Author: John Bassett

I sometimes have planned a great many adventures for each day of our travels. But other times John and I improvise a bit. Sometimes those are the best days of all. This was one of them. We have been to most of the major London museums over the years, and we have been to some of them more than once. So at breakfast John asked our hosts Andrew and Richard if they had any recommendations. They suggested that we might want to go to The Wallace Collection and pointed out that it was not far away at all. It was absolutely perfect.

Although I admit that I had never heard of this museum, it turns out is one of the most important art collections in the city. It is named for a certain Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of some duke or marquis. Despite, or maybe because of, his son’s somewhat irregular social standing, the father decided to give him the entire family art collection and the house near Grosvenor Square. After Richard died his widow, perhaps thinking that philanthropy is best social revenge of all, donate the collection to the Crown. And so was born The Wallace Collection, a superb collection of art and decorative arts. 

The paintings in the museum concentrate mostly on the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries. 

Perhaps the most famous piece here is Franz Hal’s Laughing Cavalier. 

But as the audioguide pointed out, this is a misleading title and certainly the artist would never have connected  it to this painting. Instead, it is probably the portrait of a young groom around the time of his marriage. The rich detail on his silk jacket helps to identify the purpose of the picture.

Almost equally famous, and again not correctly named, is Lady with a Fan by Velasquez. This is probably the portrait of a young French woman at the Spanish court.

One of our favorites is this picture of two young lovers whose fate is describe in the Inferno. Dante, in red, and his guide Virgil, in green, stand on the right reflection gone their fate. 

VICTORIA AND ALBERT

After a lot of art and design, we needed a bit of coffee and a sweet in the lovely courtyard restaurant. As we were there, John proposed that we try to see if we could get into the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I was a trifle skeptical as I had looked at the ticket sales online and seen that it appeared to be sold out until late this month. But I agreed to give it a try.

John was also determined that we would get from the Wallace Collection to the V and A by riding bikes. London has an extensive bike rental system, and I was willing to give it a try. The directions were actually pretty simple.

At the museum, John asked a helpful docent with a strong Irish accent, if there was a chance to get tickets for the McQueen show. She walked us halfway around the museum and put him in a line. John always seems able to get tickets for things that are sold out and his luck did not run out today. He was able to buy to tickets for the four thirty shaw. After getting the tickets, we first wandered around a bit in some of the medieval galleries. John was taken with the needlework on this chasuble. 

We knew that there was a tour of the theater collection at two o’clock. We found the tour, led by a very enthusiastic curator. There was a lot of interesting stuff here. John was really delighted with the stage models like this one for Long Day’s Journey into Night. 

And this one which looks like it was for some kind of French or Restoration drama. Look closely at the mirror at the back of the set. Do you notice somebody familiar?

OPERA

This was probably the quietest day of the trip so far. I woke up a little later than usual because the weather had turned English. It was overcast, almost gloomy, and you could tell that sometime during the day it was going to rain. We knew that meeting up with Vicki for tea was going to be the big event of the day. But we had not really planned anything for the morning. I figured I would go to church and John was thinking about going to a meeting. We had no firm plans. 

I finally decided to go to Saint Alban’s Holborn for Mass. Each time I’m in London I check another famous church off the list. All Saint Margaret Street was closer, but I had been there a couple years ago. And I was running too late to make it to Saint Martin-in-the-Fields. Saint Alban’s was a mile or so away, but it was a famous nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic slum church. With my iPhone giving me directions, I headed down Tottenham Court Road.

Sometimes church services are uplifting and sometimes they are vaguely depressing. This was more of the latter. The church is an interesting place architecturally. It was almost completely destroyed in the Blitz, and after the war it was rebuilt in a curiously British mixture of modernism and Gothic-revivalism. The chancel is dominated by an enormous mural entitled The Trinity in Glory. I cannot say I much liked it. 

Nor did I much like the service. I counted only about twenty five people in the nave, and they may have been outnumbered by the clergy, the choir, and the servers. The liturgy seemed mostly taken from the new Roman Catholic mass instead of Common Worship. I was not quite sure of what the point of the sermon was. The vicar greeted me after Mass and half-heartedly invited me to the undercroft for tea. I demurred that I had to meet some friends and left. 

It was not entirely a lie. We met up with Vicki about an hour later. John wanted to go to a museum, but we really did not have enough time. So she suggested that we stop by the new site of Foley’s, London’s best and most famous bookstore, located only a few blocks away. 

John found a little corner of the store just made for him:  LGBT, Musical Theatre, and Drama Education all right next to one another. He bought a bunch of books on teaching theater. 

