I drove into Lom today to get online, and the connection at the tourist office was down. After hunting around town for a hotspot, I’m now sitting outside a gas station in some chilly weather bringing you this quick update.
Things at the lodge are going well. No guests this week, so we’re busy cleaning the place and getting ready for the season to get underway, which should happen by June. We’re expecting a lot of national team skiers for training, both from Norway and around Europe. That includes a lot of Olympians, like the biathalon gold medalist Ole Einar Bjørndalen. We will have snow for several more weeks (or months) in Jotunheimen national park, which they call the “roof of Norway.” It’s been coming down hard the past couple of days. The new header image is one of two sets of peaks you can see from the lodge. They are called the “Smørstabbtindane.”
I’ve been using my free time on timmyjimi productions, and I just uploaded a new one here. Next time I’m online, I’ll try to post some pictures from Malta, and eventually another video, but that will have to wait for now. If you would like a postcard from the top of Norway, leave a comment with your address and keep an eye on your mailbox.
Filed under: Malta
Back in the nineties, I went to a private high school that emphasized classical education, which included studying Latin and biblical Greek, and reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. It was interesting enough to me in the classroom, but the ancient cultures never appealed to me in the way they did to my sister, Kristen, for example. She went on to get a bachelors degree in the stuff, and even spent a number of days on an educational tour of Italy, which was reported to be as informative as it was swelteringly hot and dirty.
I have always been of a different opinion from those who choose to vacation on the Mediterranean, opting instead for what I still consider to be one of Europe’s best kept secrets (at least for outdoor lovers) in the heart of Scandinavia. For all the history in the South, my own history – my identity – is and always will be North.
But while spending the Winter in Norway this year, I became acquainted with a father/son duo of gourmet chefs who work at the hotel at Kvitfjell. John Baptist Borg and his oldest son Clayton Anthony Paul Borg are from Malta, and at the end of the season, they invited us (me and a few neighbors) home with them to stay at their guest flat in Melieha.
I was skeptical, given my impression of the southern weather and lack of acute interest in the culture, but we were failing to put together any other plans for a vacation finale, and a free place to stay seemed hard to beat. So we bought our tickets and arrived here on April 26th, the day my eyes were opened to what I have found to be an amazing part of the world.
Both Odysseus and St. Paul found welcome and refuge in Malta during times of distress. I come here, not distressed, but curious, and the hospitality I find is the same as it was so long ago. I asked my travel mates yesterday what their favorite part of the trip had been so far. In the United States, two-hundred years is old. In Norway, you can multiply that by four or five. But here, old is the beginning of history – millenia – and I am seeing, touching, breathing a place that has been a crossroads of civilization since the dawn of the human race. There is beautiful nature, comfortable weather, and warm kindness all around me, but my favorite part is simply how OLD everything is. Malta tells the story of mankind, and I am captivated.
