Today we had only part of a day before heading back to the airport so we started out with some quick breakfast and a visit to St John's Co-Cathedral and Museum. This Cathedral is truly a monument to the Knights of St John and their wealth. Every bit of the inside is covered with ornate carvings and statues and paintings and each of them contains the crest of the knight who commissioned it, and in some cases a likeness as well. We also saw what was once a receptacle for John the Baptists forearm (the one he use to baptize Christ) but the French stole the jewels and one of the Grand Masters of Malta removed the relic as he fled the city during an invasion so now its just a couple of gold and silver cherubs pointing to an empty gold container. We also saw some Flemish tapestries from 1702 which supposedly cost as much as an annual military budget but their colors were so washed out it was difficult to experience their opulence since I had just left the main cathedral and my eyes were still adjusting to the lack of glitz much as they do when coming inside on a sunny day.

Whereas the audio guide for the palace armory was brief almost to the point of triteness the cathedral guide was long winded and full of details about the painters and the knights and grand masters and symbols and really anything they could think of. Often the narrator would start waffling on about some painting or sculpture or side chapel without given any indication of what he was referring to and at other times he described the obvious bits at length. Yes, having found the most famous paining in the whole place (conveniently denoted by signs, museum guards and no photography signs) I don't need the narrator to list the characters who appear in the painting, nor to describe what they are wearing since I'm looking right at it.

After the cathedral we went to the Maltese Experience which we hardly felt we could skip given that every corner in Valletta contains at least one sign pointing tourists in its direction. When we were visiting the war museum a plaque at the end of the WWII exhibit said that as Malta gained its independence from England it wanted to make a move from a military based economy to one of tourism and industry. Well I think the Malta Experience was a direct result of that decisions. It is an "audio visual experience" cataloging Malta's long history of invasion starting with the original inhabitants and their impressive temples and catacombs and continuing through the Turks, Arabs, Knights, French, English and possibly a few others that I forgot and finally ending with a upbeat description of the Maltese people embracing change and diversity. The film was entertaining and amusing enough although some of the photos looked like they had been snapped in an afternoon by someone who ran around the city (much the way we did) quickly taking picture and sprinting to the next notable location. Some of them were blurry as if the wind was blowing the leaves of the plants in the palace courtyard or the photographer was taking shots on the sly when the museum curator wasn't looking. We also had a bit of lunch and zipped around the art museum where my favorite paining was one of a woman slicing a mans throat open. Despite what you might think my choice was not based on the subject matter but because, unlike so many of the other nearby saint martyr depictions, the woman and the man both had furrowed brows and some actual angst in their expressions. It would appear that the most popular emotions to wear when being killed in a gruesome way are boredom with a side of pouty-ness for women and boredom with a bit of superiority for men. Also the lack of cherubs and halos earns the painter bonus points.

Lastly we wandered around the city for a bit looking for a cab but eventually gave up and hopped on a bus back to the airport where we are now sitting conspicuously in a large section of the airport seating which is empty except for us, a man who I imagine is playing suduku on his phone, and the woman from Diamonds International who is eating a burger which appears much to cheep to be approved by her employer which might be why she is eating in the airport seating section rather than in her shop.

Today we were a bit slower getting started and having so efficiently toured Malta on Saturday we decided to visit the neighboring town of Rabat to see some early Christian catacombs and a Dominican Monastery. We started our trek by heading toward the Valletta bus station which is a huge roundabout filled with orange buses beeping at each other and rolling backwards several feet each time they set out to move forwards. We had to wait quite a while for our bus but once it finally came we had no trouble getting to Rabat especially since the bus driver kindly yelled out "Rabat" when he got to our stop.

The catacombs were bigger than I was expecting. The largest one was a maze of tiny passageways with cutouts in the side of the passage for children and larger chest high blocks of stone carved out in the top for adults and families. In some places there was just as small hole in the wall which appeared to lead to more room(s) of compartments. Maybe there were other passage ways on different levels that lead to these rooms which were blocked off.

Even though there weren't any bodies there (at least that we could see) it was still quite eerie and a bit uncomfortable, especially for Kim who I occasionally exclaimed "Oww!" from in front or behind me as he hit his head on the ceiling.

After the catacombs we strolled along to a Dominican Monastery which was quite peaceful with a square garden in the middle full of pools and lemon trees and a lovely high arched walkway along the outer edge of the garden. We were allowed to walk along a broad, high ceilinged hallway inside the monastery to a chapel which I think was probably smaller than the hallway which lead up to it and had an alter full of what looked like plastic pink flowers but I think they were probably a recent addition rather than a 17th century artifact.

