical schedule both agreed that there would be a bus leaving at 12:20, so I decided to abide by the majority opinion and find some way to waste time before the bus left.
Fortunately, such an opportunity was close at hand in the upper Barrakka gardens. To explain this opportunity, though, I’m going to have to go on a bit of a diversion, so kindly indulge my ramblings. The Upper Barrakka gardens, like all of the gardens and parks in Valletta (and you’ll be hearing about the rest of them, make no mistake), are built on one of the old fortress bastions, bastions being the place where two fortress walls meet to form a corner. This area of a fortress is usually much thicker that other areas, with the result that all of the former bastions, before they were transformed into gardens, were basically tolerably large squares (as in the public-meeting-place-center-of-town-square, not the Euclidean polygon), doing nothing except taking up space. The British, after World War Two, turned them into gardens as a place for the officers to take afternoon tea or whatever.
The Barrakka Gardens fill what used to be the Bastion of St. Salvatore, an area which was more heavily fortified than usual, as it commands a sweeping view of the Grand Harbor. Only one part of the bastion is not today occupied with palms and ferns, and this is a section known as the Saluting Battery. In the Age of Sail, long before the invention of things like radios or telephones, keeping accurate time was very difficult, and it was also essential for navigation. Ships’ captains could find latitude using sextants and spherical trigonometry, but longitude was a different matter. To calculate longitude, British navigators carried with them two chronometers, highly accurate clocks which were resistant to the vicissitudes of sea travel (storms, water, cannonballs, et cetera). One of these chronometers would be set to Greenwich Mean Time, the other would be synchronized daily to local time at noon. Thus, by measuring the difference in time between the chronometers, the captain could determine his location on a map.
Because of this, it was law in all British seaports that the port admiral was required to fire a gun, at noon, in order to aid the captains in synchronizing their chronometers. It was also customary for the port to salute arriving naval ships by firing a number of guns proportional to the rank of the ship’s commanding officer. This was the purpose of the Saluting Battery on the Bastion of St. Salvatore: the firing of the noonday gun, and the firing of salutes (hence the name). The Battery performed this function from the day of British takeover in 1809, to the Second World War, when the saluting cannon were removed and anti-aircraft guns were installed. The Battery suffered heavy punishment during the war, but was renovated and returned to its former duty of the noonday gun in 2004. The firing of the gun is done punctually every midday, by members of the Maltese Army dressed in replica uniforms of the British artillery regiments who were stationed in Malta in the last half of the 19th century, and the ceremony is done with fully replicated pomp and circumstance, which makes it somewhat amusing to watch.
Waiting for the noonday gun on a sunny bench in the gardens took up most of my morning, along with suppressing my laughter at the high ceremony on the saluting batteries (see webalbum for more pictures). After the gun I walked back to the terminal and caught my bus without much further confusion. The ride inland to Mdina took us out of Valletta’s various suburb towns and through what I guess qualifies as Maltese countryside, which is mostly green fields separated by low stonework walls. The bus ended at Rabat, a suburb of Mdina, which at its best only has a little under 300 people living in it. Following Maltese tradition, the bus terminal for Rabat and Mdina is a small parking lot with a little booth to wait in and a few benches. From there it was a short stroll through a small garden-park (one of the results of being part of the British Empire is a surplus of gardens, apparently) into Mdina.
The city itself is built of the usual Maltese stone, the color of desert sand, and it gives the city a strange and ancient feel. The city is the main attraction, unless you really feel like dropping 15+ Euros at the Knights Extravaganza (some kind of movie/documentary thing) or visiting a restored palazzo which belonged for a few centuries to a Venetian merchant family and which is now a museum of nothing in particular which also forbids photography within, for whatever reason. Still, it was an enjoyable place to spend a couple hours’ walk and to eat in a café perched on the old city walls and overlooking the countryside, Valletta, and the Mediterranean.
I returned to Valletta at 3 o’clock, with the afternoon and evening still before me. I decided to tour the battlements of Valletta, taking my time and also trying to spot as many relics of the past as I could identify. I also hunted around the city for the rest of the auberges of the Knights, managing to find all of them except Italy’s (which I gather has been turned into a hotel now). I found three other gardens built into the old battlements (the British colonial government must really have had a thing for gardens), as well as some construction-work and the explanation for the closing of all of the old buildings. It seems that not only is February the best time to do renovation, but the Maltese Parliament had just passed the new budget, which included heaps of money to generally clean up and improve the city of Valletta, starting with the old historical buildings. I guess my advice then is to not go Malta any time in the next year, or you will be disappointed of all of the great buildings there.
My next day in Malta was very brief indeed. I check out of my hostel, stopped in Valletta to see the firing of the noonday gun again, then took a bus to the airport and waited for a few hours before catching my plane to Rome. Once there I headed straight for my lodging (the hostel I had stayed at previously), then went out for dinner with friends before bedding down that night. The next day was spent killing time until our plane left for Athens. We visited a couple of churches, including St. Peter in Chains, which we finally got into, before flying out of Rome at around 8pm, arriving at Athens International Airport at around 11 to be confronted by a great deal of signage in a language we couldn’t read, let alone understand.
But that’s a story for the next blog post. See you next time,

-JA

Economicry and Philosophising

Dear Everyone,

I wish to offer my apologies for the fault in the blog updates. I wish I could say that those responsible have been sacked, but regrettably I do not possess the power to fire University of Innsbruck faculty. Basically, I finished my first post on Malta, and then got ambushed by papers and midterms from hell and of death. So the updating schedule (by which I would have finished the travel reports by yesterday) got shot down, and there's been nothing on my end.

But, it's spring break. I'm going to be travelling, but I'm only making day trips due to lack of money and almost paralyzing exhaustion. Now, my plan (ha ha) is to finish writing up February Break traveling by April 20, and then put up one, maybe two posts about where I went over break. Knowing me, this won't happen at all, but I'm going to do my damndest to make it happen.

Happy Easter everyone!

-JA