This clerical gentleman looked like he had just stepped out of the pages of a novel by Trollope. I half thought he would be counting out some shillings. 

It was starting to drizzle as we headed toward The Langham for tea. This is one of London’s great old nineteenth century hotels. It was perhaps the most fashionable place to stay in England for decades and both the famous and the fictional enjoyed its hospitality:  Conan-Doyle had Sherlock Holmes eat dinner at The Langham. It fell into disfavor and in 1946 the BBC used it for offices. But it was sold in the 1980s and over the course of a couple decades gloriously renovated. Our afternoon tea was in the Palm Court. This is decorated in a somewhat update Moderne style.

The food was scrumptious, particularly the scones. I was pretty much stuffed by the time the tea cakes arrived.

This was Vicki’s way of celebrating my birthday, and since I had spent the actual day depressingly enough at the Dolman buffet, it was a splendid belated celebration for me. 

When we left it was genuinely pouring. We took a cab back to our bed and breakfast.

We hugged Vicki and all promised to get together soon in Los Angeles. John and I then went to our room in carbohydrate overload. 

In the evening, we were uncertain what to do. Most London theaters are dark on Sunday, so we were not going to a play. The weather was not conducive to merely strolling, so we decided a movie would be in order. We had been planning to see the documentary on Amy Winehouse anyhow, and it seemed perfect to see it here in the city where she self-destructed. We stumbled around until we found the Odeon on Shaftesbury Road in Covent Garden. The theater was sort of a dump, but the movie was depressingly good. 

Tomorrow will be our last day in London, and the last day of our vacation. 

My first item of business for the morning was to pick up my laundry. I managed to do that quickly, and we had a bite of breakfast at our accommodations here in Fitzrovia. I have been eating Italian colazione  for the past few weeks, so when we came across a jar of peanut butter and a toaster here it seemed like home! No doubt I am just better off with a cappuccino and a small roll. 

Our plans for the day were to meet up with our friends in Brentford for lunch and then return to town for a play in the evening. John had purchased tickets to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time before we left Los Angeles. However, when I pulled the order out of my binder this morning I noticed that he had bought tickets for the matinee, not the evening show. I am glad I caught that one! So we made some quick calls to rearrange the schedule and discovered that we had about two hours to fill before the show. 

We had been to London so many times that it is hard to do something for the first time. So looking on the map I was happy to discover one cultural attraction that we had never checked off our list, The Royal Academy of Art. John seemed a little doubtful about both the destination and my ability to take us there with the aide of Google Maps, but he went along anyhow. 

The Royal Academy is one of the oldest art schools in the world. It was set up to “improve” British painting in the eighteenth century. The idea was the young painters would study there with established painters, and that both old and new painters could exhibit their work there for the public. It still does the same work today. 

John thinks that a museum building is as much a part of the experience as the collection. So I had a feeling he would like the Academy as it is housed in a grand old Palladian palace. However, since it’s an art school, the young artists have to put their stamp in the building with cool things like this staircase. 

 We stumbled across a tour of the private apartments. The academy was originally the home of the Earls of Burlington. The third Lord Burlington had William Kent redesign the house and paint classically-themed scenes on the ceilings. This is one of them. That front-facing camera on the iPhone is so useful when it is not giving me a tragic reminder of how old I am! 

We had a rather enthusiastic — well, for a Brit — guide who pointed out all the features. We spent a good deal of time looking at a famous work there, William Powell Frith’s A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. While I had seen reproductions of the work before, I never had much of an idea what it was about. Our guide provided the fascinating details to explain why the Victorians so loved this work. 

It is hard to get a good picture of the work with a phone, so here is the same picture courtesy of Google Images. Almost everybody in the painting was a well-known person at the time. Anthony Trollope is on the left with the big white beard. William Gladstone, the prime minister, is just to his right. The Archbishop of York stands upright in the center of the painting and right next to him is the less-than-upright mistress of the Prince of Wales! Our guide asked who the tall many behind on the right might be.

John immediately identified him as Oscar Wilde. Our guide was impressed and explained how the picture as a whole is an attack on Wilde and the aesthetic movement he represented. 

From there we went on to the Summer Exhibition. This is not like your usual museum show because everything there is for sale! But as they are English and putting price tags on things would be rude, when you get your ticket you get a small book which discreetly tells you the price of each piece. We loved the updated version of a Greek kouros which could have been ours for a mere £12,000. 

Art galleries are not usually painted in bubble gum colors.

We came across this piece and couldn’t decide if it was a photo or photo realism. At any rate, it reminded us that school will start all too soon. 

The most important show, at least without price tags, were the works of Joseph Cornell. I have to be honest and admit that I had never heard of this American artist who died in 1972. Calling the show “Wanderlust” is deliberately ironic because he never left the northeast United States. He was one of the first Americans to work in assemblage and his signature works were carefully designed shadow boxes like this one. 

On leaving the Academy, we admired monumental sculptures old and new in the courtyard. 

The Royal Academy is across the street from Fortnum and Mason and we stopped in there briefly to admire perfectly formed and displayed carrots on sale for £10 a bunch. I wonder if anybody actually buys food there or if the whole purpose is to just convince Chinese tourists to part with a fistful of Yuan in exchange for some tweedy tea towel. 

We also walked past Saint James’s Piccadilly where a wedding was going on. I suspect that if anybody could afford to buy their groceries at Fortnum and Mason, this happy couple could.

We went on the the theater. Our original tickets warned of a “partially blocked view,” but when we picked them up we were told that they had been switched and that our new seats would be great. And indeed they were. Seated in the second row of the Grand Circle, our view of the stage looked like this. Of course, I have to follow rules so this picture is an official one for the press. The set is probably the most important thing about the play. The floor and all three walls are covered in thousand of tiny LED lights and the whole stage at times seems to explode in pulsating light. The play, for those of you who have not seen it or read the book on which it is based, is about a 15 year old autistic boy who tries to discover who killed a neighbor’s dog. In fact, the play opens with the rather realistic corpse of the dog with a pitchfork stuck in it. 

John was not wowed by the first act, but by the end of the play he was really taken in by the story. Being vaguely “on the spectrum” myself, I found the family drama not that engaging. But it is a lot more interesting than the usual West End stuff, so I am glad it is a big hit. 

We found our way to Waterloo station and then went off to Brentford to meet with our friends Vicki and Jerry. 

They live on the old Grand Union Canal. There are swans there. 

Today started early. And I mean early. We had a knock on the door of our hotel at 2:00 AM telling us that our taxi to the airport was already here. We knew it was going to be an early start to the day, but after going to bed so late this was really painfully early.

We finished packing and loaded our luggage and our bikes into the van. We had the same friendly driver who had taken us from Malta to Gozo three days before. He drove quickly through the now deserted streets of Victoria and Mgarr to the ferry terminal. We had to wait about 45 minutes for the boat. John slept most of the time. Our driver allowed us to stay in the van during the short passage, and John slept some more. 

Once at the airport, we had a couple hours before the flight and the airport is no place to try to sleep. Like so many smaller countries, the Malta airport has the feel of a shopping mall with transportation options available to qualified customers. It is hard to get from one part to another without yet another duty-free shop. 

The flight to London went smoothly. We were surprised and pleased to find that Mary Abraham, the American woman we had met at the cathedral on Sunday, was seated next to us as was her daughter Eva. We had all chosen to pay a little more for the exit rows, and were glad that we did. Once the flight took off, we all fell asleep for most of the three and a half hours.

We cleared immigration and customs quite quickly. I had bought tickets on the Heathrow Express into London and John was shocked that we were at Paddington station in only 15 minutes. It takes well over an hour on the Piccadilly line of the tube. We had a little trouble with Uber, our first driver being unable to find us, but we finally made it to our small bed and breakfast in Fitzrovia. We are on Colville Place, a small alley off Charlotte Street.

We were met by a young Israeli guy who works for Andrew and Richard, the owners of the bed and breakfast here. It is a small place with just three rooms. Ours is on the second floor, or as they would say here, the first floor. We came in, unpacked our things, and promptly fell asleep for a couple hours. 

Our first stop, after we woke us, was a laundry on Soho. After the past week in Malta, all our stuff is filthy. This place, right next to the site of the house where William Blake had been born, only does wash and fold so our stuff should be ready tomorrow morning. After that, we wandered down towards the TKTS office in Leicester Square. On the way, John decided to get his hair cut. Gino, his barber, turned out to be an Italian whose family comes from Agrigento in Sicily. So that gave us all a good deal to talk about while a good deal of John’s hair ended up on the floor!

It was a warm day for London and the streets were packed with people. We walked passed lots of shops and John posed by this one for his friend Jerry Jaeger.

Jerry is a costumer who has always generously helped us out on our school plays, and he certainly defines Third Street style!

Leicester Square was so packed with people it was hard to see is blade of grass on the ground. While John pondered what play he wanted to see tonight, I was reminded that the grand old British tradition of binge drinking is dead.