After the monastery we noticed a convenient bus stop across the street with a group of encouraging looking old people who we hopped were on their way back to Valletta. After only a few minutes at the bus stop a bus bound for Valletta did indeed appear and we had a pleasant ride back to the city only to discover ourselves in the midst of the full blown Carnival crowd. The Carnival is, as far as I can tell, a pre-Lent celebration involving lots of floats painted in florescent colors, teens in crazy florescent costumes of things like castles, flowers and lobsters and kids dressed as princesses, cow persons, comic book heroes, and gypsies. And the occasional lizard or tiger but these animal like costumes seemed to be reserved for children to young to pick out their own.

We naively followed the crowd into the city through the main gate rather than taking the long way around and after witnessing a near fist fight between two women with baby carriages who kept bumping into each other and being thoroughly squished as several hundred people tried to squeeze between some sort of food stand and the metal gates lining the edges of the street we made it to the National Museum of Archeology where we saw some headless human figures, a tiny (and rather curvy) "sleeping lady" statue which is quite old and quite famous, and some neolithic stones from the also quite old Maltese Temples with some faint spirals carved in them. As you may have guessed I was getting a bit musiumed out at this point but I did take a photo of this thing which looked like a coffee cup with a 3 foot diameter.

After this we popped back to the hotel for a quick shower and headed out for dinner, this time Italian food at a restaurant that was either on its way in or out (or both). The waitress had to go and check their supply of food and wine each time we selected something off the menu. But I enjoyed the food and then lost my glove on the way back to the hotel.

This morning we woke up to a lovely sun shiny morning full of sight seeing optimism only to be greeted by our most dismal showering experience to date. We are staying several floors up in our hotel (based on the circuitous route from the front door to our room its a bit tough to say for sure) and the hot water only barely made it to the bathtub tap let alone up the pipe to the shower head. Adding an extra challenge to the showering experience is the step in the middle of the bath tub presumably for sitting on although given that the inside length whole bath tub is about 2 and a half feet there is barely room to stand on either of the steps and sitting on the upper one with my feet on the lower one and my knees right up under my chin made me want to huddle for warmth more than splash cold water over myself in an attempt to get clean. Nevertheless we did manage to get clean and I have since recovered the heat I lost walking around in the warm Maltese sun.

We set out in search of some breakfast but ended up visiting the Hasting Gardens which we stumbled onto before we could find any open cafes.

We wandered around a bit more and finally found a tiny shop selling pies and had some particularly tasty and satisfying meat and cheese pies before setting off for some site of interest which I have since forgotten since we ended up at the completely other end of the city gazing out over the Fort St Elmo.

While we were trying to choose between the nearby War Museum and Malta Experience a man with a horse drawn carriage convinced us to go for a ride around the city. It was a pleasant ride although the wheels were rather loud rolling along the pavement and we couldn't really hear what he was saying as he pointed to random buildings.

Along the way we stopped at the Siege Bell Monument and a random botanical garden which I can't find listed among the PLACES in my guide book. We saw quite a few cats in the garden and we were wondering if Valletta might have an unusually large stray cat population until we saw a sign on the way out of the garden that said 'Cat feeding Point'. So that explains that.

Next I tried to take us to St Paul's Shipwreck Church but failed and we decided to go see the Grand Master's Palace instead where we visited the State Rooms and the Armory. You may be sensing a bit of theme here involving the accidental overshooting of our intended tourism target. Our map of Valletta is about 9 or 10 streets wide and some of the streets are so narrow and ally like that when you walk past them you think 'surely our map is so small that it has left out small streets like this' and then you get to chatting and suddenly you are on the other end of the city having walked right past whatever church or museum you had set out to see. The map is indeed far mor acurate than we give it credit for.

Anyway back to the palace. First we saw the State Rooms which were not really as gaudy and full of stuff as I was expecting but the hallway was quite nice especially since it was lined with knights.

In the armory we saw many coats of armor and lots of weapons and conveniently enough the audio guide pointed out which ones were the most impressive of the collection so I knew exactly which ones to take photos of :).

This for example, is the oldest known or possibly oldest existing or maybe just largest or roundest cannon in the collection.

Of all the things we saw these knight helmets were my favorite.

After the Palace we popped into a cafe for some cake and coffee and had possibly the most tasteless chocolate cake I have ever eaten. Then we went in search of II-Mandragg which was supposedly "the most concentrated and intense slum in the world" in its hight of slummyness but frankly I wasn't really that impressed.

