Holger's Malta Blog

Again, the transport situation has led to what in German we could call a "Schildbürgerstreich". Something that too surreal to be true, yet is true. The students' need for parking now has led to the closure of the University athletics' track, so that cars can be parked there. Maybe they think, given that the Maltese are so obese anyway (see below), nobody uses the track anyway. The same reasoning is also used by the tranport minister NOT to build cycling infrastructure, bascially saying given that the Maltese are fat anyway, they need infrastructure to get around in cars.

Meanwhile, the student representation mumbles something about slowly changing the mentality on transport, but needing this right now. (Stated otherwise, mentality does only need to change once we have our degree, certainly not before.) And all this after the rector said the follwoing in his speech for the opening of the academic year: "Clearly, the quality of life of its citizens is affected negatively by the fact that it is almost impossible to take a break from the built environment while you remain on the islands." But once parking is involved, who cares about the nice words uttered yesterday...

Sorry, students, but you called that one upon yourselves: The student representation has now started a shuttle service for students who park in the neighboring villages. Just an update, the University of Malta has more surface allocated to parking than to lecturing facilities, but because the majority of the students cannot think of another way of transport, they still need to park nearby. And because walking about one kilometer is far too strenuous for many students, now there is a shuttle service to prevent students from having to walk. I fail to find a sarcastic remark for this, it is just too ludicrous to begin with.

This blog probably needs some info on the recent murder of a Maltese journalist (Daphne Caruana Galizia), given that it hit the international news cycle. It is a big shock to live in a country where journalists get murdered, that does not even happen in other borderline European democracies, such as Hungary or Poland. Goes without saying that press freedom should be sacrosanct in a society. Personally, I did not care much for the her style very much, not a lot of journalistic care going on there, probably never heard of what the Dutch call “hoor en wederhoor”, that is giving a voice to both sides. Instead, lots of rumours and a quite catholic-conservative outlook on things. With the strong political divisions in this country (with two pillars, a nationalist and a labourite one, like the Dutch society in the 60s), the finger pointing already has begun. A point that has impressed me was a Maltese commentator saying that she argued against the Labour Party for decades, so that it is in fact unlikely that a deranged Labourite might be the culprit. After all, the Labour Party has never been more powerful than now, and the Nationalist party is in shambles, so there is really not a strong motive there. It is probably interesting to know that car bombings have featured in the recent Maltese past, sometimes with the bomber and victim being the same person (see below on health and safety standards). My Maltese friends have multiple theories about the motive, so it is actually quite unlikely that we will ever get to the bottom of this.

In case you are wondering what you are seeing: Yes this is a man working a mechincal shovel demolishing the roof he is on. As a "safeguard", the mechanical shovel is dangling from a crane. This picture is definitely not photoshopped. And the local health and safety authorities think that this is totally fine. This is why can read "construction worker died after fall" basically every two weeks in the local paper.

Recently, we went to a fish restaurant in the lovely town of Marsascala. Walking along the promenade, I could not help but notice this rather interesting looking board about fresh fish being caught by a very busy and probably exaspirated husband. Apparently, family relations in Malta can be quite complicated. Or, as an alternative hypothesis, the writer was not thinking about common ground. Malta is definitely more a "egoistic-production" rather than a "coorperative" country....

Bit of a nerd alert!
If you are a scientist, you probably also came across science spam. I had people wanting to sell me F2 antibodies, because I once published on normalization for the second formant in speech perception (also known as F2, but no antibodies needed, fortunately). This morning, I was again asked to submit a paper to some new journal, because the writer of the email thought my paper on "Letters don" was really high impact. Took me a while .... I published a paper titled "Letters don't matter". Obviously, the writer of the email is right that it is a brilliant paper that is going to have a huge impact (get it here). However, s/he needs to work on his/her regular expressions. The search engine of this spammer did not take into account that title can have apostrophes... So, there you have it. Another good reason to learn programming skills!

If you have been on Malta you might have noticed two things. First of all, cars are everywhere and, second, a lot of fat people around. There two things are obviously not unrelated. And now we know officically that there Malta "excels" at these things. A comparative research project found that the Maltese are the most inactive, the most car-dependent and the most obese in Europe. On the bright side, this made me get a top ten spot in the National triathlon championships this year (and this in the open category!), see here.