We bought tickets in the end to a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest. David Suchet, the English actor who had a career of playing a French detective, was starring and Lady Bracknell and the reviews in all the London newspapers had been quite positive. We did not have enough time to go back to the bed and breakfast, so we went to a restaurant on Greek Street that was listed as one of London’s “Top 100” and was also supposed to be reasonably priced. It was a bit of a disappointment. For £40, we had a few small plates of vaguely Mediterranean food. We could have had far better in Italy for half the price. 

The play, however, was not a disappointment at all. Not only was Suchet great, but the actors playing Algernon and Cicely were also outstanding. On the way out, we snapped picture of the picture of the marquee. Some old English guy walking by us made some snide comment about tourists taking pictures of signs, but frankly we just wanted the memories more than approval.

Today was the day I fell in love with Malta. I think it may have been the very best day of the trip.

We had a good bike ride yesterday, but we did not feel like getting on the bike again. We decided that we would go to Victoria, the only real city on Gozo. We knew that there was a walled section of the city here, and we hoped it might be something like Mdina. Buses do not run quite as frequently on Gozo, so we were waiting in the hotel lobby until it was time to catch the bus. There was a old print of Gozo in the 1950’s on the wall. It does not all that much different now. 

A young German couple was asking at the desk where they could rent bicycles. We impulsively just offered them ours for the day. They seemed a little uncertain at first if we really we were offering the for free, but they finally accepted with smiles. As we left on the bus, John and I decided that we either the nicest or the dumbest thing we have done in a while. 

Victoria is not Mdina. It is more of a real town and the old section is still under extensive construction. But it was a fascinating place to spend the day. As we had read, there is a walled section in the middle of the city.

But these walls are still in the process of being rebuilt largely funding from the European Union. 

I was a little surprised by all this work. I believe that the usual practice these days was to preserve things in their existing condition rather than trying to reconstruct what we think it used to be like. We roundly slam our nineteenth century forefathers for clumsily rebuilding Gothic cathedral and Greek temples. Could we be doing the same kind of vandalism here? Or does the need to increase tourist trump everything? 

The old section is dominated by the cathedral. It is not a particular impressive edifice either outside or inside. The earthquake that destroyed Ragusa and Noto also destroyed the old cathedral here. They started to rebuild it in the grand baroque manner, but ran out of money. 

The dome was never built, and there is a trompe l’oeil picture at the crossing above the high altar where the dome should be. That is the most interesting thing about the cathedral, but a there was a number of older women making sure that no tourists took pictures. 

There were no pictures allowed either in the cathedral museum, but there was only one woman at the desk and she did not seem to particularly care. So we quietly snapped some pictures of charming shadow box of the Last Supper

and a really disturbing one of the martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

The basement was filled with croziers, chalices, and pectoral crosses.

Apart from the pleasure to taking surreptitious photographs, there was not much of interest in this collection of ecclesiastic bric a brac. We went on to some of the other small museums. The history museum had prehistoric,

Roman,

Christian,

and folk art.

We also looked in the old jail and in a tiny natural history museum. The eighteenth graffiti on the walls of the jail was interesting. Although the Knights were supposedly a monastic order, they were apparently not a particularly devout group of young men. When drunken brawling resulted in death, offending knights were imprisoned here on Gozo. They evidently dreamed of a time when a ship would come and bring them back to Malta again. 

We walked around the battlements now turning into restaurants. 

Again, we noticed how much of it remains to be rebuilt and wondered how much of this would have been just rubble a decade ago.

We caught the bus back to our hotel and enjoyed some time in the rooftop pool. 

We learned on our bike ride two days ago that tonight would be the festa in Kercem. But we also knew that it would not really start until around nine at night and that bus service would be finished by that time. So we talked to the clerk at the desk who made arrangements with a taxi driver to take us there and pick us up later on. As it turned out, the driver was from Kercem and even though he barely spoke English at all we could tell that he was delighted that American people were coming to his town for the festa. Still, when we arrived we wondered if maybe this was the wrong evening. The streets were absolutely deserted. We amused ourselves by taking photographs of the sacred and the profane, sometimes in the same picture.

We walked toward the center of town. 

The parish church was packed and we could hear the sound of not only a chorus but a small orchestra. They were concluding  their celebration with the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. 

We thought that the festivities would start as soon as people left the church. But nothing at all seemed to happen. John asked one of the men sitting in the street when things would become lively. Not until about eleven, he said. We knew we had to leave for the airport in the middle of the night but we had no intentions of missing a festa. As it grew dark, the church was illuminated in gaudy colors

and the lights in the street came on. 

More and more people steadily filled the streets. We finally convinced these young boys to pose in the jerseys that had been made specially for the occasion.

John stumbled across some guys with a vintage World War II American jeep and they insisted he get his picture taken in it.

Two complete marching bands started to assemble. 

There were people sitting on every street corner. 

Today we had our third and final bike ride of the trip. This was was different from the two rides on Malta where we had to wait to be transported to the beginning of the route. This was designed as a loop beginning and ending at our hotel in Xledi. Because of this, we were able to get started early, a little before seven o’clock. That helped all the difference today. It was a good ride.

Good — but not great. Once again, the written directions were not that helpful and when we came into Victoria we were directed to turn onto a street that simply was not there. At that point we simply gave up and tried to find our own way to the next town. And how fortunate that was because we came upon the final preparation for a festa tomorrow evening. There were colorful statues of saints everywhere and lights were spread across the street. 

We went through many kilometers of farm fields. One of the differences between Gozo and Malta is that this smaller island still has a vibrant agricultural sector. We rode past a sandstone quarry and an expensive hotel. At one critical junction we were given the opportunity to take a detour to the “Azure Window” and the “Inland Sea”, two of Gozo’s biggest attractions. I really wanted to go there, but John read that the road to the shore went sharply downhill and he did not want to go up it. So we went on into Victoria. 

We will see the real sights of Gozo’s largest city tomorrow. For today we looked a bit through some of the central city including a large if somewhat dull public garden planted by some Englishman. For some reason, we did not bother to take pictures here. 

Returning to the hotel, we washed ourselves off and enjoyed the rooftop pool and the lounge chairs there. We pretty much had the whole place to ourselves. I fell asleep for a bit, and so did John. 

I worked a bit on photos and napped some more while John went for a walk. He sent me a text and asked me to come out an wave on our balcony. 

He explored a cool sea cave.

He found out that real fishing is still taking place on this island.

In the late afternoon, John decided he wanted to rent a motor boat. His initial thought had been to go to the Azure Window, but the boatman convinced him to go to Comino instead. This is the third largest of the Maltese Islands, though it is almost uninhibited. I am not usually prone to motion sickness, but the bouncing of the boat almost did me in. John offered to turn back, but I decided to tough it out. And I am glad we did. We saw some beautiful rock formations

and mysterious sea caverns. 

Comino, as I mentioned, is almost uninhabited. But there are a couple small hotels there. This one looked quite swank. I think the only way to get there is to come on your boat.

Throughout it all, John was a fantastic skipper. All that early training from his dad paid off I guess.

Malta is a small archipelago. Most people live on the largest island which is also called Malta. A much smaller number live on the second largest island, Gozo. The remaining handful of islands are either small and lack any meaningful source of water. After being a little disconcerted to discover just how urban Malta is, we were definitely looking forward to seeing Gozo. 

Our driver met us with the van a few minutes late. He had a young girl with him, and we figured that this was his daughter. Most of the Maltese we have met so far have been quite reserved, but this man liked to talk. His English was not perfect, but it was better than average for this island. We drove north towards the ferry to Gozo. He asked us where we had been. We told him that where our bike rides had taken us and also about our trips to Valletta and Mdina. He asked us if we had been to Popeye’s Village. John perked up. “No,” he said. “Is it on the way?”

In the early 1970’s, shortly after the success of Nashville, Robert Altman had decided to make a movie of the cartoon with Robin Williams in the lead role. Probably because it was cheap to film here in Malta, Altman constructed a huge set in an inlet on the north part of the island. People like it so much that when I burnt down a few years later, they rebuilt it. I am not sure how many people still watch the movie, but the set is a big tourist draw.

We fortunately did not have to wait long for the ferry. Although a short crossing, we left the van and walked around the deck of the ship. John bought some snacks and a couple souvenirs. Soon we were approaching Gozo.

As we drove off the boat, we chatted some more with our driver. He told us that the girl with him had only been to Gozo once before in her life even though she had only lived in Malta. We said something about her being his daughter, and he corrected us. “No, she’s my girlfriend,” he said. As she could not have been more than fourteen, we were appalled but could say nothing. 

We drove through a small port town. 

Our destination was the tiny village Xlendi. We were there is no time at all. Our accommodation for the next three nights is the Saint Patrick hotel. I knew right away that I would like it here. The hotel is older, relatively small, and located right on the beach. We filled out all the usual paperwork at the front desk, but our room was not quite yet ready. As it was barely noon, I could hardly complain. We left our luggage at the desk and and went to the restaurant. There is a small sandy beach here in front of the hotel. We both had some coffee and enjoyed our surroundings. It was everything we had wanted Malta to be. 

