Tuesday 19 January 2010

Tuesday 19th Sunshine on the menu again. Great that means it’ll rain for the following two days, but lets make the best of it. Forget the gym, quick breakfast out and onto the 645 today we’re off to Sliema and St. Julian’s. Soon the bus is hugging the coast line, this is a pleasant drive into Sliema. It’s a busy resort very commercial along the front, people trying to sell you boat trips to here there and everywhere. I wander away from the bay area up a side street, I’m not getting a feeling for this place. I abandon the city after about thirty minutes, jump a bus, then off at St. Julian’s. This is the night life place to be on Malta they say, only it’s day time and I’m totally under whelmed by both these places just not what I had hoped to see. I give this less than the thirty minutes I gave Sliema, I try to make a quick exit hopping on a bus which I have no idea of it’s destination. It stops a few minutes later at it’s terminus in the middle of nowhere, I have to get a return bus just to be back where I started from.

I wait for a bus who’s destination I do know, lets try and find Anchor Bay again. I leave the bus at the entrance to Mellieha where yesterday I had seen a map telling me “You are here”. I work out I need to get off the next bus at the third traffic Island and walk up the road to the right. This I do, but as I walk up the road to the right I appear to be in a hotel complex. Noticing a gardener I enquire if the road only leads to the hotel 'yes' he replies, any idea where Anchor Bay is 'yes' he points in a totally different direction. Well I do know which side of the Island it’s on and it’s not where he is pointing. Anchor Bay will have to wait for another day, and it better be worth it!

Head back to the hotel with a feeling of having not made the best of the day. I sit in the lounge having a drink and listen to the conversations all around me. A group of five women all here on there own, all have been here before up to eight times in most cases, they are haranguing the hotel manager about the fact there has been no butter at breakfast time for two weeks they claim. He thinks one week, there is diet butter and if you ask me one or two of them would be far better off sticking with the diet version.
The conversation turns to a planned a Robbie Burns night to commemorate the Scottish poets birthday on the 25th January. Two of the women say 'we leave before then can’t you change it to this Saturday?' 'Do you want me to change his day of birth he replies?'. Nice one I think, I’m sure they did, I get the feeling they have been coming for so long they feel they partly run the place. I can well understand why men die before women, if these women are par for the course!

After dinner (Beef Maltese style with aubergines) I am exposed to a woman who if I believe everything I have heard about her, is ninety five years old, has five properties in Knightsbridge London, and has laid out £66,000 to be able to stay at the hotel for the remainder of her life. She had apparently been asked to leave another Hotel on the Island for being too difficult to deal with, bossing the staff around.
The lady stops on her way out of the restaurant and begins talking to one of the staff. I’m sat having another drink, I can hear her going on and on about her life with servants and the like. She goes on in this manner, 'never even sat in a taxi until recently', she is a well dressed lady, twenty minutes pass she is still talking - it’s an hypnotic drone. I feel my eyes closing, I have yet to hear the guy speak yet, it’s a one way conversation.
He is shifting from foot to foot, three times he try’s to break away from her, but she has her prey and there is no escape. The poor guy is exposed to a further five minuets of this whine. As she finally runs out of words I look at his face, it is the face of a man who was losing the will to live, she has made me so tired I go off to bed and it’s only 8.45pm!