Malta 2006 - Day 3

The lifts talk to you.

Well they don’t actually hold conversations with you that would be silly; and quite a bit scary I would think. No, their vocabulary is fairly limited and after you’ve listened to ‘Doors Closing’, ‘Doors Opening’ and any combination of ‘Ground Floor’ through to ‘Eighth Floor’ for the umpteenth time in one day it’s enough to make you use the stairs. We would too if we weren’t on the 8^th floor.

TRUE LIFT STORY NO. 1

We were standing in the lift waiting for it to go up when a really fat woman got in and in a Northern accent she said, “Oh no, it’s not going down is it?” The lift moved off; upwards. “Oh that’s good in’t it?” she said.

I smiled.

“These lifts ‘ave a mind o’ their own don’t they?”

I smiled.

“You know yesterday, there were four o’ us, no five o’ us in’t lift and d’you know one o’ us ‘ad to get out before lift’d go”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“You’ve got lovely eyes,” I said.

Acting on the reps advice of “…walk straight along the sea front to your left and you’ll come to The Square. It’s not really a square, it’s a roundabout but it’s here that you’ll get all the night life you could want. It’s not very far…” we turned left out of the hotel and walked along the sea front until we came to a sort of roundabout with a square obelisk slap-bang in the middle of it. “We’re here,” I said to Pauline. But do you know what? There was sod-all there. Just one restaurant and two beach bars, none of which were very busy at all. “This can’t be right,” I said, “where’s all this throbbing night life she was going on about?” You could see further along the sea front for a good half mile or so and there was absolutely nothing down there. No twinkling lights. No sign of life so we walked back to the hotel. It turned out that the night life “…just a short distance away…” was even further round the coast than we could see but we found out later that we could get there in no time at all by walking through the town. The sea front route took you two miles along the coast as it curved out and back in towards the town again.

Why do we listen to these bloody reps? You’d think after all these years we’d just ignore everything they said wouldn’t you? But we don’t. We listen to their same old clap-trap and fall into the same old crap-trap every time.

Well it appears there’s some sort of football competition on at the moment. It’s called the World Cup I believe and the idea is to find out who is the best football team in the world. I thought we’d already found that out four years ago but apparently not. Football crazy is somewhat of an understatement over here. Every bar in every road is competing for World Cup custom. There was one bar, quite a small one, advertising ‘two big screens and six TV’s inside’. No room for customers though, eh?

I’ve noticed a lot of old people in the hotel seem to be wearing those colour-coded charity bracelets. You know the ones; pink means ‘I support breast cancer charities’, blue for AIDS and red for ‘I don’t give a stuff, why should I tell you what charity I support?’

It’s really hot here. Apparently there’s a heat wave at the moment in Malta which means that instead of it being bloody hot it’s incredibly bloody hot.