Sunday, January 6, 2008

Malta. And Spirits.

Let me just get something off my chest.
During this past week, I have seen more of those Fucking Smiling Peugeots than I have ever seen before in my life! Ever! They love the Fucking Things!
Ah, that's better, thank you.
Now, on to the more important stuff.

Welcome to Malta, we apologize for any inconvenience.
This is probably the sign I've seen most during the past week. Since this is hardly the most popular season to go to Malta, most of the interesting historical stuff was closed. Along with a lot of other interesting things. We did get to see quite a few really cool sites, though. The Catacombs of St Paul, which were Awesome, a bunch of random caves, which were awesome as well, something called The Malta Experience, a movie about the history of Malta, stretching back some 7000 years, and a lot of other interesting, and less interesting, things.
However, this was all slightly hampered my the fact that the island of Malta contains the single most complicated road system on the planet. They haven't really invented the roadsign yet, or at least not found out how invaluably practical they are. There are usually one or two points in each town/village/settlement where there are roadsigns, pointing to other towns/villages/settlements nearby (including the entire island, since it's hardly big) but since there are no signs whatsoever on the actual roads, and the roads themselves are hardly straight, it makes the entire island very difficult to navigate. They do have one kind of sign they really do love, though. It says "Diversion. Airport", and there is at the very least twenty or thirty of them in each town/village/settlement, all pointing in different directions. I saw two of them, no more than five yards apart, pointing at each other. Bah.
EDIT: Right, I forgot to mention that, since all of the towns/villages/settlements were fairly close together to begin with, and they have all grown a lot bigger than they once were, it is very difficult to find out where one such town/village/settlement ends, and the next begins, since there aren't any rural areas in between. Just to add to the confusion. Once, when we actually thought we had a pretty good grasp of where we were and where we were heading, we realized we were in a completely different town/village/settlement, six or seven kilometers away. Confusing.

Other than that, the people I was there with (Being my father, his girlfriend, her son Magnus, his friend Mattias, and my friend Carl) were all nice people, even though Magnus and Mattias both had a habit of partying in a slightly different fashion than the people I'm used to, since it usually involved drinking at least half a bottle of rum each before going anywhere. And then they just kept going from there. They spent a lot of money on alcohol, they did. Not as much as they did elsewhere, though.
I have recently found out that I find stripclubs to be highly amusing. Or, rather, I find others going to striclubs and spending frankly embarrassing amounts of money, highly amusing. Since Magnus's girlfriend left him very recently after six years, he and Mattias decided he needed therapy, so they went to a stripclub four or five nights. The amount of money they spent varied, but on two nights, they spent a grand total of about 1300 euro. All in all, they spent between 1500 and 1600 euro, on that stripclub alone. Well, it's their money.
Back to cars for a moment: All taxis on Malta are white, and since there are quite a few Peugeots 306 or so among them, they all reminded me of Taxi. I'm going to have to watch that movie tonight.
Just one final note, since there are quite a lot of
Opuntia on Malta, I was reminded of something I was thinking when we were on Tenerife a bunch of years ago. Anyway, am I the only one wanting to cut one of those apart every time I see them, just to see 1: What they look like inside, and 2: What it would feel like to cut them?
Ehm, anyway.
There are probably other things I should be writing about, but I can't think of any, apart from the Nightflyer, so I won't.