The man running the pension in Valletta offered to drive me and another guest to the airport, and while we waited for the other guest, he told me about Saint Ursula Street. The place across the street is a convent, and behind that garage door is where they keep the saints. "The saints, for the processions. They'll take them right up this street on Easter. And they used to unload cargo ships just down at the water and hold a market here, and the carts would creak up and down these steps..." And then the other guy turned up, and we went tooling out to the airport, through streets never intended for cars, around a hairpin, and then along the water, where a vast white cruise ship has just moored, like another city attaching itself parasitically to this one.
Two notes about Malta's airport: it has a Hard Rock Cafe; and it has a grand piano, which was being played by a teenager while his friends leaned across it like in a 1950s lounge act.
I'd wanted to go to Sicily by ferry, but it had started to look like a surprisingly large hassle: the ferries leave at 6:30AM, and then you're in a port and need to take a taxi to the bus, which doesn't leave for four hours, and so on. At least, this is what my research suggested. Future travelers should be cautioned that my research is not sound. So I took this early-afternoon flight, instead. The only drawback was that it was with Ryanair, the hobgoblin of airlines.
The one thing you have to respect about Ryanair is that it doesn't pretend to be on your side. Its web site is like a chess game with the devil. It levies charges for everything it can think of, and then you must also avoid doing anything else they might demand a fee for, like trying to check in at the airport, or being slightly late, or any of the Secret Offenses.
The actual flight wildly exceeded expectations by being only kind of unpleasant. They seemed to want us to pass a cheaply photocopied catalogue of duty-free perfumes amongst ourselves, and they tried to sell us scratch cards; but in the important things, no worse than any other budget airline, which I guess is why everyone but me has already flown with them many times.
After landing, a quick packet of what turned out to be ketchup-flavoured crackers from a vending machine, and then a two-hour bus ride through the stony hills of eastern Sicily. Then a long hike through the newest and least interesting part of Ragusa, through a park where flat-capped old men slammed down dominos, up some stairs, and into the mazy back streets, where I realized the GPS on my phone no longer works and found the B&B through trial, error, and the pity of the gods.
The woman who runs it is thoroughly nice and refuses to be discouraged by the fact that I don't understand Italian. She insists on carrying my bag up a long interior staircase, though I'm twice her size, describes everything about the room in detail, explains something about the bus system, and circles places on the map where I can get the cusina tipica.
The apartment has two drawbacks. There is a dog somewhere nearby that barks a good deal. And the interior staircase is as dark as a mine shaft. When I try a switch in the hallway, a noise like a fire alarm sounds in my room. Rather than experiment further (I find the lights later, when I'm feeling readier to cope with things), I just feel my way down. On the way back up, I slam into a door, notice a missing railing, reach what I think is my door, and grope blindly for the keyhole. Then I think, "maybe the flashlight on my phone would have helped." At least he died doing what he loved: stupid things. (It also took 24 hours for me to remember I'd downloaded the Italian language pack for the Google Translate app.)
In the morning, a woman up the street is squatting in her doorway, smoking and casting murderous looks up at a dog on a nearby balcony.
Ragusa's old town, Ragusa Ibla, is a little appendix attached to the rest of the city at the northeast tip. What apparently happened is that, when an earthquake destroyed most of this part of Sicily in 1693, the nobles stayed on the original site, and the rest built a sensible grid of streets on the next hilltop over (the distinction survives for tourists, in that the posh hotels are in Ragusa Ibla).
The new city slants down towards the bottleneck that joins it to the old one. The streets are lined with cheap bakeries, fruit stands, and enormous double doors that occasionally swing open, swallow a car into their mysterious depths, and close again. From the bottom of the valley, you climb stairs, reach scenic outlooks -- postcard views of a long crest crowded with pale orange buildings -- and then descend into a land of gelato, baroque masterpieces, and fridge magnets.
