Malta, part III: Stranger in a Strange Land

Hi, y'all. Any of you who are still out there. I think I'm pretty much back to blogging to myself, except for my mother who still checks this blog. That's okay with me.

I knitted with my next door neighbor today. She is a lovely person, who is putting herself out there to be friendly to me and Bill. And she has a handy 15 year old son who ferret-sat for us when we were on vay-cay and did a nice job. She is making a felted bag which should be very pretty. I continued to work on my sock I started in Malta, and began to turn the short-row heel, which, if its anything like the short-row toe, should be very exciting.

More about Malta: want to see more pictures of the Tarxian temples? (that's plural because there are actually ruins of several of them, all sitting next to each other.) By the way, I could not get over when I was there that "Tarxian temple" sounded sort of Star-Trek-y, and then I finally remembered there was some alien race in one of the newer series called the "Tlaxians," and that must be what I am dredging up from my subconscious. That and the fact that "Tarxian" when spoken rhymes with "Martian". Ah...Star Trek. In our new house we have cable, for the first time in my life, and that's sucking me in sometimes. The frequent availability of Star Trek is problematic, as is the home-redecorating channel. And last night I discovered Six Feet Under for the first time. What a great show! I appreciated the darkness of the drama, and it reminded me of my past, working in hospice and all.

Yeah, I know, ADHD, Malta. Tarxian temples.

I have about a dozen cool shots along the lines of this one. Rocks, piled on one another in interesting ways.

I was also fascinated, as I said in an earlier post, by the juxtaposition of these ancient stones together with the plants and cats growing and living among them.


These round rocks were just sort of lying around the perimeter of the temples. Its believed that they were used as wheels of sorts to move these big rocks around as the people built the temples.

One of the strange things about visiting these temples is that we could actually get close to them--some of the more unusual elements were kind of roped off, but certainly not in any way that would keep us from touching things if we had any interest in doing so.

Like my bad husband, who was fondling this round rock, which it is believed was used for grinding grains in this round-rock-shaped hole.

We met this lovely girl Naoko (above, left) from Japan. She was travelling in Malta for a few days. We took her picture, she took our pictures, we all had our pictures taken by the little guy who minded the entrance of the temples. A brave woman travelling through Europe by herself, she was friendly and talked with us a while. Anyway we ran into her again on the bus the next day, and then again on our flight to Milan. Three times is quite a bit of a coincidence, wouldn't you say? Naoko, if you stop by this blog, it was ever so nice to meet you!

By the way, the other people in the above picture are myself, my husband Bill, my sister-in-law Kari and my brother Dan. We left their toddler at the hotel with my folks and took the car (Bill driving, of course) over to the temples. This was an experience in itself. On the way home I took pictures of buses.

Boy did my family make fun of me for taking pictures of buses. But they were all so neat, all different, clearly old but well-maintained. Below are more bus pictures I took at the central bus area in Valetta:

It was neat visiting a place where you could really take a bus anywhere. They had bus routes to every single place in the entire island. A tiny but beautiful island.

Well, I think I've finished talking about Malta. Next: I'll finally post pictures of our new house.