Gretchen asked for a single 30mg pseudoephedrine pill this morning to help her power through that mild head cold that she might've caught from me. I decided to take 90mg myself to help with my lingering symptoms and to also help me power through the tedious touristy things in Valletta that I expected Gretchen to want me to do with her.
Gretchen and I ate our last breakfast of the cruise with Kelly and Brian. Kelly and I were in agreement that we were very happy for the cruise to end. Kelly said that if the next cruise (the one departing today from Malta) had been free, she would turn it down. She then went on to say that even if the next cruise was offered along with 500 euros, she'd still turn it down. Something about sweltering in our cabins and the limited public space on the ship had made it feel a little more like a prison that one would prefer.
In terms of providing an end-of-cruise tip, we'd decided to pool 40 euros to give Michæl, a Filipino waiter who had served us particularly well on this cruise. We delivered it to him this morning inside a coffee cup. He was so appreciative that he stayed and chatted and even said he would try to work on the cruise to Svalbard, which we plan to be on in late April of 2027.
Inevitably, since everyone was in the process of disembarking, fellow passengers kept coming oover to say their goodbyes. Some of those were more perfunctory than others; of Eric and Gila the health vegans, for example, only Gila seemed to think saying goodbye was something they should do, and he was just there to go through the bare minimum of motions. Somehow the only people we ended up having to hug goodbye were the veterinarians from Brighton, Dave and Mary, though Lilly the young Asian woman probably wanted a hug too (and, as an attractive young woman, she's used to getting them).
As always there was some sort of delay in our disembarkation causing me to stand around wondering why we were still on the ship or even where the others in my group had gone. This was because Gretchen and I would be setting off as a group with Kelly and Brian, and it always takes awhile for anyone not named Gretchen or Gus to get their shit together. When we finally started walking, there was some initial confusion at the elevator beyond the security checkpoint, which seemed designed to take us up a cliff that had us hemmed in against the harbor. But then at some point Google Maps started making sense and we began hiking with determination towards the center of Valletta.
Early in our hike, we came upon a public map showing where the settings of various famous movies and teevee shows had been filmed. This included season one of Game of Thrones. (Remember that, for season two, they'd moved filming to Dubrovnik. They're both beautiful and medieval, but they don't really look like the same place.)
Later in the hike, we stumbled upon a feral mother hen with at least one baby chick foraging on the sidewalk near a busy street. The chick retreated to under a parked car as we passed while the mother hen clucked with annoyance. Gretchen tossed them a chunk of bread from the breakfast buffet items she'd stockpiled to eat as a late breakfast.
The main streets of Valletta featured medieval-style banners in celebration of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Also possibly related to this was the occasional explosion of fireworks.
Valletta was easily the most beautiful of all the places we'd visited, even more so than Dubrovnik. Everything in the city is made of blocks of the same lion-colored limestone, giving a gorgeous consistency to the look of things (much like using from the local rock also does in places like Dubrovnik, Croatia, or Strasbourg, France). It makes everything look like it is constantly bathed in the light of a setting sun and conjures up the sublime void of the desert even while using European motifs to express it. But then when you look at the details like the architectural details, you see that they're not really European either. The capitals of the columns can be impossible to classify as any of the Greek forms and even the religous symbols seem off, which is what you'd expect for a country where they speak a derivative of Arabic, but write it in a Latin script and practice Roman Catholicism. This weirdness is what makes it such a great backdrop for science fiction or fantasy productions, where you don't want people to immediately recognize what it is they're looking at.
Somewhere in the center of Valletta, we arrived at the place (it happened to feature a classic red British-style telephone box, though without a phone) where our hotel was to the right and Kelly and Brian's was to the left. So we split up and went our separate ways.
Our hotel was the four-star Gomerino Hotel, one Gretchen had selected partly because it has a pool. When we arrived, the woman working the front desk was in the middle of what might've been a 20 minute detailing of where to go and what to do for a pair of guests. When it seemed our checking in or whatever was going to take awhile, we started flipping through a coffee table book about Valletta. The air conditioning was nice and cold, so we were in no hurry. When the woman at the desk finally got to us, she said our room was not yet ready but that we could store our stuff with her and even make use of the pool while we waited. This was exactly what we wanted to hear.
The pool was up on the roof and had amazing views of Valletta, including of the harbor we'd just hiked from. The pool area was popular, and nearly all the chaise longues were occupied. But all there needed to be was two available, and there were. The pool itself was long and narrow and ended at the edge of the roof facing the harbor. The temperature was just about perfect. My only complaint was that the hotel WiFi was unreliable up there.