So, there is the case where a bowser driver who hits a cyclist and the cyclists ends up with fractures in his spine and his bike broken (worth more than 2k euro). What happens to him in court? He gets acquitted, because there is no evidence of a collision. So the cyclist's evdience is worth zilch and the fact that he spent six weeks in recovery and totalling his bike is not considered evidence. So, bascially, every time I am on a bike, any driver is free to run me over, as long as no one is looking?

So what is winter like on Malta? Even though it does not get really cold (average maximum is about 15C or 62F) it can be pretty rough. Just today (26/01/15) there was a hail storm and massive amounts of hail accumulated. Fortunately, I was in my office, because the hail also accumulated on our window, forcing the rain water insde rather than staying outside. I had to manually remove the hail so that the water could flow off again.
And yes, everything that is white on the picture is hail, even the things swimming in the water and on the car roof. There is also a new Maltese meme what to do then: Build a hailman.

…, just swimming in the rain. Yes this old musical classic can get away with new lyrics here in Malta, thanks to the outdoor pool. see picture on the right, with impending rain. Fortunately, the pool is heated so that you get a whole new experience at an outdoor swimming pool. Usually, a visit to an outdoor pools means that it is hot outside and you go into the water to cool off. Here in winter, the pool is heated and with outside temperatures of about 15 degrees (average high temperature in the winter month) you get into the pool quickly to warm up. The outdoor pool has the added advantage of helping you to keep your tan even in winter. However, I do not do backstroke, so there is a noticeable front-back difference (OK, bordering on too much information). But certainly beats the “sunglasses tan lines” one gets with skiing.

Malta is really small. So small that you easily get your name into the papers. But I am slightly proud to see my name in a paper in Maltese. The clip you see on the right reports on the conclusion of a series of triathlon sprint races, in which I participated. The highlighted bit is saying: "..filwaqt li atleta ieħor ta' Agones, Holger Mitterer rebaħ il-kategorija ta' atleti li għandhom aktar minn 40 sena.", ie, ".. while another Athlete from Agones (a local club), Holger Mitterer won the category of athletes that are older than 40".
-- OK, admittedly, I am showing off a bit here. Probably, and to be honest, I should mention that this is due to the grace of two stronger athletes. First of all my coach, Fabio Spiteri was second overall, taking him out of the over40 category, and David Galea did only two of the four races; both of them wipe the floor with me. --
Oh, and if you do not believe me, here is the same thing from the Times of Malta

I was trying my Maltese today by reading a news site. It was saying that a Maltese couples had chosen something for the "il-qamar il-għasel". Now, I knew the first word, because it means "moon", and I had needed a list of all words that start with "q" and are picturable. But why would a couple choose something for the moon? Well, I did not know the second word ("il-għasel"), and Google translate told me it means "honey". What? The couple chose something for "the moon honey". What type of honey is there in relation to the moon. OK, you probably got it by now, it means "honeymoon". Apparently, the concept did not exist and hence the English compound was translated word for word. Unfortunately, this does not work for other things, so I still have to learn the Maltese word for "butterly", even though I know "butter" and "fly".

Just did the European elections here in Malta, which reminded me how small the country is. I was able to support the guy I was voting for by patting him on the back (literally) two days before the elections. I had met him at a party once where we briefly talked. It is also interesting to talk Politics with the locals. The voting system here allows you to give an n-th preference vote if you want to (n being the number of candidates). There was someone from an for me an usual party that I was thinking about. A friend told me: "Yes, I know here from school, she was a year under me". And politician also usually get addressed by first names, as everybody knows someone who knows them...

In any case, I do not see a resemblance here. So why these two pictures together?
It is a psychological given that you do not notice the absence of something easily. So it would take you some time to realize that Malta is void of cute dogs (OK, there may be some, somewhere, but generally, you will only see a few dogs and those will be barking at you aggressively, because they have nothing else to do, which is, to finish this long bracket, not really their fault). Consequently, most Maltese are afraid of dogs.
Here is now some food for Whorffians (for non-linguists, still not talking about Star Trek). The word for dog is kelb (The plural of which is obviously klieb, but more on the plural maybe later). As you by now probably already have guessed, the word for shark is il-kelb il-bahar, which literally means "sea dog" Strangely enough, this is also a word in German ("Seehund") but there it refers to seals. Somehow, I see the resemblance there, and I have a feeling that is not just because I am German.

