Malta Calling
Michael at Malta Calling is inviting reader feedback for his draft pitch of his book about Malta. '101 Things the Malta Tourist Authority Doesn't Want You to Know' could very well be one of the highlights of his book. Read some of his old blog posts as you go along. From Notes of a Tiny Island:
..After selling his house, his car and his bubble coat and moving to Malta for a year to write a book about the mysterious and absorbingly beautiful island nation, American author [my name here] and his family of seven can’t seem to stay out of the way of remarkable occurrences. First, it’s just fights at restaurants, festival brawling, and automobile accidents; but then, like Forrest Gump, they always seem to be present wherever the remarkable happens: a fatal plane crash, an oil bunkering vessel run aground, the arrival of a shipwrecked group of African refugees.
Having arrived during high tourist season, no one really seems to take much notice of the American family. In fact, they feel studiously ignored. But when the tourist season ends and they’re still padding around, frequenting the shops, attending a neighborhood church and school, riding the buses and beating a worn path to the seaside promenade, things change. As the weeks wear on, more and more locals seem to know their business, sometimes even before they do. Although the family is formally introduced to very few Maltese people, the neighbors, shopkeepers and even the crazy bus drivers seem to know their names and often where they’re going and what they’re looking for on any particular day.
A remarkable series of occurrences leads the author to wonder if he’s not being followed around the island. You see, some of his writings on an internet travel-blog are rather critical of modern Maltese life – the drivers are nuts, the sidewalks want fixing, the food is grade D but edible, the elevators are unreliable, the dogs leave their marks, and the beaches are butt-strewn...
posted by Robert Micallef at 11/23/2006 07:24:00 AM
No country is perfect including yours (US). Malta has its good and bad aspects. If we had to compare it to the US:
1. Our history goes much far back than yours - your country's inhabitants were still climbing trees and killing each other for food when our country was going through cultural and other advances.
2. We have monuments/temples which pre-date the Pyramids. And yours??? What’s the oldest monument that you can boast of?
3. We were occupied (and hence benefited from) some of the highest cultures (for their time) in the then known world e.g. Phoenicians, Romans , etc...
4. Despite our size we have our own language. Yours is a form of sometimes badly spelt English (probably brought about by the illiterate migrants flowing into the US).
5. Our crime rate is negligible compare to yours - one feels safer here than in the US.
6. You spoke of the illegal immigrants. Yes that’s a tragedy and a burden on us but it’s not our fault.
But surely the US has a much worse situation with the Hispanic immigrants! There are places where they do not speak English but Spanish! And this is in the US!!! You think that we have problems!!!!
7. Ah yes the food. I don’t know where you went to eat but we have quite a few first class restaurants. We like good food and wine (something that we did not inherit from the British but from the Italian influence).
Is that enough? So as you see although God knows how much we have to fix things here - we are still much better here than in the US.
Having said all that I travelled to the US and I think that the people are really nice and friendly and the places I have been were beautiful.
Have a nice day.
Of course its all true! But who cares! I was, and still am critical too, but then its easy to be critical. You NEED the bad to provide a backdrop, a balance if you will, for the good. Fortunately, the bad things are easily fixable. There are plenty of excellent restaurants if you don't like pub food. Elevators...well....not really a priority...and you can complain to the building manager.
Drivers are nuts, yup! And you would have them any other way? Sidewalks and other infrastructure...well, when the money rolls in...its only concrete. Beaches. Well, there are so few beaches that it would be easy to have them raked. But then, the beach is not the priority in Malta. Its not like San Tropez or Cozomel, in those places the beach is the life of the place! Malta, the life is the pubs, churches, festivals,and history.
So since you can fix all these bad things, it is helpful to put them into perspective. There is almost no overt crime, there ARE roads, there ARE buses and they are plentiful, inexpensive and easy to use. The stores are full, the fruit and vegetable carts are ubiquitous, the market is full of gorgeous meat...so you don't need to eat at bad restaurants.
I have traveled a LOT of places. There are plenty of places where I say "You know, this place would be really nice if it wasn't for the residents". (I know, an arrogant attitude which I try to keep to myself...but nonetheless, when I see some drunk pissing into a 300 year old baroque fountain, it is hard to remain objective.) Malta is not one of those places. The strength and beauty of Malta (I don't know about the "mystery") lies in the very down to earth people which populate this little island.
I grew up in small town Canadian Prairie country...and the people are the same. Used to looking after themselves, open handed, "neighbourly". A strong suspicion of central government, and a tradition of "making do".
THATS what makes Malta a good place to me. Your mileage may differ.
He's free to go back home whenever he wants ... or maybe he got fed up of his home as well and that's why he ended up in Malta?
Yeah, he can still write though, even from home.
Print does not show nuances of language. You cannot be sarcastic, or even very clever in wordsmithing when writing it down. (Really GOOD writers know this....and even I know it, and I am NOT a really good writer!) And although this gentleman is a good writer, any time you take comments out of context, you really lose the nuances of language.
You and I both know that the ultimate praise you can give a co-worker is to "mock-insult" him. You know, to a co-worker who is going out to a job, you say "hey Jim, break a leg!" Yet you could not do that in the company newsletter! A lot of the "critisism" in his very readable blog and in his book is of that nature. I would not be too upset about it! Critical essays like that are more common in North America than they are in Malta or the UK, and are more in the nature of dynamic give and take. My fellow Canadians have been putting up with it for a LONG time, and are sort of getting used to it. (Unfortunately when Canadians do the same thing, they always sound like they are whining! But thats another post..grin!)
A sharp critisism is often veiled in a cloak of humour to take the sting out of it, and sometimes a comment is only thrown out to start the conversation with someting other than a comment about the weather. Otherwise it becomes another boring tavelogue. The purpose is to get a rise out of you, and hey! It worked!
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