Despite that unreliability, Gretchen managed to stay in contact with various people, including her parents. As we'd known they would be, they also happened to be in Malta at the same time us, having flown in from Sardinia some days ago in preparation to board the cruise ship we'd just disembarked from. (Its next cruise would be a complete circuit of Sicily.) While we were still enjoying the pool area, Gretchen's father arranged to meet us at a gelato place five minutes away. So we jumped into at the least-awkard-possible monment a conversation between the very nice woman working the front desk and a young woman who thought she might've lost a piece of jewelry in her room and put more stuff in desk-supervised storage and went out into the sunny Valletta streets. As we passed the big cathedral (the St. John Co-Cathedral), I caught sight of Coron, the formerly-mute woman with the loud unpleasant voice from the ship, and quickly told Gretchen so we could duck our heads and avoid her.
Before catching sight of Gretchen's parents, we did what we could to secure a table from an harried-but-understanding waitress with dark hair and dark eyes of the sort I'd expected to see more of in Sicily and Malta. Gretchen explained that part of why she needed the table to be where it needed to be was that her parents were old and had mobility issues. Then her parents actually appeared, and of course we had to stand in the most obstructing outdoor part of the gelato place exchanging perfunctory greetings before immediately launching into logistics. The gelato waitress had to tell us to move to our table, but no sooner had we sat down when Gretchen and her father had an alternative plan, one that didn't immediately involve gelato. So we picked up and left with nary an apology to the poor waitress. I was keenly aware of this, but it seemed Gretchen's father and perhaps even Gretchen herself were not. Such brusqueness was, their behavior suggested, to be expected and tolerated, and perhaps age alone is all that one needs to have to get away with it.
Instead we headed to a foccacia place, but on the way we took a detour to the hotel Gretchen's parents had just checked out of. Her father wanted to show us the view from its rooftop restaurant. As we breezed past the front desk, Gretchen's father said he just wanted to show his daughter the view from the roof. "Sure," they said. But at the top of the elevator, the maître d' seemed irritated when came barging into his domain. Amusingly, Gretchen's father didn't bother matching the maître d's attitude; it seemed easier just to ignore him, and so we continued out to the rooftop. The view was indeed spectacular, but not all that much better than what one could see from the end of the pool on the rooftop of our hotel. Getting back, for a moment, to the observations of brusqueness I was making of Gretchen's father, I've probably seen instances of this before. But I've also seen him get very angry in similar situations. I think what I was seeing here was what you see when a man has traveled the world for many decades, has all the money and status he needs, and small attempts are made to stand in his way. In those situation, he's a truck and they're an ant. He doesn't get made because, in some respects, they aren't even really there.
The foccacia place was called Dal Pani Focacceria, and it was a little hole in the wall that really only had one vegan option ("the Grinch"), a sort of vegetable sandwich not too different from the pizza Gretchen and I had had on Lipari, but with a thin layer of hummus in there somewhere (it so thin I barely sensed it at all), arugula, and mushrooms. It was a good sandwich, and they were big enough that only three of them were ordered for the four of us and I ate all one of them. I remember as I ate having had all these ideas about things I might want to talk to Gretchen's father about, but all he seemed to want to do was tell us the places in Malta that we must see and how to go about seeing them. Since I had no interest in discussing this, all of his conversation was with Gretchen. But of course she was unsatisfied with the conversation too, since her father expressed no interest in our lives or what we are up to these days. He clearly didn't want to talk about the big march against animal testing that Gretchen is organizing (on that, at least, I could agree with him).
After eating our foccacia sandwiches, we returned to the gelato place and this time there was an open table waiting for us when we arrived. But then as I was eating my generous scoop of mango sorbet, I kept smelling a horrendous stench and realized out table was right next to some garbage cans. In a desperate effort to discuss with Gretchen's father something other than what we must do while in Malta, I reached into Gretchen's bag and pulled out the little jar of arnica pills Gretchen had purchased at the pharmacy yesterday. I handed them to Gretchen's father and asked how these could be homeopathic given that they actually contain some real percentage of the arnica plant (an herb he believes is effective). He said he wasn't sure, and at that point Gretchen's mother chimed in with something that I wsa surprised to find funny, "Maybe they contain 150mg of what arnica has done to the water after it was diluted."
We finally said goodbye to Gretchen's parents at the entrance to the St. John Co-Cathedral just as we were about to go inside. I don't think I've ever been so happy to be rid of them.
