Happy New Year! ...

Happy New Year!

Still on hiatus, with no immediate plans to start writing Camworld again. I'm going through some very personal internal struggles and am having trouble coming to a decision about what to do with my life. And since my life also consists of this web site I don't feel comfortable maintaining it until I've made a decision.

I know that I will be back; I just don't know when or in what form. It may also depend on what kind of job I am doing and where I am living. As soon as I've set a plan into action I will let everyone know.

I will post all of my travel pictures sometime in the next few weeks.

Back in New ...

Back in New York: After over 48 hours of travel, delayed flights and airport camp-outs I'm back in New York. Only to leave for Michigan tomorrow morning.

A few more teaser photos.

Mdina, Malta - The islands of Malta are well-known for its thousands of stray cats that wander the streets of every town and village. This cat was sunning himself on the walls of Mdina, the cathedral city.	Moscow Circus, Moscow - Dancers at the very famous and old Moscow Circus. Well worth the money spent.

Happy Holidays from ...

Happy Holidays from Moscow. I'm headed back to New York tomorrow but only updated the index page to replace my logo with my old bulb-in-a-box animated GIF.

SpamAssassin has done an amazing job of keeping my inbox free of spam. I've left it untouched since I left a month ago and the caughtspam file is now over 25 MB in size. Amazing.

Quick preview of some of my pictures. I took over a 1000 of them, and about half of them so are good enough to annotate. Full trip report with photos will be online sometime in January.

St. Mary's Church in Mellieha, Malta. this was the view from my apartment if you can believe it.	Red Square, Moscow - View of the huge Gosudarstvennij Universalnij Magazin (State Universal Stores) shopping center.

Trip Report: Part2: First Impressions, and Driving in Malta

Listening to the old British pensioner couple next door having sex at 10:00 PM wasn't quite what I had in mind when I booked an apartment for rent in Malta, but that is what I got. They are now gone but the memory is forever etched into my mind.

And that describes the majority of the tourists on the islands of Malta in early December. The first few days here were sunny and warm and the beaches were dotted with mounds of pale skin wearing brightly-colored bathing suits.

The hardest thing to get used to on Malta is the fact that 90% of the businesses are closed between 1:00 PM and 4:00 PM every day, and most are closed on Sundays. Walk around the shopping hubs of the cities of Sliema and Valletta at 3:00 PM in the afternoon, and all you see are dozens of other displaced tourists wandering around aimlessly waiting for the shops to re-open. For a tourism-based economy like Malta's, this defies logic, yet only a few shop owners have bucked tradition and stayed open through the afternoon. I have been told that a business must apply for a special permit from the Maltese government to stay open late and during the afternoon "siesta".

The first few times I drove my rented 4-door Fiat Punto from Mellieha (where my apartment is) to Valletta, I drove slow and cautiously. I was used to a manual transmission because I owned a 5-speed VW Jetta a few years back, but driving in Malta is nothing at all like driving in the States. The first thing you need to realize is that all of the European driving rules are in effect. Malta gets its driving rules from Britain, which means everyone drives on the left side of the road and nearly every major intersection is a roundabout. I cut off a few cars before realizing that vehicles in a roundabout have right-of-way and cars approaching it must yield. The second thing you must learn to deal with are the narrow streets and that orange buses ALWAYS have right-of-way. If a bus is coming at you, you need to get out of the way, and this means driving up on the narrow sidewalk or going wherever you can in order to let the bus get past. The streets in some of the cities are so narrow that if you don't have a good idea of how wide your car is you're going to end up with some scratches and dents. I have to give Fiat lots of credit for the durability of the little Punto I'm driving. Besides my constant downshifting from 4th to 2nd gear, this little car has handled everything I've thrown at it and now that I'm comfortable driving it, I find that I'll take hairpin turns at 40 mph without even blinking.

The weather fluctuates a lot in Malta in the winter. In the week and a half I've been here, it's gone from sunny and warm to cold and blustery. The past few days have seen almost non-stop wind with torrents of rain. Since I will be going to Moscow in two weeks, I packed warm clothes -- I just didn't think I would need them so soon.

Up next: Part 3: Movies with intermissions (really!) and getting lost on the road to the Roman Catacombs.