It is nearly one year ago that I traveled to Malta with the Kvitfjell gang. It took me the better part of that year to finish a five minute documentary of our vacation. Now, cousin Adam has tipped me off to this video competition, which has motivated me to upload the piece to Vimeo along with a few pictures and words.
April might be the best month of the season, but it is also the busiest. Longer days and warmer temperatures mean more skiers and plenty of work to be done, not to mention that Easter vacation begins today for the rest of the country. When we aren’t on the job, most of us who work here are planning the Summer ahead: where we will go, what we will do, and how we will get there. Instead of last year’s vacation to Malta and a Summer bumming around Norway, I am looking forward to heading home. Plane tickets are more than double the price I anticipated from past experience, so dates and destinations will have to be flexible as I plan the next couple of months. Though I still hope for a May arrival in Moscow, if cost forces me to delay my departure or consider other travel options, it would be nice to have a couple weeks to visit relatives in the South and maybe even see some friends in neighboring Sweden or Denmark. At this point, I am not deciding to return next season (carefully worded), so I have a lot of details to consider, including what to do with Snow White and how I will transport my belongings across an ocean. For now, however, I am juggling a much needed full work schedule, filing taxes in two countries, and even a couple of video projects to keep me sane. I hope this excuses my delay in getting the “weekly” episodes of Twidgets out the door, and please enjoy part four, as it may be another few weeks before part five rolls around.
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.
