A tedious story about a delayed flight
I was going to write an entire post about this flight delay, but now I'm thinking of turning it into a rock opera that will probably get me thrown off my record label, so thanks for that, too, Air Malta. Basically, the flight was delayed for 15 hours -- it made Maltese newspapers -- and spending a night in Gatwick is not very interesting. Still:
Air Malta tried to make it up to us by sending us for lunch at an airport hotel. The Gatwick Hilton has a restaurant in the basement where they hold a kind of buffet of the damned. You just show up and say that your flight was delayed. They don't ask for details; they just look into your eyes and wave you to a table. Air Malta had more than this planned for us, I think, but to find out I would have had to locate some of their staff and talk to them, so I went to Gatwick's pod hotel for a nap, instead. This place is a warren of space station-y corridors with soft purple lighting where you can rent tiny rooms by the hour; like a love hotel, but for boredom.
Gatwick's better by night than by day. The security staff are bored and jokey, there are plenty of chairs, and you join an informal society of airport overnighters -- a demoralized, mildly defiant people who lie down wherever they want and put their feet up on things. One man was sleeping barefoot on a bench with his hand hooked through the handle of a suitcase. We wanted him to lead us, but he was too rugged an individualist.
The new departure time was 1AM. At 3AM, they announced a gate. People crowded to a window from which the plane could be seen and allowed themselves to be cautiously encouraged by this evidence that Air Malta really was an airline. Staff passed along the queue licking their fingers and holding out sheets of paper: vouchers for fabulous compensation? No: a letter that regretted the inconvenience in a general sort of way, offered a somewhat valorizing account of Air Malta's response to events, and loosely linked together some ideas about aircraft wet-leasing and the ungovernability of fate. This provoked a new round of grumbling about the buffet and one outburst of Maltese rage.
There's something uniquely hollow about a corporate apology. It's partly that they're so calculated, partly that they can't really admit fault, and partly that their authors have this smug belief that people just want to feel they've been heard, when what people really want is for them to be eaten by ants.
Valletta
A driver I'd apparently hired at the airport dropped me off somewhere in Valletta and waved in the probable direction of my pension. It has no sign. I find it by its address. The proprietor is standing in the doorway. We meet as two men who hadn't completely believed in each other's existence. He connects the flight delay to official corruption -- pointing to his pockets and raising his eyebrows -- demonstrates the locks and shutters, mentions that it's a public holiday tomorrow -- St. Joseph's Day -- and offers a ride back to the airport when I need it, which is generous, considering he'd been waking up periodically during the night to look up my flight (I'd tried to tell him I'd just turn up at a decent time in the morning). Then there's a period of unconsciousness, and then I get up and brush my teeth and am heartened to find myself again oriented to time and place and capable of basic self-care.
The room has a stone ceiling supported by thick beams, and stone walls, drilled through in places for cables and pipes, with knobs of old iron and sawed-off bits of wood projecting here and there where people of previous generations had done the same for the mod cons of their own time. There are two little balconies projecting out over the street. Over the intersection, suspended from wires, hangs a cross tricked out with light bulbs. Overlooking it is a life-sized statue of Francis of Assisi. Along the street, a postering campaign promotes a reenactment of the flagellation of Jesus. Above a doorway across the street, a verse from Lamentations has been inscribed in Latin:
Hagar Qim
For St. Joseph's Day, I went to the neolithic temples at Hagar Qim. Why not let the Maltese have their services and processions without me standing around looking at them and posting pictures of them to Instagram or the other social media nonsense I probably use? (Don't get used to it, people of the world, I'm still going to mess up your next thing.)
The bus station is a row of bays faced by a row of orange kiosks where tourists stare at chicken burgers. A bunch of us are going to Hagar Qim, which is an hour's ride away, on the south end of the island. There's a British woman among us who talks loudly and incessantly, as though needing to constantly reassure herself of her own existence. She is a treasure trove of travel stories, but a treasure trove that is being sprayed in your face. Low walls piled up from yellow stones divide plots of weeds and yellow wild flowers from each other, and every few minutes we pull into a silent little yellow town with a sumptuous yellow church.
Your visit to the Neolithic temples at Hagar Qim begins with a "4D" movie presentation. It's in 3D, and the theatre also blows mist past you when it's raining on-screen -- the fourth dimension is mist (it's not just that time passes as you watch). In Valletta, there's something billed as 5D; I think it contends that the fifth dimension is swords. The film is all calendars running backwards and lizards darting over ruins and scenes of rain that are not well-justified dramatically.
