David's Diary: Saturday, April 5, 2003

Dinner Out in Malta

We took this week off school. While I spent a lot of time running around getting boat work organized, the kids read, watched movies, and listened to music. Last night we even went to the movies and watched "Catch Me If You Can" at a theatre in English. While the Maltese have their own language almost everyone speaks English too making things so much easier for us.

Marit and Jocelyn

To celebrate our safe passage to Malta all of us go out to dinner with friends from Sylphe and Little Albatross. Both boats were in Monastir during the winter. Roland and Marit live on Sylphe full-time, while Thorsten and Britta are young people taking an 18-month break to sail the Mediterranean, before taking their sailboat through the canals of France and back to England. We head to Roland and Marit's favourite pub, "The Plough and Anchor".

We stand around and have a pint at the bar. Malta was a British territory for more than a hundred years and a major British Naval base until the 1980s. This means that we can get real English bitter at the bar. We all head upstairs and sit down for a nice dinner where we got to talk about our time together in Tunisia and our plans for the coming cruising season. Kevin and Allen are as good as Jocelyn at keeping up with the conversation and adding in their comments and impressions. When we left the pub, we thought that the buses had stopped, but eventually one came along and after paying the "night fare" (triple the regular daily fare) we all piled onboard and headed back to the boat around midnight.