Sabine in Gozo

So this was Christmas…

…and what have I done? It’s tough to swallow that it’s come and gone already! Work didn’t leave me with much energy in the run-up to Christmas, to decorate our home, get presents, or to organize a get-together with the whole family. I don’t know how we managed to put up the tree last Sunday! But we did, and sitting by the lights of the tree and numerous candles, things did seem to take on calmer, brighter hues… that, and probably the fact that my vacation leave finally started last Wednesday!

Our Christmas tree, finally in place!

So many weeks, months – the whole bloody year! – passed by so quickly, it’s frightening. It’s been a very intense year, with so much going on that at times I’m wondering whether it really all happened in one year! Probably it would have been more appropriate to title this post “So this was 2009…” Continue Reading…

Noise@Connection or What to do on a winter afternoon

As a starter, here is the weather forecast for Christmas week. While a lot of Europe is covered in snow, it seems our little island is farther away than ever from getting getting a glimpse of the fluffy white stuff. How often have I told you that I miss it terribly?!

A bit of dreadful weather like we enjoyed last Sunday (boy, it was coooold!!) was just perfect to enjoy a cosy afternoon with noise@connection. Again. Our  Sunday outing to the Duke has become a regular fixture on our weekend calendar!

noise@connection is a live music event – entrance is free of charge – taking place weekly at the Connection Bistro & Wine Bar in the winter season. Connection is tucked away inside a shopping mall in Victoria, called The Duke. Starting at around 4 pm, local musicians set the appropriate atmosphere for an enjoyable afternoon out with friends, but there’s more. Tapas are served for free throughout, and they are just begging to be washed down with Philip’s locally produced wine, and prices are very reasonable. (Although other Maltese and foreign wines are available, I strongly recommend to go for his Philip’s!)

The crowd is a mixed one, from the very young to the, um… a little more mature (no prizes for guessing which crowd I’m part of!).

The music is varied, too; covers of Eagles, Cold Play, Leonard Cohen, Plain White Tees or even Pink Floyd (just a very few mentioned off the top of my head) are performed, going hand in hand with the various artists’ own songs. On alternating Sundays, local and foreign DJ’s lend yet another musical angle to the eclectic melange that is noise@connection.

Confusion

Yesterday’s weather was bad enough to deserve to be called gruelling. I didn’t mind too much, as I was confined to the great indoors of the hotel anyway. If anything, the cold was serving as a base on which Christmas spirit could grow.

Today it’s a completely different story, though. It’s an extremely bright, sunny day with a sky so blue it hurts the eye. I’m sitting in one of our battered garden chairs and while I’m still trying to reconcile our sprouting and blossoming plum tree with neighbour’s large flowering poinsettia bush, I discover that one of our orange trees is carrying large fruit – but fresh blossoms, too! And I swear I’m not making this up, as strange as it may sound: there’s a brass band marching outside our front door (yes, it definitely is a curse, living so close to a main village square!), playing the march that belongs to the feast of St Elizabetta. Which is supposedly taking place in July… Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the “fireworks” that was let off a while ago.

All the while George has some soft tunes from some satellite channel playing, not very successful in covering up the noises of that brass band – and rather  badly matched, too. On top of all this, I just witnessed for the first time how our “soft-spoken” Griza attacked the usually more ferocious Felix with such malice, it was startling. Frightening, even.

Am I dreaming or something??

Oranges are in season...

...their blossoms are not!!

Neither are plum blossoms!

The only sight that makes sense today

PS I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo of the racing ball of wool that ensued upon Griza’s surprise attack!

Finally!!

Yesterday evening, between 6 and 7 pm, the long awaited launch of the new Kempinski websites finally arrived! Getting the content for the site of the Kempinski Hotel San Lawrenz ready, was what occupied so much of my time at work lately, and that was also one of the reasons why I didn’t feel like blogging much. If you stare intently at a PC screen throughout the day, you just don’t feel like more of the same at night, too!

So here’s the baby…

Of course I hope you’ll like it! Although it did drive me nuts at times, I am immensely proud to have played a part in this project.  Now before you get all excited about my design abilities, please note that the design is not my work (it lay in the hands of Kempinski and is the same for all hotels of the group). But all the descriptions are mine, and they are anything but run-of-the-mill texts, which made writing them such a pain! Also a few of my photos made it into the site, and I right now I cannot decide which makes me prouder…

So now you know what I’ve been up to when I blabbered about work being so stressful. Now that it’s done , I’m hoping to get some of my blogging motivation back, although Discover Gozo also plays a part in keeping me away from my blog. But at the end of the day, does it really matter where I’m blogging?

Tomorrow I’m MOD once again (bummer, it’s only been 3 weeks since I had that pleasure!!), and because of that I’m going to miss my annual visit to the Nadur Christmas Market.  But on Sunday I’m planning to go to the Duke and enjoy some great live music at the Connection Wine Bar & Bistro – why don’t you come too? From 4 pm onwards in another event of Noise @ Connection, Cash will be jamming live with Keith & Christophe, and Philip feeds the crowd with great Tapas – on the house! Maybe I can whet your appetite with a few impressions from the first edition of Noise @ Connection two weeks ago: