Matt and Kat Brown

After a week in sunny Malta we are both sporting a healthy glow – a slight improvement on the pale and pasty complexion we have been developing throughout the “Irish summer”. It was refreshing to take a week off and I feel quite rejuvenated after soaking in the sun for a week. It was also great to catch up with Mark and Gill. We met them for 1 week in Malta in the middle of their epic European adventure!  You can read more about their travels on their blog.

My first impression of Malta on arrival was that it felt overwhelmingly hot and humid and looked very old and dusty. On the drive from the airport we passed rustic Mediterranean-style houses lining densely packed streets in numerous small towns, the outline of Mdina’s walls and the cathedral dome were visible in the distance. It was easy to see Malta had a rich history and plenty waiting to be explored throughout the week.

Malta is a very compact country with any location reachable within about 30km of where we were staying in St Paul’s Bay. We hired a car and managed to sight-see a significant portion of Malta over our 7 days. Of course all sight-seeing took place at a leisurely pace, working around the sleeping in, eating out, siestas and swimming in the hotel pool!

A picture speaks a thousand words so I would suggest checking out some of the pictures from our trip in the gallery to give an overview of the week in more detail.

Day 1 (Sun 14th)
We visited Valletta, the capital of Malta. The city was quiet on a Sunday and I enjoyed wandering the narrow streets tightly packed with buildings displaying lots of variety in old balconies and shutters. Some buildings were in quite a state of decay but the streets as a whole had a lot of charm and character. Valletta is a fortified city on a peninsula with high walls built up around each side. The views were nice looking out from the city over the bay to the ‘Three Cities’ on the other side of the Grand Harbour.

Day 2 (Mon 15th)
We saw lots of beautiful boats today, some huge and expensive and others modest and traditional. We started our touring with a coffee stop at St Julians Bay. We saw some of the traditional Maltese fishing boats, very sweetly painted in bright red, blue, yellow green and brown. We continued on to Vittoriosa, one of the ‘Three Cities’ across the Grand Harbour from Valletta. There were many fine super yachts moored in the Grand Harbour, very impressive. After lunch we visited Marsaxlokk, a traditional fishing village with more of the brightly painted Luzzu and Dghajsa boats and a market selling laces and other wares.

Day 3 (Tue 16th)
We took the ferry to Gozo, the smaller of Malta’s two major islands and drove around the sights. Along the way we saw the remains of the Ggantija temples, built around 3600BC! We enjoyed views of the stunning blue sea at the Azure window, a very impressive natural rock formation. We also stopped in Victoria, the central city of Gozo and admired views from the citadel out to the sea on all sides.

Day 4 (Wed 17th)
We took a short boat trip today out to the Blue grotto, clear water reflecting brilliant blue in grottos along the base of the cliff. We went from there to Rabat and Mdina where we saw St Pauls catacombs and the fortified city of Mdina.

Day 5 (Thu 18th)
A quieter day with a bit of shopping in Sliema and then plenty of relaxing.

Day 6 (Fri 19th)
We spent our last full day on the beach at Golden Bay enjoying the sunshine. The sea was lovely to swim in, not too cold and very calm. I’m sure the sea in Malta is bluer than anywhere else I’ve been! After lunch Matt “won” a 7-day holiday which after listening to a timeshare sales-pitch turned out to be offered in the form of 1200 pounds of “discount” vouchers for package holidays and cruises, all of which must be booked before the end of the year. To use any of the vouchers you have to book much more expensive holidays. Essentially it’s all a scam, but was interesting to watch and hear the sales pitch none the less.

Day 7 (Sat 20th)
Up early to see off Mark and Gill at 7am, then a slower start for us to make our 1pm flight. Arrived back to a sunny Dublin afternoon around 4pm.

We had a great time in Malta with just the right mix of active sightseeing and relaxing. The islands are a pretty good size for a weeks holiday too, we had plenty to keep us occupied and saw most of the major attractions. I’m sure there are a still few more that we could have added to the list given another day or two in the sun though.

Back to work for us on Monday, but hope is in sight as we’ve already got a weekend trip to Brussels planned for early October and we’re going to Scotland for New Years (Hogamany) in Edinburgh, so you needn’t feel too sorry for us yet.

• Don’t forget to view our photos from Malta!

Phew, we had an eleventh hour crisis tonight as we began packing for Malta. With the suitcases nearly full and all in order I went to get our passports from the file in our drawer. One passport was found – mine, one passport was missing – Matt’s.

We searched the drawer, we searched Matt’s desk, with increasing urgency we searched every inch of the apartment!!! The passport remained missing.

We searched under couches, in kitchen cupboards and behind shelves. Nothing. By this stage we were almost resigned to spending our planned holiday in a NZ embassy instead of Malta.

Matt was about to leave for the office to check his desk there when I asked if he had needed the passport on our weekend road trip around Ireland last month. Yes! He had. Not optimistic that the car rental office would be open at this hour or that they would have seen the passport at all Matt decided to call anyway. What did we really have to lose!?

Imagine our relief when Matt got through to the car rental company and they told him they did have the passport! Yes!

I can’t imagine how we managed to lose such an important document or how we both failed to notice it was missing for so long. I’m just so incredibly thankful that we managed to track it down and will still be going to Malta tomorrow morning as planned. I’m certain we’ll both be keeping a firmer grip on our passports tomorrow.

This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).

It’s been a while since I last acquired new gadgets but I think I’ve made up for lost time with my last weeks purchases.

You may remember that I’ve had my eye on the Openmoko phones since early 2007, but in between shifting across the world and starting a new job I never got around to purchasing one of the first versions. The second version, the “Freerunner”, was released in June this year and I placed an order with Pulster, a local distributor, shortly after. The phones have been in hot demand, so I only received my phone last week, a wait of of almost 2 months, and it turned up missing one of the cables that was meant to come with it. Still some distribution kinks to be worked out.

Distribution kinks are the least of Openmoko’s worries at the moment though. As advertised, the phone is definitely not ready for primetime distribution yet. I’ve tried three different software images on it: the original “stable” 2007.2 image, the current “devel” 2008.8 image and the latest completely rebuilt SHR release which is the most promising yet. With the SHR image I’ve been able to send and receive calls and text messages, although the interface is somewhat arcane. I’m most interested in the GPS which looks to be working reasonably well at this stage.

After almost a week with the phone I’m glad I purchased it, and I’m having fun hacking on it, but there is a huge way to go before I’ll be able to use it as my primary phone. So that’s gadget #1.

The second gadget is a new Digital SLR camera. I’ve been thinking about getting back into photography for a while (I last took photos seriously in high school) and when I saw how affordable digital SLRs had become I couldn’t resist. There isn’t much between Canon and Nikon when comparing mid-range SLRs these days, so after about a week of deliberation I decided on the Canon 450D, primarily because most of my workmates also have Canon SLRs!

I only got the camera on Friday, and spent half the weekend playing with the GPS on the phone (I want to set them up so I can geo tag all my photos), so I haven’t had quite as much time to play with it yet. I expect to spend plenty of quality time with it on our holiday in Malta next week. First impressions are favourable, although I’m fast discovering camera viewfinders were not really designed for people who wear glasses. I may have to consider wearing contacts again.

Once we get back from Malta I’d like to find a local (or online) photography club with some good weekly assignments to fire my creativity and motivate me to get the most out of my new toy.

If you feel the need to comment, head over to the original post on Matt’s Musings.