It's mid-March, 2007. I am teaching at University in Florence, Italy. Mid-terms are over ... students are on break and I need a break, too. So a professor friend of mine and I took ourselves off to Malta for a long weekend. At this point in my narrative, I usually get three questions: Why? Where's Malta? And, did you see the Falcon? So why? Because it's there, it's beautiful, and it's historically interesting. Where? Fly from Rome, across the middle of Sicily, and keep going ... you'll run right into it. Oh, and if you get to Africa, you've gone too far.

Getting there was easy and cheap: Bus from Florence to Pisa; Ryan Air to Malta, cab or bus to the hotel. Total cost round trip was about $200 including 2 nights in a hotel. Add in food and it brought the total to about $300.

So this professor friend of mine, we'll call him Dan, well ... because that's his name ... is a professor of creative writing and especially poetry. Although I like a lot of his poetry very much, I often tease him about his not writing poetry that rhymes. All this is doubly interesting because we got to composing limericks while we were there. Malta turns out to be hard to rhyme. "There once was a girl from Malta," and Dan's next line included the word "butt" and ended with "Asphalta." It could be Malta is as difficult to rhyme as Albania (Check out the movie Wag the Dog!) So I took my turn ...

Two professors went to Malta.
It wasn't really their fault-a.
They swam the mote,
No stinkin' boat.
And landed in Gibraltah.

Admittedly that makes no sense, but it rhymes! One limerick lead to another and we laughed ourselves silly. Good food, good company, and a couple of pints will do it every time. I hope you enjoy the photos and commentary below. I like this place.

These photos were taken in March 2007 mostly with a Nikon D200.