We did pop into Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church which is a large church dating back to the 1570's which was damaged during WWII and unlike the slum the guidebook had a particularly accurate description of the recently reconstructed dome. It is indeed "worth a peek to gape at the dizzying hollowness within" which appears to have been constructed in order to "make Carmel's egg-shaped dome eclipse the spire of the nearby Anglican Cathedral". It is in fact a massive egg shaped dome completely free of any ornament or painting or gold leafing which one normally finds in old cathedrals including this one (below the dome line).

We also popped into the War Museum which described Malta's pivotal role in WWI and WWII and was full of cool stuff like anti tank guns and random videos including one about the German invasion of Albania.

There was also a large speed boat looking thing which didn't seem to have room for any passengers but was apparently a reconstructed version of something the Italians used in a failed attempt to invade Malta. It did not seem from the description however, that the failure was due to no Italians ever actually making it to land to invade which was my chief speculation. Describing the events of the war were lots of standard museum type plaques containing narrative gems such as "The British fleet assumed responsibility for contrasting the Germans in the North Sea, the Atlantic coast and the channel, while the French shouldered the onus for the Mediterranean... France obtained that it would have overall authority over both fleets... [but it turned out that the French and English didn't get along so well and] problems were met at the dockyard [because] British measurements were used, while the French used the metric system. This problem was surmounted thanks to a special apparatus devised by a Maltese fitter." No actual apparatus was displayed but it sounds an awful lot like a ruler containing both measurements to me.

Here is a photo of some butterfly bombs. I don't really know what they are or how they were used but they looked cool :)

When we got back to the hotel Kim chivalrously arranged for us to move to a different room with a working shower (yay!) except when we got there we discovered that the hot water heater had been turned off (boo!) so we had to wait a bit before showering and heading off for some dinner.

Our travel to Malta was pretty uneventful. We left work at lunch time which is a good start to any trip and caught a tube/train/bus combo to the airport. We then stood in the check in line for half an hour so that my travel documents could be stamped per the instructions on the boarding pass we printed the night before only to find out we could have gone to a different desk which was not marked in any way to suggest that they provided travel document stamping services and had basically no line at all. Kim set off the metal detector with his chewing gum and we tried eat a nice sit down lunch not realizing how little time we had and ended up having to scoff it and run to the gate only to find ourselves standing in line again waiting to board. The flight was as per usual for Ryan Air complete with a litany of items for sale ranging from food to drinks to raffle tickets to smokeless cigarettes. I did manage to start a new CIV IV game but I only had time to kill off a few barbarians and not any actual competing civilizations. The taxi that the hotel was supposed to send for us never turned up so we chartered our own cab, just one of many many cabbies standing around waiting to bring tourists to the city center, and arrived at the hotel in a speedy manner. Fortunately Malta used to be part of the British Empire so they drive on the left here which is always a particularly enjoyable experience for me given that Maltese cab drivers have the same speedy, reckless attitude that cab drivers share the world over. After arriving at our hotel we set out in search of drink and nourishment and we found a cute little wine bar where we tried both red and white Maltese wines and ate cheese fondue. Until the restaurant was overrun by 20some year old men who spent more time going on smoke breaks and leaving the door open than actually eating. Now it's time for bed but I think this bring the laptop and update the blog along the way method might be my new favorite blogging technique especially now that I have my super cool Ferrari laptop which is way better than Kim's new slightly smaller laptop no matter what he says.

Kim has just declared that he is master of the universe so I think I'd better go and put a stop to that...

The rest of our trip was spent at Frost Valley YMCA in the Catskills. It was raining or misting most of the time we were there but it wasn't so cold or soaking wet as to make the trip to miserable. We had heard rumors of having to sleep in tents or dorm style housing and I were so relieved to discover we had a clean, private room with a private bath that I didn't mind the weather so much.

The bride and groom organized a 'field day' which was full of silly games and not really my sort of thing so I went on a hike instead. You'll notice a map below. My path is marked in lavender.