We observed with pleasure that there is still fishing going on here.

After a couple of cokes, we were restless and decided to explore. Xlendi is located at the end of a small inlet. 

The water is clear and magnificently turquoise.

At the end of the inlet we came to sandstone cliffs. 

At some point, the Knights Hospitalers had erected some fortifications here.

But local people had used it a place to dry sea salt. 

We watched some tourists — they had to be Italian or French — set up a beach umbrella. 

Around this time, we noticed that it was two o’clock and John realized that the medication alarm on his phone was probably ringing like crazy at the desk. We called the hotel and told them how to silence it. We felt embarrassed, but I know they were grateful. We walked back more quickly to the hotel, crossing over the stone bridge that leads from the town toward the tower.

Our room was ready for us. It is simple, but it has a great view of the entire inlet. 

There is a rooftop pool, and it even had wifi! I need to put away the computer and enjoy some of the planet’s loveliest scenery! But such is the life of a travel blogger. 

In the evening we had a mediocre meal at the restaurant. We watched as sun faded and the lights came on in town,

and reflected in the water.

Tomorrow is our last bike ride. This one is different from the previous two as we leave from the hotel — nobody picks us up. So we are going to get up as early as possible and leave before it gets too hot. I hope that this bike ride will be a happier experience than our last one. 

So far, Gozo is the best!

 Today was our second bike ride. It was not really successful on several levels, and it left me feeling pretty dispirited about this whole trip again. As before, we were driven to the beginning of our bike ride. I just do not really understand why this hotel was picked for a trip like this as neither of the rides on Malta begins even remotely close to it. This one began at Birzebbuga at the far southern tip of the island. It is not at all an attractive place dominated by the Malta Freeport facility. The directions sent us uphill for a couple kilometers on a busy road. Fortunately it did have a broad and completely unused sidewalk. After that, however, things became completely confusing. The directions told us stuff life “Go left on road” and then “After 500 meters go right” and “Continue through the industrial park before going right again.” This even pulling out our phones and checking Google Maps we could make no sense of these directions. We were in an industrial area and there were many roads, none well-marked. Several times we made our best guess about which road we should take only to have to backtrack. By this time John was frustrated and I was angry. 

We just did our best to find the village of Zurrieq. We knew we were supposed to pass through it. Not a place with much to commend it other than a funny statue at the entry to one house on the edge of town

and a pretty decent fruit stand in the center. 

The main point of this trip was to show us the Blue Grotto. There are a number of places like this in the Mediterranean. Each of them is a small cove with a shallow bottom made of limestone. The white stone causes the water to appear a stunning turquoise color. Malta’s Blue Grotto is supposed to be one of the very best of these, rivaling the Grotta Azzurra on Capri. The way to the Blue Grotto was quite well-marked from Zurrieq so could do dispense with our generally useless directions. 

And it was indeed quite lovely there.

At three o’clock, we met the driver and came back to the hotel. We rested for a bit, and cleaned ourselves up. John was not sure about what he wanted to do for the evening, but I knew that I wanted to go to Mdina. So I walked over to the nearby bus stop to catch the X3 bus, and he said that if he felt better he might join me. 

As it turned out, Malta public transit, which usually seems to be efficient and on-time, was not either of those things this evening. The six o’clock bus to Mdina never showed us. I stood there, along with a large group of Italians who planned to take the same bus to the airport, getting more and more annoyed. About thirty minutes later John showed up to catch the six-thirty bus. And in a couple minutes it showed up and we both boarded. I was glad to have him with me!

Mdina is the old capital of Malta. When the British took over Malta in the aftermath of the defeat of Napoleon, they made Villetta the capital and Mdina remained a seventeenth century walled city. Mdina is located on one of the highest points on the island and during the medieval period enormous walls were built around the city. These have been recently restored by the government of Malta in cooperation with the European Union. Here is a shot of Mdina take as our bus approached it. 

The old fortifications are now beautiful public areas. Most American urban planners do not have to think about how they are going to creatively turn an old moat into a public park, but Maltese planners do! And what a magnificent job they have done here. 

John paused outside the main gate to the city to get his picture snapped.

The restored city is absolutely gorgeous. Almost everything in Mdina was rebuilt by the  Knights of Saint John in the heady years after their victory of the Turks in 1657. Apparently the same earthquake the leveled much of southern Sicily did some damage here as well and that is also the reason that this is a baroque rather than a medieval town. 