At this point in our vacation I really needed a vacation from being in the inside of random cathedrals. But St. John's is like nothing you've ever seen. It's a box stone box without much in the way of windows, and on the inside absolutely every surface is covered with carvings, paintings, or other detailing. (There are windows, it turns out, but they're way up high and in the days before electricity, it would have been very gloomy inside, very unlike a gothic cathedral.) It's like nothing I had ever seen before, except, perhaps, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The floors are completely tiled in a grid of commemorative mosaics for the many knights and nobles who have died while having a relationship to the cathedral. In keeping with their morbid fascinations, many of these mosaics feature motifs about death, including skulls and scythes. Somewhat surprisingly, given all the effort the inside of the cathedral represents (that's how it awes you), most of the mosaics are rather cartoonish and do not demonstrate amazing skills of realistic representation.
The main reason Gretchen wanted to check out this particular cathedral was that it was home to two paintings by Caravaggio. We soon found our way to the wing where they were housed. One was "St. Jerome Writing," a late work that seemed like a lesser work. The one the cathedral really wanted to highlight was "the Beheading of St. John the Baptist," a painting actually commissioned by this very cathedral while Caravaggio was alive (but before he had to escape the island after committing yet another of his many hotheaded crimes). The cathedral behaves more like a museum in the way it presents visualizations of Caravaggio's life and career. One shows how Caravaggio's paintings differ from those of previous artists who had painted the same subject matter, while another presents a timeline of Caravaggio's life, including the moment when he was sentenced in absentia to be beheaded after murdering someone and then obsessed in his paintings about decapitation. Then we're treated to video-powered dissection of Caravaggio's "the Beheading of St. John the Baptist," with the painting being broken up into grid in one case and into a nautilus spiral in another as various elements are elided or emphasized.
A short film about Caravaggio's life as a painter and hothead was being shown in a small room full of uncomfortable benches behind a velvet rope, and, unlike every other theatre in a museum, nobody could enter or leave the movie while it was playing. One had to wait until it was done, at which point a staffer would unhook the velvet rope and open the door, and a new audience could file in. It was a very watchable little film, full of great costumes and a very convincing-looking Caravaggio. But it left me with a gladness that I had never made Caravaggio's acquaintance. Dude was trouble.
Once we'd internalized all that content, we went to look at the actual painting itself, "the Beheading of St. John the Baptist," and it was a bit far away in a somewhat cluttered room.
An observation Gretchen had made the other day after seeing one or more Caravaggios in Messina was that looking at paintings by any other artist afterwards made the viewer wonder why they had bothered. Caravaggio makes everything else look cartoonish, amateurish, or deeply uninspired. I definitely had this experience when looking at other paintings in the cathedral after seeing what I'd just seen.
After getting all that we needed from the St. John Co-Cathedral, we headed back to the Gomerino Hotel, where our room was ready. We showered, [REDACTED], and then Gretchen went up to the roof to take advantage of the pool. It was nice to spend some time in the hotel with nothing planned.
For dinner, we rendezvoused with Kelly and Brian at a small Asian restaurant called the Drunken Dumpling. We arrived first, and I ordered a beer while Gretchen said she'd be happy with tap water. The waiter was horrified and tried to convince her that this was foolishness, that nobody drinks the tap water in Malta. (Gretchen's father had told us this too.) But we'd subsequently learned that it is perfectly okay to drink, that, at worst, it might taste a little weird due to the fact that it is desalinated sea water that has been treated with a lot of chlorine. After insisting several times that she only wanted tap water, the waiter reluctantly got her a glass of it.
When Brian and Kelly arrived, they talked some about their AirBnB. There's always something a little off about the places they rent, and in this case there were noise issues that included fireworks. But I'd been seeing puffs of smoke from fireworks every time we'd been outside, so that might've just been a consequence of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel festivities. We ordered not quite enough food, and I kept feeling like I was at a disadvantage in eating it because of how the cadence went when the food came out and it was my responsibility from the start to scrape off the tiny cubes of cucumber so it wouldn't contaminate the underlying food too much for Gretchen. We ended up ordering another serving of noodles at the end, but I could've eaten more; it was delicious and was of a flavor profile that had not been present at any point during the cruise.
After dinner, we stepped out of the darkness into a parade that was just starting. Several old balding men in lacy white skirts and forest green shawls stood waiting for some sort of signal. There were also some similarly-dressed teenagers and even some women (they wore lacy white head coverings as well). Meanwhile, a throng of onlookers began to assemble. This included a great meany young sharply dressed women (Gretchen's father had mentioned them earlier today). Clearly, this was an event where one was expected to look one's best.
Eventually the parade got moving. There were groups of young people banging on drums or blowing on horns and they all sang a simple melody, joined somewhere by a woman (or castrato?) singing through an amplifier. Eventually people bearing crosses with a crucified Jesuses surrounded by silver beams started to appear. And then came what must be the main event, a heavy float topped by what looked like a stainless steel mother and child, all of it carried by a group of toga-wearing men who were staggering under the what must've been its enormous weight. Some of the float's yokes were so close to one another that the men had to be in each other's space as they worked, and they were very hot and very sweaty.
