Spacing Associate Editor Shawn Micallef is in Europe during December and is posting sporadically throughout the month. — The Editors
I arrived in Malta last night and went for a walk in my temporary neighbourhood today. Mellieha is a town on the north side of the Island, with a large sandy beach that’s usually packed with people in the summer. Today it was grey and empty, but nice. The public transportation here is pretty good — a fairly robust bus network. There are new air conditioned coaches, and then these really old things that belch black smoke (I heard Malta bought them off of London when they were done with them) and have crazy Catholic religious displays on the dashboard. Statues (Our Lady of the Windshield Wiper), crucifixes, flags — stuff that will cushion the crashes maybe.
Some of the bus shelters in the countryside are simple limestone huts, but here in tourist-land they are modern with electric ads. Up close though, the glass has a bunch of writing on it. I hoped it was art, but feared it was more ads.
I had my dad translate the parts in this picture — seems to be art after all, unless an ad contains these translated poetic-ish phrases:
…to the moon…
…you step on passageways…
…shatter everything…
…touching bottom of the ocean…
…if you sleep with each worm…
Often in Malta things in the tourist area are in English (in fact, English is everywhere here — the island was under British control for more than a century), so it’s striking to see Maltese in a tourist zone — in season this shelter would be full of lobster-red Britons waiting for the bus back to their holiday flat. Triumph of the local is always nice.
