TRAVELLING HOPEFULLY

A blog about going places and the English we find there

WE ARE LEAVING MALTA (BUT MALTA IS NOT LEAVING US)

by Bud (Bogdan Constantin)

I am writing this from a ferry. Outside the window, Malta is getting smaller. This is how it looks when a place becomes a memory — first it is big, then it is small, then it is just a shape, then it is nothing, and you are somewhere else.

I think this is quite deep. Stan says I should focus on the introduction.

So. The introduction. Hello, and welcome to Travelling Hopefully, which is the blog of me (Bud) and my colleague and also friend Stan, and also now Wei, who is our editor and who is sitting two tables away from us on this ferry reading a book and pretending she cannot hear us arguing about the introduction.

We have spend four weeks in Malta. We recommend it very strongly to anyone who wants to improve their English in a sympathetic environment. The people are very sympathetic, the weather is sympathetic, even the pastizzi — which are the small pastry things, filled with ricotta or peas, absolutely delicious, we had many of them — are somehow also sympathetic. This is the only word. Stan agrees.

(Note from Bud: Stan does not know I am writing this. He is on the other side of the table making corrections to his Italy spreadsheet. He has a spreadsheet for Italy. It has seventeen tabs. I have looked at it once. Tab four is called ‘Contingencies.’ I did not open Tab four.)

Our English is too much improved since we are arriving. We go to the school most days — well, many days — well, some days — and in the evenings we are practising very extensively with local people and also international people and also each other, in Romanian, because sometimes you need to speak Romanian. This is science.

The point is: Malta worked. Here is the evidence. I am writing a blog post in English right now. It is a good blog post. You are reading it and thinking: these people have good English. This is the evidence.

And now we go to Italy.

“Our English is too much improved…”

Stan has researched Italy very thoroughly using several sources, which he will tell you about himself because I always get the details wrong according to Stan. What I can tell you is that we are going to Rome, and then maybe Sicily, and then maybe Croatia after that, and then maybe Bulgaria, and then maybe we see what happens. This is the plan. It is a good plan because it has flexibility and also because it ends with ‘we see what happens,’ which Stan calls ‘unacceptable vagueness’ and I call ‘the spirit of adventure.’

The water is very blue. Malta is almost gone now. I took forty-three photographs of it getting smaller. Stan says this is too many. I say it is content.

Yours in the spirit of adventure (and also on a ferry),

Bud

As someone once said: not all those who wander have good Wi-Fi. But we are managing.