35 54.271N 014 29.893E Maltesse Update
Pipedream
Fri 19 Aug 2011 14:28
The painter sanded and spot primed yesterday and rolled a coat of anti-fouling in this morning. He was able to find a small quantity of Awlgrip for me to touch up some spots on the top side and had a buddy mix it up for me. The efficiency of this yard is amazing. Feels like
Germany but they all speak English... well sort of'
I looked up the origin of the Maltese language in my handy Encyclopedia
Britannica which I put on the hard drive of this computer before we left. It
is Arabic in origin and similar to the dialect spoken in Tunisia and
Algeria, but is the only version written with the Latin alphabet. That
explains a lot... why Malta was flooded by refugees when Libya started to
blow up. Why the language sounds Arabic with some Italian and Turkish
thrown in for good measure.
Speaking of encyclopedias... remember those. My parents saved like crazy so
we could have one in the house. One cost hundreds back then. I remember the
special book case, the huge color atlas on top, and my mother explaining
how to look things up in the index. As a kid I spent a lot of time just
looking stuff up. I now have the whole thing on my computer's hard drive
for $35 and it is pretty much obsolete. Let's here it for the internet...
Michael and I went out for a Maltese dinner last night. He had rabbit... they stew it in a vinaigrette sauce with vegetables... real tasty. I had bragoli. (I always pronounced it bra-joll) It is a very thinly sliced piece of flank steak cut across the grain of the meat. They season it with stuff?? and roll it into a tight wrap. It comes out baked in a sauce with peas and perhaps small potatoes. Each one is about the sized of a small baked potatoes. When I was a kid, my father was in Korea and mom went home to her parents and I was raised during the days by my great grandmother Nana who come over on the boat from Ribera, Sicily. (still comming up next stop or two) She used to make bragoli the meat with pasta in a meat tomato sauce. I have looked in every Italian restaurant for years and never found it offered. Here in Malta it is considered a national dish. Could there be a knight in the wood pile some place? Hot here today... 92 in the boat. Time to head to the Jubilee... internet and cold AC with 2 Euro gin and tonics.
Next I need to find a place to sail too so I can leave the boat some place on the south coast of Spain for a month and a half while I go back to the US for a visit. I tried Ceuta, a Spanish outpost on the coast of Africa and that came back pretty expensive. It could be that October and November are still in the 'season' but I will keep looking.