This appeared on a Maltese news outlet. Apparently, a bus has been taken out of service (titnehha mis-servizz) because of "strange affairs" (affarijiet strambi). According to the report, the bus switches on its light by its own volition and is also capable of starting by itself. However, no reports of driving around by itself have yet surfaced.
(Obviously, the subtext of this entry is that I am able to read a bit of Maltese, be it with some help of google translate. However, in a morphologically rich language like Maltese, google translate does not get you very far)

We have got a new office space here at the University and needed some keys duplicate. No problem, there are plenty of "ironmongers" (the local name of hardware stores) around, most of which have signs "keys cut here". So I went to one of them, showing him two standard keys. He immediately told me that the "large one" would be problematic, but the small one should be fine. Hence I decided two get just one copy of each. As it turns, the large one worked, but the small one not (opposite to what the guy predicted). So my colleague went to a different one, who also made copies of both keys. From this batch, the small ones worked and the large ones did not.
That's the tale of small businesses here. They are quite cheap, but until you get the job properly done, you probably spend as much many (and much more time) as in more efficient regions.

The University of Malta is hosting a Star Trek symposium next year. Just in case anybody was thinking I had something do to with it, I did not. It really is a coincidence. Nevertheless, I might think about going, the travel costs are doable for me. Let me know if you want any travel advice.

I ran my first experiments in Maltese, and found that the whole idea of experiments with volunteers is not something the local population is familiar with. When I advertised with "You speek Maltese? Make money out of it", I got a call from a potential participant. She wanted to know more about the study, thinking that I would interview here about how she feels recognizing words in Maltese. When I told here that it would be a computerized task, she got apprehensive and told me: "I am doing introcourse with my computer now". Guess how I misheard that...

Last Sunday (10/11/2013) there was the University Ring Road Race (3 loops around the Uni, and a finish on the University track, 5k in total). Just for fun, I entered, and, to my surprise, not only won the trophy for fastest staff member, but was third overall and 2 minutes faster than the fastest student. So there seems to be a point in calling students "lazy bastards" then? (Don't blame me, there are some 10.000 students around, some of them should be able to at least keep up with me.)

On of my first entries on the blog was on the "ID card". We are a couple of month further and I still have none. At least there are only 10000 applications to process, according to yesterday's paper. Someone in the goverment really cannot calculate: They wanted to expire the old ID cards by March, and now in November, there are still many applications that need to be processed. Really: If you have 5 people working on 30.000 applications, how do you expect that to be done in 3 month time?

Recently, I got a call from the US embassy. They asked to speak to the Ambassador. When I told them that there was no ambassador present, they asked whether this was not the Palestinian embassy. I replied that they have the wrong number. Two weeks later, they US embassy called again, and other calls came in, usually starting with a to me unintelligible salutation (Maltese and Arabic are not THAT close). The frequency has increased to the level that it starts to get annoying, so I told the American embassy off. So, it the middle-peace process gets stuck, maybe I am to blame, because they just can't talk to each other.

(serious phonetics alert) Today we were at Ħaġar Qim Temple, one of the prehistoric temples on Malta (est. 3600-3200 BC). There I witnessed the following conversation between an American tourist and a Maltese museum ward.

American tourist:  How do you pronounce Ħaġar Qim?

Maltese ward: [ħadʒar ˈʔiːm]

American tourist:  So the “q” is silent?

Maltese ward: No, it is [ʔiːm]

American tourist: That’s what I meant, the “q” is silent

Maltest ward: No it is [ʔʔʔʔiːm].

and so on, I did not want to be rude and overhear the conversation any longer. I saw the tourist again later, so they must have overcome the stalemate they were in.

Would would you think is the fine for running over a cyclist, injuring him severly and then fleeing the scene?
Maybe a suspended jail term, and a ban from driving for two years? Not in Malta, cyclists are apparently fair game. For such an offense, a driver of a BMW (!) has been fined 200€ and a two-week driving ban. Let's call it a slap on the wrist. Intersting comparison: an English guy was growing some weed for his own consumption: Jailed for 8 years.

is: "mowbajl." I do not need to translate it, just say it out loud a couple of times, orrajt?

I have been travelling to the "mainland" over Easter and had fun with Air Malta on both flights. On the way to Vienna, I noticed a couple of young guys wearing identical suits at the gate. Looking closer, I realized that this must be the national football team. The big surprise was, however, that I turned out that I was seated amongst them on the plane. And it was not me travelling buisiness class, it was them flying economy. During a short chat I learned that they rather play Italy than Danmark, since they are not dealing well with crosses. No surprise when the average height is 174 cm.
On the way back, there was a 90min wait at the Gate, because there apparently was a stow-away. It was announced that there was one passenger more on the plane than there should be. After some time, they realized that there were two passengers with the same first and surname, which had been counted as one. But this was not the end of it. It took some about an hour that it was more likely that the AirMalta booking system cannot handle this situation than that a middle-aged woman, travelling with another middle-aged woman, had managed to beat the system and got hold of a boarding pass without buying a ticket. Really?

