…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…
Posted on December 26, 2009 - 7:13 pm. Add a comment
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.
Posted on December 22, 2009 - 3:44 pm. 2 comments
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!
Posted on December 6, 2009 - 12:00 pm. 1 comment
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:
Posted on December 4, 2009 - 8:31 pm. 2 comments
It seems my blog is becoming a “satellite” to Discover Gozo… The destination blog of the Kempinski Hotel San Lawrenz is fast becoming my raison d’être on the weekends! The beauty of it is that it gives me an excuse for revelling in my favourite pastime, photography – so I’m not grumbling!
I wasn’t really grumbling either when my alarm went off at 5 am yesterday. After all, I had the opportunity to get photos that can’t be taken every day at the drop of a hat! The idea was to introduce horseback riding to the readers of Discover Gozo, and thanks to Victor Muscat – Stephanie calls him the horse whisperer of Gozo – we had an unforgettable Saturday morning! Even the weather was amazing, especially for a late November day!
It took me many hours afterwards to sort out and edit some 150 photos (mind you, many of them turned out blurred – bummer!!). And at the end of it all I put together this video. Hope you like it…
And now the weekend is over already… and what’s worse, it escaped me that today is/was the 1st Advent. Christmas is just around the corner!!
Posted on November 29, 2009 - 9:07 pm. 2 comments
You won’t understand my amazement at Simba’s behaviour if you don’t know that he’s not at all like a “normal” cat. He doesn’t eat fish (ok, a teaspoon-full of sardines in oil, sometimes); normally he won’t touch anything except for his regular food… So the fact that he should fall for the temptation made in Malta, Twistees®, is extraordinary!
Posted on November 25, 2009 - 9:41 pm. 2 comments
I really love it when I get to be in the right place, at the right time! Just as planned, hubby and I went to Ramla Bay today, as we were both off from work. (The weather at the moment is truly fabulous!) Of course I had my camera with me, even though it was a drag on the motorbike, with backpack and camera bag. But I don’t even want to imagine how dismayed I’d have been, had I left the camera behind!! Because just as we settled on the beach, this splendid yacht entered the bay and stayed there for quite a while!
And this is my favourite shot:
Upon returning home in the afternoon I googled the yachts name, Dilbar, and found out that it is, in fact, one of the largest motor yachts in the world! Here is a link with quite a lot of detailed information about the Dilbar.
Posted on November 16, 2009 - 9:05 pm. 1 comment
So it’s over a week ago that I said “tomorrow is another day”. That’s how it goes, my life seems to be one big merry-go-round, though it isn’t exactly merry, most of the time. It just zooms by in a hurry…
Yesterday I was MOD (or ‘manager on duty’, for the non-hoteliers among you); I’ll never lie and say I enjoy these 14 hours shifts. Thankfully they come around only once every 4 to 6 weeks, so it’s safe to say I can live with them. On these days I usually lug my camera with me – you never know that opportunities might come along! After a long drawn-out day I was rewarded when the time came for the sun to set.
View from Cafe & Lounge at the Kempinski Hotel...
...and from the roof top!
A friend of mine (who also saw yesterday's sunset) said it looked almost unnatural - it did!
The church of San Lawrenz, standing guard over the village
A last peek before descending the stairs!
Getting such shots done, make it all worthwhile for me! 
Posted on - 7:37 pm. 2 comments
28 Oct 2009 – Fire training
A couple of weeks ago we had a very interesting hands-on fire training session for all employees of the hotel. What a good thing I hardly ever leave home without my camera!!
28 October 2009 – Cruise Liner in Gozo
I had hardly recovered from that excitement, when more was to come: I was allowed to “escape” the office for half an hour to catch a few nice shots of the cruise ship Rotterdam that visited Gozo that day! I posted a few photos on Discover Gozo, but had no time for my own blog…
And after work I went back for more, arriving at the harbour just in time to watch the ship leaving…
29 Oct 2009 – Opera night in Gozo
Once more, a photo-shoot I did on purpose for the Kempinski’s destination blog, Discover Gozo. I simply love the way my 5D Mark II handles night shots!!
A day later, the “D-Link” event took place in the church square of San Lawrenz, with Chasing Pandora being the stars of the night. But that’s certainly stuff which deserves a separate post!! As they say… tomorrow is another day!
Posted on November 7, 2009 - 6:33 pm. 2 comments
The last couple of weeks were very busy ones, with stuff happening and a handful of photo op’s too. Had there been more hours in a day, I wouldn’t have had enough energy to take advantage of them! Last night I wasn’t even up to “celebrating” the fact that it was Friday… just after eight I collapsed in my bed and didn’t wake up before a few minutes before eight this morning! It was a rather lovely awakening, to the sound of rain, even though it stopped again all too soon. So I strolled into the garden and hunted for left-over raindrops…
Today hasn’t been entirely lazy for me; I sorted out a lot of photos (another post is coming up soon!) and I’ve updated Discover Gozo, the blog of the Kempinski Hotel San Lawrenz, with a contribution by my boss about the Ggantija temples, which we visited together a few Sundays ago. The blog is growing quite nicely, it’s really fun to keep going and watch it grow, but it does distract me from my own… There aren’t enough hours in a day, but as I said, even if there were more… see my first paragraph above!!
Now the sun has gone down already; it seems it was a rather pretty sunset, but I didn’t feel like venturing away from the house, and I only caught a last few rays from the roof:
