Bombed out and filled with life

Shannon was "totally enraptured" with Malta but "can't figure it out". She visited Malta in March with Lisa and Colleen and blogged about her adventures at Poptarticus:

How to Spend One Hundred Maltese Lire: Here we are in Malta. It is pretty fabulous, let me tell you... They drive on the left here, and it's a "with your front bumper" philosophy in Malta just like it is in Italy. But for some reason we were extra sensitive last night. We were in a van, and after the fourth near-miss with a car or a bus, Lisa said "I am NOT driving here."... I was hoping for Maltese MTV, but I guess there is no such thing, but we do have Italian MTV and already Lisa and Colleen seem to be sort of hooked. Also late last night, I watched that skateboarding show "Extreme." In of all places, Malta? Hmmm... In the Maltese language two Xs makes the sh sound. So, for this week my name XXannon. In fact I may just keep it that way forever.

Stimulus in Overdrive: Yesterday we went to the "must-see" city of Mdina. It is an old Norman walled town. It took us a gazillion years to get there. They have these crazy yellow buses all over Malta, and they go everywhere but you always have to change in Valletta. Like, every single bus goes to or leaves from Valletta. So it totally sucks unless you are staying in Valletta or you really like buses, which I do not. My philosophy is, life is too short to take a bus, unless it is faster than the train, or you have no other choice. In Malta you have no other choice. Unless you drive, but that is opening a whole 'nother can of worms.

We're on an Island, No Immediate Plans to Get Off: The island of Malta is beige and smoke and hazy light. Pea green on the inside of the pastry shell, turquoise where the ocean meets the beige city wall. Pink where the sun sets. Malta is third-world, Arabic, from another planet. Malta is bombed out and filled with life. I am totally enraptured with it, and can't figure it out... And a lot of Malta is like this - buildings with varying degrees of misuse, inhabitance, and repair. Laundry racks on balconies with unbelievable views... Valletta is full of skeletons, not ghosts. Skeletons on the church floors. There were crazy wars fought here with heads chopped off and shot out of cannonballs. I've never been anyplace like this before, never.

Surviving the Blue Grotto and Other Tales of Adventure: He drove us through the cities and the small towns and through twisty streets and on pockmarked roads. We saw the Mosta Dome, where a bomb fell during World War II and did not explode, we saw the temples that are the oldest freestanding structures in the world. We took a boat into the Blue Grotto, and the sea was kind of crazy and the boat was pitching all around. As we were going in, another boat came out, and all the people had life jackets. We didn't have any life jackets, and there were some pretty big swells out there. We'd rock a little and the boat guy would just smile a toothless smile. We'd go into a cave, and he'd say "look to the left! See the colors!" But I was looking for something I might hang on to if we went down.