U issa xi ħaġa għalkollox differenti ...

(oo ees suh shee ħa juh aal kollosh diff u rent i) and now for something completely different...

It's my goal to be able to say that in as many languages as I can some day.... kind of like Omniglot and their hovercrafts full of eels (in Maltese that's: il-Hovercraft tiegħi hu mimli sallur [ill hovercraft tee ay oo meem lee sall er]). I can probably do French...
et maintenant pour quelque chose complètement différent...
今が何かぜんぜん違いない... (ima ga nanika zenzen chigainai)
i ara per alguna cosa completament distint (Català)

And I'm afraid my vocab isn't good enough for Greek yet, mostly reading there not writing.

At any rate, I'm afraid lately i've been so amazingly busy with a secret project that fell through, and now with applications for Grad School so the blog hasn't been getting much love. I haven't really been going out and seeing much either. My friend Jessica is in Israel at the moment and there hasn't been much going on otherwise.

I went out to the il-Melita tea and coffee garden (fair warning this site has a fair amount of ads, has good pictures though, their own site is down, which seems to happen a lot around here and noone cares) weekend before last with Jessie which was fun but recently nothing. Though that il-Melita was an experience, the tea and coffee garden apparently hosts birthday parties, so we kind of watched the kids go nuts, do the limbo, eat the wacky mushroom house cake they had. We had burgers, and I can't speak for Jessie, but I was less than thrilled with it, tasted kind of like a veggie burger, it was underdone (for my tastes), and just really different, but it took care of my burger craving. Wasn't too expensive either €12, hopefully I can check out the restaurant and the wine bar section at some point too.

Otherwise the weather has gotten distinctly colder, especially indoors, dropping down towards 16C (about 60F) at times which doesn't sound that bad, but makes shorts chilly and has one very odd side effect. It seems houses here are not very insulated if at all... so it gets freaking freezing inside even when it's perfectly fine outside! It's been pretty rainy of late too, which isn't too bad, not exactly cold November Rain like it would be in the states, but wet nonetheless. Stormed pretty bad the other day too, was kind of surprising, had a couple of troubles, lightning struck (or rather the thunderclap vibrations) and demolished a stone balcony in Gozo falling on some cars, noone was hurt. There was also a pretty fierce looking waterspout off the southern coast, but it didn't make its way inland.

Thursday there was a serious downpour as well, as you can see in the picture below. Anyway that's all for now, hopefully more updates forthcoming, and perhaps the weather will be nice enough to go places again soon! And have more stories!

Vote today!

This note has been moved to my facebook page as the election is over and it doesn't really fit with the theme of this blog, but if you're interested in my political musings (and you have facebook) you can see it here:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=39709696337&id=6202479&index=0

Int x'tagħmel? Jien student.

(int shtaa mel? Yeen stu-DENT, What do you do? I'm a student)
So I think I set myself up for failure to update here, I don't seem to be updating due to the immensity of relating everything i've done here chronologically, even in short form, so from now on I'll be relating my best and interesting stories, possibly in chronological order, possibly not. I'll certainly attempt to give dates but again, if this is too difficult to look stuff up I probably won't wind up updating. Anyway </disclaimer>.

So here's a few of those interesting stories.

A couple weeks back I went off in search of the ocean. I had been stuck in Lija trying to get things together and all the walking I had done had gotten me as far as scenic Ħal Attard and Birkirkara (read: not that scenic, mostly residential). First I went to San Pawl il-Baħar (St. Paul's Bay), then I took a bus to Golden Bay. Both places were beautiful and I definitely got to see the sea, I even got to swim in the clear waters of the Mediterranean at Golden Bay :) Seriously it's shocking how clear they are! There are lots of pics on my picasa if you're curious about what it looked like :) At any rate the fun story happened on the way back and I have a little bit of video of this on my picasa i'll embed the video tho. There are 2 buses that go to Golden Bay, 652 and 47, now 652 goes direct from Sliema (where all the tourists stay), 47 goes via Mġarr, Mosta and Lija, which is where nearly 0 of the tourists stay. So it was just me and a group of Germans on the bus, going through the Maltese countryside, but one of them had a guitar, and one of them had a baby. The bay was really digging the guitar so the guy with the guitar started playing songs! It was the wackiest thing but the fun part, and I got some of it on camera was nearly the entire bus singing along to a decent rendition of Wonderwall by Oasis, his set list also included Hit the Road Jack....2 songs I didn't recognize and at least one more that I did but can't recall. Anyway it was a really wacky experience to be coming back from the beach sitting in one of these old Maltese buses they have here and listening to acoustic guitar driving through the Maltese countryside.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/5KNaEiuhZNTuOwbkC43Y7A