Ibla was rebuilt after the earthquake, but kept its medieval streets, which arose in some complicated organic way, like tunnels in an ant nest. I got a bit lost on the way back. Somewhere, a door opened, and something hit the pavement with a wet splat: a medieval moment.
In the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, a young man in a red track suit and huge white headphones is spitting up yoghurt. He identifies himself as the guardian of the church. He suffers from a bad cough and a strange inner pressure to engage with tourists. There's the small postcard he wants me to take away "for my lady", the questions he stands ready to answer, if I can think of any, the guest book he reminds me to sign. He himself seems like the sort of spirit that would inhabit the gentler parts of purgatory, very mildly tormenting the souls of the mostly-decent. There would be no fire, but he would always be waking you up to play weird board games.
All the churches have guardians; all the guardians are different. One looks up at the clatter of the door and the swishing of travel pants and then returns to her book. One sits at a desk in a church unaccountably containing an exhibition of paintings of birch trees and keeps exchanging awkward smiles with you. One church seems not to have guardians, and then a throat is cleared loudly and you realize that there are two ancient nuns, only their noses visible under their habits, facing each other and reading in the choir directly ahead.
Outside the cathedral, men are selling woven palm fronds, each with a plastic Christmas bow on it. A half-empty beer bottle stands on one of the carved stone benches. Inside Madonna of the Rosary, a sort of sawhorse in a corner holds a painted wooden statue of Jesus mounted on shoulder poles. There is a cathedral museum. A woman meets me at the door at street level, starts leading me upstairs to the museum, and then breaks into a run in order to be waiting coolly at the desk to receive me. The museum holds vestments, paintings, and a remarkable silver ark built as a reliquary for one of John the Baptist's teeth.
Something about visiting a grocery store
One of my new goals is to find out whether there is anyone in Europe who will accept one of the fifty-Euro notes bank machines are so insistent on giving me. You go to a grocery store. Elderly women with carts congest the aisles; a little girl is being cooed at by the lady at the cheese counter; through the door to the back room, an enormous wooden crucifix can be seen.
You hold out €50 with a winning smile, and the cashier just laughs. It's like trying to pay with tap dancing. I've been selective, too; I haven't been trying to buy packs of gum with them. Eventually, I got rid of some paying for the hotel. I held up a card and the cash; she wavered a second like a game show contestant, then took the cash. And I thought, yes.
Two notes about Malta's airport: it has a Hard Rock Cafe; and it has a grand piano, which was being played by a teenager while his friends leaned across it like in a 1950s lounge act.
I'd wanted to go to Sicily by ferry, but it had started to look like a surprisingly large hassle: the ferries leave at 6:30AM, and then you're in a port and need to take a taxi to the bus, which doesn't leave for four hours, and so on. At least, this is what my research suggested. Future travelers should be cautioned that my research is not sound. So I took this early-afternoon flight, instead. The only drawback was that it was with Ryanair, the hobgoblin of airlines.
The one thing you have to respect about Ryanair is that it doesn't pretend to be on your side. Its web site is like a chess game with the devil. It levies charges for everything it can think of, and then you must also avoid doing anything else they might demand a fee for, like trying to check in at the airport, or being slightly late, or any of the Secret Offenses.
The actual flight wildly exceeded expectations by being only kind of unpleasant. They seemed to want us to pass a cheaply photocopied catalogue of duty-free perfumes amongst ourselves, and they tried to sell us scratch cards; but in the important things, no worse than any other budget airline, which I guess is why everyone but me has already flown with them many times.
After landing, a quick packet of what turned out to be ketchup-flavoured crackers from a vending machine, and then a two-hour bus ride through the stony hills of eastern Sicily. Then a long hike through the newest and least interesting part of Ragusa, through a park where flat-capped old men slammed down dominos, up some stairs, and into the mazy back streets, where I realized the GPS on my phone no longer works and found the B&B through trial, error, and the pity of the gods.
The woman who runs it is thoroughly nice and refuses to be discouraged by the fact that I don't understand Italian. She insists on carrying my bag up a long interior staircase, though I'm twice her size, describes everything about the room in detail, explains something about the bus system, and circles places on the map where I can get the cusina tipica.