The cobblestone streets are pristinely clean. Most of the shops had closed for the day, so it often seemed like we had the city to ourselves. It was near sunset, that time that director David Lean called “the golden hour” and John was in a mood to pose.

Today was the day I started to like Malta. This was scheduled as an “off” day for the bikes. We decided to go into Valletta and explore the capital city. It was a capital idea! Yesterday we discovered that the transit hub was only about 500 feet from the Dolmen hotel. And we also figured out that Google Maps seemed to have all the information we needed to take the bus. So after a quick and uninspiring breakfast, we walked over and found the bus headed towards the Valletta. 

We arrived early so that John could go to a meeting. We found the place, with some difficulty, and I discovered that the Anglican cathedral was only a few steps away. 

It obviously dated from the early nineteenth century when the precise difference between the Church of England and the Bank of England was not too clear to anyone. There was a English woman sweeping the porch. She invited me to come back at 11:00 for the service. This sounded interesting, and it left me about an hour or so to wander around the streets of Valletta on my own.

One of the defining architectural features of Malta are the window boxes build on the houses. 

The main street of the city, Triq Republik, was festooned as if for some saints’ day. However, when I looked more closely, I noticed that the decorations were for the “Shopping” festa! Malta is one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, but I think in Valletta the worship of Mammon is paramount. 

But God is not dead on this little island. Most of the churches were holding sevices and I avoided entering those churches out of respect. But I did look into some of the churches that we not celebrating Mass at the time. This was apparently the Jesuit church. I was surprised it was not even more baroque. 

Around eleven o’clock, I returned to the Anglican cathedral. John was not yet finished with his meeting, so I send him a text telling him what I was doing. The church was surprisingly full. The choir of Oriel College Oxford was singing the service that morning. Although Oriel is one of the University’s oldest colleges, the apparently do not have a choral foundation of men and boys. Instead, this was a mixed choir of male and female students. They were good, but not exceptional. There was also a large Swedish youth group here. We were told that these were high school age students who were preparing for confirmation and apparently a trip to Malta was part of this. I suppose they were here to see where Saint Paul had spent the winter after his shipwreck though escaping the gray Swedish weather may have been the real attraction. John joined me about part way through the service. After it was done, he snapped picture of me by the baptismal font.

I sat by a woman I assumed to be Maltese during the Eucharist. After the service we saw her snapping some pictures of the church on her phone. “I guess you’re a tourist too!” John said. We all introduced ourselves. It turned out that she was from New York where she was a member of Saint Bartholomew’s. Her husband is the head of Episcopal Relief and Development, so not surprisingly he was at General Convention in Salt Lake City while she and her daughter were spending some time here in Malta. 

John and I headed towards Triq Republik. We stopped at a cafe there for some quick bite. We saw a reminder of Malta’s 160 odd years as a possession of the British Crown.

From there we went off to explore the Palace of the Grand Master. For a couple hundred years, Malta was the property of the Knights of Saint John, one of the “military” orders of the Catholic church. During the crusades, this group started out supposedly protecting pilgrims headed towards the Holy Land. They operated shelters or “hospitals” along the way. This gave them the nickname of “Hospitalers.”  But the crusaders were driven from Palestine by the Muslims, the the knights found themselves at first on the island of Rhodes and later here in Malta. The Turks made a rather spectacular effort to capture Malta in 1654, but failed to dislodge the Knights Hospitalers. The failure was most likely due to internal divisions among the Muslim forces, but the Christians ascribed the victory to Providence. After this victory, the Knights took transformed a fort on a small isthmus into a baroque city and named Valletta after the de Vallette, the French leader of the knights. From that time until another Frenchman named Napoleon successfully conquered Malta, the leader of the Knights, known as the Grand Master, was the ruler of the island and lived in a palace here in Valletta. 

The palace is now a museum, though some of its rooms are used by the democratically-elected leaders of Malta on special occasions. Before Malta became a republic around 1974, it had been a dominion of the British Crown for about a decade. A picture of Queen Elizabeth is a relic of those days.

We wandered through elaborate halls

and looked out onto lovely courtyards. 

There is a huge collection of armor here. This is not one of my biggest historical interests, but we thought we should take a look at it as it was part of the tour.

John loved this face mask. 

But the palace of the Grand Master was not the only place to learn more about Malta’s past. We also looked into the Museum of Archeology. The Maltese are proud that the first monumental structure in Europe were built on these islands. We know remarkably little about the group called “The Temple Builders,” but we do know that long before the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge, huge stone buildings were erected here and they were beautifully decorated. There were examples here of some of the art work that has recovered from the temple sites such as this reclining woman. Could this be the inspiration for Henry Moore?