In other news -

Here's my final schedule and some comments on the classes:

Monday:
1100 - 1300: HST3015 Late Medieval Mediterranean History - This class had such promise, unfortunately the teacher doesn't believe in working from notes and so each lecture he kind of rambles on. Thankfully he doesn't repeat himself often content-wise, but he does CONSTANTLY rail on how euro-centric the history of the late medieval period has been (specifically western Christian, politically focused). Which is great and all, it's definitely been a serious problem in most history done on that period, great Arabic, Jewish and even Italian sources have been passed over in favor of the accounts of the failed crusades and other foolish ventures of the latin Christian kingdoms. BUT he brings it up all the time! Without fail, every class we get a few minutes devoted to how it's such a crime that source X has been ignored. It gets really old, and is very unfortunate because now that we're past the introductory stuff, the actual course content is pretty interesting, though I do think this should have been called Late Medieval Mediterranean ECONOMIC History, since most of what we're talking about is southern European merchants and trade with the Islamic world.

1300 - 1500: ARB3005 Arabic Dialectology - Dr. Zammit is definitely my favorite teacher so far, he is incredibly knowledgable and teaches in a really engaging way. His passion for his subject is really clear and contagious. This class I added at the end mostly to fill a spot for a course I couldn't register for, but it's become one of my favorite classes. I kind of had to give myself a crash course in Arabic script but it's not that different from Persian so it didn't take long, now I'm far less lost when he writes certain things on the board. The subject is absolutely fascinating and something i've always been interested in.

1500 - 1600: SHG1102 Introduction to New Testament Greek (Κοινή): I didn't see this was a full year class so I had to officially drop it, but since I already owned the textbook (and happened to bring it) i asked the teacher (who is an hilarious old priest) if I could sit in and he said sure. So i'm taking this course but just to help learn the language, so far it's pretty interesting but the teacher moves fairly slowly, so hopefully it'll pick up, only been a few classes so far.

Tuesday:

900 - 1100: ARC3004 Maltese Prehistory: This class is interesting in principles and promises to be much more interesting and unique to being here in Malta. Dr. Bonnano is a major player in the field of Maltese archaeology so that's kind of neat, but he's a very quiet, very boring sort of teacher, he doesn't really get people interested. The first part was insufferable, the history of studies, but that was mostly content at fault, who dug up where isn't all that interesting, I wanna know what they dug up and the importance of it.

1210 Mass - I go to mass on Tuesdays at the chaplaincy, it's the only service of the week in English. It's fairly neat, very short, but the music people are....well...not so great, i'm guessing they sound better in Maltese.

Wednesday:

1100 - 1200: NES2003 Introduction to Semitic Languages: This is very interesting, very in depth linguistically and very fascinating. It's taught by Dr. Zammit like the Arabic Dialectology class so all I said about his teaching applies here too. Sadly a bit short.

1200 - 1400: Il-Malti Pass 1: Introduction to Maltese, it's part of their non-credit Degree-plus program here, only started last week, but so far so good, class moves fast which is good, I"m hoping to learn a decent amount of Maltese :)

1600 - 1700: ANT2006 Introduction to Physical Anthropology: Humorously the only people in this class are me and Jessie, the other person from GMU here. Still Mrs. (Dr.?) Farrugia has a real passion for her subject, and a real knowledge about it. I started to sign up for a course at NoVA on physical anthropology and it bored me to tears so I dropped it. She makes it very interesting however and I am learning a lot!

Thursday:

1500 - 1700: ARC3005 Roman Malta: Also taught by Dr. Bonnano so much the same as the prehistory one, however we have gotten into a little more of the fun stuff, Epigraphic evidence (which is totally my thing :) ), but same comments about teaching style apply.

And Friday I am free (as a bird :P).

That's all for now, I'll update with some more fun stories from my time here, adventures in wine bars, tea and coffee gardens, walking trips that become much longer than intended, oh it's a thrill a minute here :P