The temples, down a little path, are piles of rough megaliths. They were built in the fourth millennium BC, and then again in the 1920s, when they were dug up and pieced back together. There are two separate sites here, because the temple builders, in the inscrutable way Neolithic people had, also moved a few hundred metres down to Manjdra and built another complex. Both sets, being limestone, have begun to dissolve in the rain; they're covered now in huge sails of white canvas supported by steel trusses where local birds nest and sing in large numbers.
Leading off from the path linking the two temple complexes is a path that leads down to a drop-off near the shore, a memorial to a British governor of Malta buried at sea nearby, and a 17th century watchtower built to give warning of attacks by (non-Maltese) pirates or the Ottoman Turks.
The stretch back up to the visitor's centre runs along the wall, with signs asking you not to stray out into the weedy rocks because you'll damage the vegetation. The temptation is the many shacks, piled up out of stones, built by bird trappers who would hide out in them waiting for their decoys to attract a flock so they could jump out and pull down nets. The signs make you think a bit wistfully of the wanton 19th century idea of tourism, where you'd climb all over everything, have a picnic, maybe chip off a little something to take back with you.
On the way back, everyone waits on a low stone wall by the road. A bantering old cabbie pulls up to try to drum up some business, then wishes everyone a happy St. Joseph's Day and peels off.
The Co-Cathedral of St. John
Co-cathedral of St. John is ornate to the point of insanity: every surface carved, gilded, or painted. Exponents of the High Baroque movement are known to have visited during periods of special personal enthusiasm for baroque and said "isn't it a little, well, baroque?" The overwhelming lavishness of the place is explained, as the brochure forgets to mention, by the fact that the Hospitallers of the time had been getting on quite well in the business of large-scale piracy. The modern cathedral agonizes less obviously than some churches over its status as a tourist attraction; admission is €10 on the nail, and it has a .com web site with a 'premium content' section. Still, it's pretty stupendous, and has some Caravaggios.
There's also St. Elmo's Fort, where the knights held out in the Great Siege of 1565, the archaeological museum with its enigmatic neolithic carvings of obese figures, the encircling fortifications, the high ramparts where teenage goofballs are standing with the arms spread out and hooting, the bookstore with a faded copy of 'The Spaceman and King Arthur' in the window, and many other things I am too lazy to describe.
I was going to write an entire post about this flight delay, but now I'm thinking of turning it into a rock opera that will probably get me thrown off my record label, so thanks for that, too, Air Malta. Basically, the flight was delayed for 15 hours -- it made Maltese newspapers -- and spending a night in Gatwick is not very interesting. Still:
Air Malta tried to make it up to us by sending us for lunch at an airport hotel. The Gatwick Hilton has a restaurant in the basement where they hold a kind of buffet of the damned. You just show up and say that your flight was delayed. They don't ask for details; they just look into your eyes and wave you to a table. Air Malta had more than this planned for us, I think, but to find out I would have had to locate some of their staff and talk to them, so I went to Gatwick's pod hotel for a nap, instead. This place is a warren of space station-y corridors with soft purple lighting where you can rent tiny rooms by the hour; like a love hotel, but for boredom.
Gatwick's better by night than by day. The security staff are bored and jokey, there are plenty of chairs, and you join an informal society of airport overnighters -- a demoralized, mildly defiant people who lie down wherever they want and put their feet up on things. One man was sleeping barefoot on a bench with his hand hooked through the handle of a suitcase. We wanted him to lead us, but he was too rugged an individualist.
The new departure time was 1AM. At 3AM, they announced a gate. People crowded to a window from which the plane could be seen and allowed themselves to be cautiously encouraged by this evidence that Air Malta really was an airline. Staff passed along the queue licking their fingers and holding out sheets of paper: vouchers for fabulous compensation? No: a letter that regretted the inconvenience in a general sort of way, offered a somewhat valorizing account of Air Malta's response to events, and loosely linked together some ideas about aircraft wet-leasing and the ungovernability of fate. This provoked a new round of grumbling about the buffet and one outburst of Maltese rage.
There's something uniquely hollow about a corporate apology. It's partly that they're so calculated, partly that they can't really admit fault, and partly that their authors have this smug belief that people just want to feel they've been heard, when what people really want is for them to be eaten by ants.
______
Valletta
A driver I'd apparently hired at the airport dropped me off somewhere in Valletta and waved in the probable direction of my pension. It has no sign. I find it by its address. The proprietor is standing in the doorway. We meet as two men who hadn't completely believed in each other's existence. He connects the flight delay to official corruption -- pointing to his pockets and raising his eyebrows -- demonstrates the locks and shutters, mentions that it's a public holiday tomorrow -- St. Joseph's Day -- and offers a ride back to the airport when I need it, which is generous, considering he'd been waking up periodically during the night to look up my flight (I'd tried to tell him I'd just turn up at a decent time in the morning). Then there's a period of unconsciousness, and then I get up and brush my teeth and am heartened to find myself again oriented to time and place and capable of basic self-care.
The room has a stone ceiling supported by thick beams, and stone walls, drilled through in places for cables and pipes, with knobs of old iron and sawed-off bits of wood projecting here and there where people of previous generations had done the same for the mod cons of their own time. There are two little balconies projecting out over the street. Over the intersection, suspended from wires, hangs a cross tricked out with light bulbs. Overlooking it is a life-sized statue of Francis of Assisi. Along the street, a postering campaign promotes a reenactment of the flagellation of Jesus. Above a doorway across the street, a verse from Lamentations has been inscribed in Latin:
O vos omnes qui transítis per viam, attendite et vidéte si est dólor similis sícut dolor meus.
Oh all you who pass this way, look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.Up the stairs and into the city. The main drag is a kind of low-key carnival, with an Irish band that asks for the names of passing children and incorporates them into songs, a marionette being jiggled to the Beverly Hillbillies theme song, a caricaturist, a stand selling carved walnuts, and more, but the other streets of Valletta are narrow and quiet and an almost uniform yellow.
Hagar Qim
For St. Joseph's Day, I went to the neolithic temples at Hagar Qim. Why not let the Maltese have their services and processions without me standing around looking at them and posting pictures of them to Instagram or the other social media nonsense I probably use? (Don't get used to it, people of the world, I'm still going to mess up your next thing.)
The bus station is a row of bays faced by a row of orange kiosks where tourists stare at chicken burgers. A bunch of us are going to Hagar Qim, which is an hour's ride away, on the south end of the island. There's a British woman among us who talks loudly and incessantly, as though needing to constantly reassure herself of her own existence. She is a treasure trove of travel stories, but a treasure trove that is being sprayed in your face. Low walls piled up from yellow stones divide plots of weeds and yellow wild flowers from each other, and every few minutes we pull into a silent little yellow town with a sumptuous yellow church.
Your visit to the Neolithic temples at Hagar Qim begins with a "4D" movie presentation. It's in 3D, and the theatre also blows mist past you when it's raining on-screen -- the fourth dimension is mist (it's not just that time passes as you watch). In Valletta, there's something billed as 5D; I think it contends that the fifth dimension is swords. The film is all calendars running backwards and lizards darting over ruins and scenes of rain that are not well-justified dramatically.
The temples, down a little path, are piles of rough megaliths. They were built in the fourth millennium BC, and then again in the 1920s, when they were dug up and pieced back together. There are two separate sites here, because the temple builders, in the inscrutable way Neolithic people had, also moved a few hundred metres down to Manjdra and built another complex. Both sets, being limestone, have begun to dissolve in the rain; they're covered now in huge sails of white canvas supported by steel trusses where local birds nest and sing in large numbers.
Leading off from the path linking the two temple complexes is a path that leads down to a drop-off near the shore, a memorial to a British governor of Malta buried at sea nearby, and a 17th century watchtower built to give warning of attacks by (non-Maltese) pirates or the Ottoman Turks.
The stretch back up to the visitor's centre runs along the wall, with signs asking you not to stray out into the weedy rocks because you'll damage the vegetation. The temptation is the many shacks, piled up out of stones, built by bird trappers who would hide out in them waiting for their decoys to attract a flock so they could jump out and pull down nets. The signs make you think a bit wistfully of the wanton 19th century idea of tourism, where you'd climb all over everything, have a picnic, maybe chip off a little something to take back with you.
On the way back, everyone waits on a low stone wall by the road. A bantering old cabbie pulls up to try to drum up some business, then wishes everyone a happy St. Joseph's Day and peels off.
The Co-Cathedral of St. John
Co-cathedral of St. John is ornate to the point of insanity: every surface carved, gilded, or painted. Exponents of the High Baroque movement are known to have visited during periods of special personal enthusiasm for baroque and said "isn't it a little, well, baroque?" The overwhelming lavishness of the place is explained, as the brochure forgets to mention, by the fact that the Hospitallers of the time had been getting on quite well in the business of large-scale piracy. The modern cathedral agonizes less obviously than some churches over its status as a tourist attraction; admission is €10 on the nail, and it has a .com web site with a 'premium content' section. Still, it's pretty stupendous, and has some Caravaggios.
There's also St. Elmo's Fort, where the knights held out in the Great Siege of 1565, the archaeological museum with its enigmatic neolithic carvings of obese figures, the encircling fortifications, the high ramparts where teenage goofballs are standing with the arms spread out and hooting, the bookstore with a faded copy of 'The Spaceman and King Arthur' in the window, and many other things I am too lazy to describe.