If you were on Malta yesterday, you might have wondered whether Malta has qualified for the 2014 World Cup. Or that the national football champion chip had been decided prematurely. Cars driving around waving flags and honking their horns, people on the street cheering with cans of beer in their hands. At some point you might have thought that “partit laburista”, the name on most of the flags, is a strange name for a soccer club. At this point in time, you might have realized that this was the celebration of an election result, with a view you expect in third-world countries, not in the EU. And, before I forget, the day after the elections, most shops are closed, because the party still goes on.

The campaign was also a strange one. The ruling nationalist party mainly took to the scaremongering that the Labour party would not be able to govern properly. The Labour slogan was “Our Malta for all”, which simply meant promising everything to everybody. Like a transportation plan that will solve all problems. Which was probably perceived as the promise that everybody can always drive their cars anywhere and always find a parking spot.

Despite being the standard issue liberal social scientist, I would have a hard time deciding between these parties. It was the nationalist party who made the EU membership happen and the Labour party opposed it. At some point in time, the now new Prime Minister said that he will use his veto right on the EU level, which is a really scary prospect, the EU not moving forward, because a country with less inhabitants than Bristol objects. The ambition of the new prime minister is to get Malta to the top of Europe. A long way to go, in my opinion. But maybe there is progress; after all, the Labour party did get elected in this catholic country promising a legal union for gay couple.

And now to something completely different. I went for a long cycle yesterday and got sun-burned, in early March.

If you live in Germany or the Netherlands, you are exposed to a lot of commotion surrounding false packaging, and the addition of horse meat to things like lasagne. While I understand that selling horse meat as beef is questionable, I cannot fail to notice that there are worse things that can (and have been) in food. Afer all, there is no health risk involved. Apparently, this island seems to think similarly. This was the special at the restaurent yesterday.

In yesterday's class we learned all about: "haxix". The orthography is cross-linguistically unusual here, so I try to translate it into other spellings:
English: hashish; German: Haschisch; Dutch: hasjiesj, IPA: /haʃiʃ/. What does it mean: Simply vegatables, like onions (basal), peppers (bzir ahmar), etc.

This ad is what I found in my last Sunday paper. Does it really make sense to import milk from the Netherlands? There must be cattle closer by whose milk produces less CO2 in transit.

...is: qtates (probably only for the phonetician reading this). It means "cats". You may ask what is so special about this. Well, the "q" is the Maltese letter for the glottal stop, so that the phonetic transcription is [ʔtates]. So we have an onset cluster of glottal stop + alveolar stop. If you had asked me four weeks ago what the most unlikely consonant cluster is in the world's languages, this would have been high on the list.

One does have this preconception of Southern Europe that things may not run really smoothly here. You know what: it is based on a grain of truth. As an EU citizen, it should be no problem to settle here, since Malta is an EU country (even though my moving company did not know that). But to get anything in Malta (really, anything, from a gym membership to an internet connection), you will be asked for your ID card.
Well, they just changed the system for these cards, and you are supposed to apply for one by sending an eMail. However, all expats have to do this now, even those who are already here. So the system gets swamped in requests, and the new arrivals are screwed.
You might think that someone may have seen this coming, and maybe someone did, but probably the higher echelons are too busy with preparing for the election. So, it came as it had to be and I (again) did not get a reply to an eMail (two weeks and counting). In the meanwhile, I still have to pay higher bus fares as a non-resident.

Over the years, I have learned that some eMails may go unanswered. This mostly involves eMails to members of the opposite sex (or maybe the same sex for you) or things like a "request to review" (ok, both reasons can apply at once, but that is not the point).
It was, however, a new experience that eMails to a real estate agent went unanswered. After all, you are telling someone that you want to give him money for finding you an apartment. And actually quite a lot, given the work involved. One would assume that it should be no problem to get a reply here, but no. I had to tell my case manager on to his boss in order to get a reply.
--At least that made me feel really young again, like being eight--
It was also a new concept to me that a monthly rent was immediately introduced as being negotiable. Fortunately, I had a local informant (thanks again, Clive) who was willing to help me with the intricate system of bargaining. In the end, things worked out beautifully, the picture is the view from my rooftop.