The apartment has two drawbacks. There is a dog somewhere nearby that barks a good deal. And the interior staircase is as dark as a mine shaft. When I try a switch in the hallway, a noise like a fire alarm sounds in my room. Rather than experiment further (I find the lights later, when I'm feeling readier to cope with things), I just feel my way down. On the way back up, I slam into a door, notice a missing railing, reach what I think is my door, and grope blindly for the keyhole. Then I think, "maybe the flashlight on my phone would have helped." At least he died doing what he loved: stupid things. (It also took 24 hours for me to remember I'd downloaded the Italian language pack for the Google Translate app.)
In the morning, a woman up the street is squatting in her doorway, smoking and casting murderous looks up at a dog on a nearby balcony.
Ragusa's old town, Ragusa Ibla, is a little appendix attached to the rest of the city at the northeast tip. What apparently happened is that, when an earthquake destroyed most of this part of Sicily in 1693, the nobles stayed on the original site, and the rest built a sensible grid of streets on the next hilltop over (the distinction survives for tourists, in that the posh hotels are in Ragusa Ibla).
The new city slants down towards the bottleneck that joins it to the old one. The streets are lined with cheap bakeries, fruit stands, and enormous double doors that occasionally swing open, swallow a car into their mysterious depths, and close again. From the bottom of the valley, you climb stairs, reach scenic outlooks -- postcard views of a long crest crowded with pale orange buildings -- and then descend into a land of gelato, baroque masterpieces, and fridge magnets.
Ibla was rebuilt after the earthquake, but kept its medieval streets, which arose in some complicated organic way, like tunnels in an ant nest. I got a bit lost on the way back. Somewhere, a door opened, and something hit the pavement with a wet splat: a medieval moment.
In the Church of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, a young man in a red track suit and huge white headphones is spitting up yoghurt. He identifies himself as the guardian of the church. He suffers from a bad cough and a strange inner pressure to engage with tourists. There's the small postcard he wants me to take away "for my lady", the questions he stands ready to answer, if I can think of any, the guest book he reminds me to sign. He himself seems like the sort of spirit that would inhabit the gentler parts of purgatory, very mildly tormenting the souls of the mostly-decent. There would be no fire, but he would always be waking you up to play weird board games.
All the churches have guardians; all the guardians are different. One looks up at the clatter of the door and the swishing of travel pants and then returns to her book. One sits at a desk in a church unaccountably containing an exhibition of paintings of birch trees and keeps exchanging awkward smiles with you. One church seems not to have guardians, and then a throat is cleared loudly and you realize that there are two ancient nuns, only their noses visible under their habits, facing each other and reading in the choir directly ahead.
Outside the cathedral, men are selling woven palm fronds, each with a plastic Christmas bow on it. A half-empty beer bottle stands on one of the carved stone benches. Inside Madonna of the Rosary, a sort of sawhorse in a corner holds a painted wooden statue of Jesus mounted on shoulder poles. There is a cathedral museum. A woman meets me at the door at street level, starts leading me upstairs to the museum, and then breaks into a run in order to be waiting coolly at the desk to receive me. The museum holds vestments, paintings, and a remarkable silver ark built as a reliquary for one of John the Baptist's teeth.
Something about visiting a grocery store
One of my new goals is to find out whether there is anyone in Europe who will accept one of the fifty-Euro notes bank machines are so insistent on giving me. You go to a grocery store. Elderly women with carts congest the aisles; a little girl is being cooed at by the lady at the cheese counter; through the door to the back room, an enormous wooden crucifix can be seen.
You hold out €50 with a winning smile, and the cashier just laughs. It's like trying to pay with tap dancing. I've been selective, too; I haven't been trying to buy packs of gum with them. Eventually, I got rid of some paying for the hotel. I held up a card and the cash; she wavered a second like a game show contestant, then took the cash. And I thought, yes.