At first I wasn't quite sure of how well the trails were labeled and how trail like they actually were and I was looking for the blue trail and I came across some blue plastic ribbon tied around some trees so I thought I had found what I was looking for and I started blazing my way through the forest. The blue trail was supposed to be moderately difficult so the fact that there wasn't really a trail and only some ribbon tied around an occasional tree didn't seem that odd. Until I came to a cliff with a tiny tree growing straight out the side with a little blue ribbon tied around it; then I got suspicious. I tried to figure out a way around the sheer rock but after about 10 mintues of stomping through the wet and muddy woods I gave up and declared defeat and went back down to follow the yellow trail which was an easy trail. I walked along that for a while until I came to a sign for a waterfall. This path was also marked as moderately difficult so I wasn't sure if I should follow it given all the warnings about staying on the trail and turning back at the first sign of water, mud or snow, especially after my previous moderate experience but the yellow trail I had been following was quite well cleared and it was clearly marked with little signs (rather than random ribbons) so I decided to give it a go. The path to the waterfall turned out to be up a bit of a hill but other than that it was an easy walk with a nice wide trail and a little wooden platform for viewing and photographing the waterfall at the end.

When I finally made it to the end of the yellow trail I decided that my first attempt at a moderate trail hadn't been a trail at all but a series of randomly marked trees and that I needn't have declared myself an easy trail girl after all, so I set off on a moderate trail around the bottom of the camp. This took a bit longer than I expected but was quite picturesque with lots of little brooks and waterfalls and even a tiny salamander. It was through what was sign posted as a model forest. I don't really know what a model forest is but most of the streams had little rock paths or wooden bridges across them so perhaps a model forest is one that behaves as a model citizen of the earth and grows in a way most convenient for tromping through.

I did finally make it back in time for the wedding and of course the party afterwards. My shoes and jeans were rather soaked but fortunately the sun was out the next morning when we got up and just an hour or so in the sun and my shoes were dry enough to wear home.

Thursday we drove down to Longwood Gardens where we met up with a few friends of mine. Actually, we started out by going to pick up a rental car at the airport which turned out to be much more difficult than we though. It turns out that we had booked the car with an international company and could only have an international driver as the primary driver (ie I could not be the primary driver). Fortunately, Kim has a drivers license from the UK and even more fortunately I was allowed to be an additional driver. Since I'm the only one who can actually drive we (or at least I) were quite relieved to discover this. We had to call the car rental company that we originally booked with so that they could send a new reservation in Kim's name and either the man on the phone or the woman at the desk were not quite sure what they where doing because we stood their for nearly half an hour waiting for the fax to come through before we finally got it sent via email. Once we fgot the car we had a smooth trip down to the gardens and we were able to find my friends in the Children's Garden which was full of fountains and by the time we got there several wet children as well.

After the park we had a quiet, romantic, child free dinner at a fondue restaurant which was fun and relaxing and right across the parking lot from the hotel so we didn't even have to drive.

Friday we woke up bright and cheerful in the morning and went to the mall for a few hours before setting off for NY. Kim tried on most of the men's jackets in the mall and finally picked one after much discussion of inside and outside pockets and their proper opening direction and closure mechanisms. (Inside pockets are required and should have the opening at the top whereas side pockets should open on the side and be comfortable for putting your hands in, either for comfort or to improve the line if you silhouette, I'm not sure which. Neither requires zippers.)

Before I continue on with my story I think it is important to point out that tolls in the US are getting out of control. Especially the bridges.

After shopping we headed up to a wedding at the Frost Valley YMCA in the Catskills. That trip was also smooth although slightly wet. We did make one or two wrong turns but we didn't go too far out of our way. Next time we travel via car I will buy a map and not just rely on google for directions; the $20 you spend on a map only seems wasted until the google instructions are wrong :)

We traveled to NYC on a Virgin flight from Heathrow to JFK which was uneventful and surprisingly comfortable despite being packed with small children. Kim and I had two seats next to the window to ourselves with even a bit of space next to the window for stashing stuff. We took a cab from the airport to the city to avoid dealing with all our luggage on the subway and although the cab driver seemed to prefer straddling lanes or driving on the shoulder to actually driving in a single lane we arrived unscathed. Wednesday we met up with some friends for breakfast (proper American pancakes - yum!) and then strolled through Brooklyn to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. It was rather warm there so between admiring the flora we had a few quick showers in some of the sprinklers scattered about near the entrance.

We also made a quick stop for a few pints at a lovely little bar (although I have no idea where we were and thus could probably never find it again) and then hiked across the Brooklyn Bridge. Actually we ended up under the bridge at the water which was picturesque but then we had to hike back up a looong hill to find a place where we could actually get on the bridge.

We also had steak at a restaurant in Manhattan that Kim has been raving about since he ate there 5 years ago but sadly it wasn't quite as good as he remembered.