Maybe I'm getting older too fast, but traveling for me is becoming each time less exciting to me. I don't know what's the reason, but I guess the fact that anywhere in Europe is converging towards the same kind of thing is helping quite a big deal. One might expect that places so marooned such as Malta would still seem pretty different, but then, I discover that it is not, at least, due to the kind of landscape my eyes are used to observe.
Malta is a minuscule island in the very center of the Mediterranean, our sea, and has a pretty interesting history, which in many aspects quite defines the nature of Europe, but in a far smaller scale. It is a fortress on the sea which once was ruled by knights of seven nations who control the marine paths of trade and peoples crossing the sea, restricting the incursions of infidels into the heart of European Christendom.
What is it now, Malta? To me, it is just a rock, almost half of it totally urbanized in the most bizarre way. The word I'd would use to define Malta is
small, too small. It can be completely seen in a couple of days; and then, the only thing that one can do is just sitting in a terrace and drinking its mild beer
Cisk. I bet that my opinion of Malta would be better if I owned one of the yachts moored at the harbor, and had spent my days partying on board with half a dozen of Easter European beauties, as Berlusconi, but unhopefully that was not the case.
However, what started in the dullest way, that of treating the most unfriendly people on Earth, Maltese, turned little by little into more enjoyable days and nights, until the last one, when being all the work done, we started the afternoon by doing an improvised cruise around the creeks of Malta and continued the evening and night feasting the unexpected victory of the Maltese football league by
La Valletta F.C. At that point things became more and more surreal.
From a square where supporters were celebrating the victory, we went to the football team's bar, where horrendous music of football anthems were played once and again while drunken supporters jumped like loonies. That was hotter than hell, and we kept drinking water-down beer to maintain our liquid balance stable. And when the party here was over, we followed a very peculiar character resembling
Sandokan to a club in the docks, from where we left with time to sleep a couple of hours before catching our flight back, through Munich, to Barcelona.
That was the story of my trip to assist to a meeting and workshop in Malta dealing with automatic sign language recognition and translation, the project I'm currently involved in, that end up dancing in La Valletta docks with a pretty and clever English girl, a funny German from Oxford, a Cameroonian from Aachen, my boring co-worker, and a Belgian guy with a T-shirt saying that "
Porn Happens". Yeah, it probably does!