We strolled across the central axis of the banner-flying part of Valetta and went downhill towards the harbon on streets so steep that they included steps and thus could only ever be pedestrian. This took us past several cafés and restaurants where customers sat on cushions placed directly on the steps to eat at tables while looking at the beatiful Maltese harbor. Down at the bottom, we turned northeastward and walked along a wall between us and the harbor below. Somewhere down there, we passed another group of sharp dressed young women who were sitting as a group, some of them absent-mindedly hiking up their skirts. After I suggested that they might be hookers and that the mouthwash nearby on the wall might be an important tool of the job, Brian said he'd seen the women giving us men the eye.
One of many interesting things about Malta concerns the signage for businesses, something Gretchen was first to notice. The most modern of these look like they were made in the 1960s, and many of them are faded from apparent decades of sun exposure. Their look complements the tawny sandstone perfectly and they don't yank you back into modernity the way a high-saturation modern sign would. There must be some regulation that keeps business signs looking this way.
Gretchen wanted to show Kelly and Brian the pool at our hotel, so we brought them up on the roof. While Gretchen was off dealing with some pent-up march-to-end-animal-testing communications, the man running the poolside bar came over and asked if we wanted anything to drink, that he was just about to close. I asked Brian what he wanted and he said "a very small beer." I wanted some sort of booze but didn't know what. The waiter suggested Jack Daniels, and I said that was "too American," so he had some other idea, and I said sure, I wanted whatever it was he'd said. I couldn't remember our room number (302) so I gave Gretchen's name instead, since that was the one our room was registered under. Our little nightcap only came to 9 euros.
When Gretchen reappeared, she was dressd to go swimming, and soon I was also in the pool. Kelly and Brian didn't have swimwear, so all they could do was soak their feet. Meanwhile, a series of spectacular fireworks were exploding off in the distance to the south, creating colorful circles and arrays of circles in various arrangements. We briefly discussed a term Kelly had just introduced but for which I needed a definition: wenis. That word, with all the baggage it carries in terms of what it rhymes with, simply means the loose skin on an elbow.
Later we got to talking about Gretchen's father and how effortlessly assertive he'd been earlier today. We wondered how he came to be that way, and how exactly it related to Gretchen's ballsy nature. Kelly suggested at some point that it might be a consequence of access to money, which seemed plausible, but the observation irritated Gretchen and fit in with a pattern she'd noticed of Kelly repeatedly bringing up money and how she doesn't have quite enough (or, perhaps, as much as us) even as she and Brian continue doing extravagant things like vegan cruises. I was also irritated with Kelly and Brian by this point, but it was for a very different reason. I was glad the cruise was over and now wanted to move on to what came after. And yet here were Kelly and Brian, continuing to insist on remaining in our vacation with us. I love hanging out with them, but now I was done and just wanted to hang out with Gretchen, if anyone.
Details of nearby rooftops from the pool on the roof of our hotel. Click to enlarge.
The view of Valletta from the rooftop of the hotel where Gretchen's parents had stayed. Click to enlarge.
Inside St. John's Co-Cathedral. Click to enlarge.
A somewhat-cartoonish commemorative marble floor cartoon in St. John's Co-Cathedral. Click to enlarge.
Gold decorative relief on the interior wall of the St. John's Co-Cathedral. Click to enlarge.
Caravaggio's "the Beheading of St.John the Baptist" is back there somewhere. Click to enlarge.
We saw this painting by a lesser artist after seeing the Caravaggio and wondered why the artist hadn't been a haberdasher instead. Click to enlarge.
Victoria Gate and the Santa Barbara Bastion. It looks like some detail in medieval fantasy world. Click to enlarge.
A view down a stepped street to the Grand Harbor. Click to enlarge.
A bustling stepped street with lots of cafés pouring out onto it. Click to enlarge.
Glassed-in balconies. Click to enlarge.
The columns on the Grandmaster's Palace are in a style that is hard to place, with Gretchen. Click to enlarge.
The Sette Giugno Monument, commemorating an uprising against British rule. Click to enlarge.
One of the marchers in the parade is checking out the pretty ladies in their nice little outfits. Click to enlarge.
Some video of the parade.
A gorgeous view of Grand Harbor. Click to enlarge.
A view from near where we saw the suspected prostitutes. Click to enlarge.
You can see that when PVC isn't painted lion yellow, it clashes with the stone. Click to enlarge.
A corner saint killing some bad dude. Click to enlarge.
That crane across the harbor was painted to look like a giraffe. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen and Kelly with that corner saint. Click to enlarge.