The group that followed the Temple Builders in the Bronze Age was hardly as advanced in either building or art. They did erect stone tables or “dolmen” and I presume our hotel is named after this archeological feature.

Although it was later afternoon, I was ready to look at another museum. But the day was pretty hot and John was tired, so he decided that we should go an cool off at a movie theater. For some reason, he decided that he wanted to see San Andreas. The movie was incredibly stupid, as both of us knew it would be, but the air conditioning did feel good. 

As we came closer to sunset, we decided to do the Lonely Planet walking tour of Valletta. We started near the old main gate of the city. Renzo Piano, the great Italian architect, has created a new home for the Maltese legislature and redesigned the gate and the plaza. 

The parliament building is made of the lovely local limestone. In the past, I have never quite understood why Piano is such a highly-regarded architect, but I I think this might change my opinion of him, too. It is a great building in a wonderful public space. 

Right next to the Parliament building is what remains of the old opera house. The Germans and the Italians bombed Malta mercilessly from 1940 to 1942. The theater was destroyed, and right after the war rebuilding an opera house did not seem all that important. Today, the what remains has been carefully converted into a great outdoor theater. 

Walking around the backstreets of Valletta, we saw things old

and not so old.

We decided to explore Siliema and Saint Julian, two of the newer neighborhoods of the city. These are located on the other side of the harbor, so we decided to take a ferry across. As we waited for the boat, we noticed fireworks. 

We asked a woman waiting for the boat and she told us that this meant that there would be a “festa” or celebration for a saint’s day that evening. 

We loved the site of Valletta bathed in the golden light at sunset.

We were unclear about what to do when we found ourselves on the other side of the harbor. I was for just finding someplace to have dinner and head home, but John wanted to find Paceville, the nightclub district of the island. We compromised a bit. John bought me a sausage, and I agreed to walk towards Paceville. We had only gone a few hundred yards, however, when we came upon the “festa.” This was a grand Catholic celebration 

but the Anglo-American marching band had been added to the Tridentine rituals. 

A large statue of the Virgin was being carried and procession. We looked at the image of Our Lady

and at the watching ladies, too.

Soon it was dark. The waterfront in Saint Julian is a lively place. 

We found a restaurant that Lonely Planet had recommended and had a decent and reasonably-priced meal. We caught the bikes for home. Tomorrow will be our last day and we will be on the bikes again. I hope it will be as nice as today was. Like I said, I am beginning to like this country. 

Today was our first bike ride. This was notlike  our bike ride in Italy where we went from hotel to hotel and they took our luggage from one place to another. Instead, what they are doing here is driving us to a starting spot and we ride from there. 

After a breakfast even less inspiring than our dinner last night — the only thing worse than a full English breakfast is a one served from a steam table — a van pulled up with our bikes. I did a quick check to see if John’s bike was the right size, and fortunately it was. I knew that we were not going to have a GPS this year like we did last year, but I was stunned when I asked the bike man about holder for our maps. He looked at me as if I were crazy. “It’s an island,” he said. “You can’t get lost.” I was annoyed.

We were driven to Dingli on the other side of the island from Saint Paul’s Bay. Our driver was not particularly chatty, and was quite happy to discharge us and our bikes right in front of the church. 

The directions were not particularly clear, but we finally figured out how to make it to the Dingli cliffs. Riding along this bluff is clearly the major attraction of this route, and it is marked as a cycle route by the Malta government. Apparently there are only a couple of these on the islands. There are still remnants in Malta as a British military outpost including this radar facility. I gather it is now under control of the Maltese military, not, I suspect, a particularly large force.

We stopped to get a water at the Bobbyland restaurant. This is another remnant of Malta’s British days, but it had quite a favorable review in Lonely Planet. They had not yet begun serving lunch, but were happy to let us have some fizzy water and use their wifi. 

As we went on, our frustration with the directions that had been provided to us grew. And, because I had no place on my bike to place this flip chart — this is quite standard for bike touring — we had to stop and pull it out of the backpack every time we can to a fork in the road. Had it not been for the Malta bicycle path signs in red behind me, we might still be lost in some barren field. 

There were some nice scenic views. 

in this Baja like landscape. 

At last we arrived in the city of Mgarr. The church dominates the skyline of the town as it does in most small Maltese cities. This one we learned in called the “egg church” because it was build in the 1930’s mostly from the money local people made from keeping chickens and selling eggs.