The Bells

Victoria, the town we are staying in, has a great many churches all of which have clock bells and bells, church services for the ringing of. The clock bells are not synchronised, so 10am in one church is two minutes ahead of another. Some clocks just announce the hour but others also ring the quarters so in order to show off they first ring one, two or three chimes for quarter past, half past or quarter to and then, on a heavier bell, chime the hour. So at 11.45 you get three small quarter bongs plus eleven big ones. Victoria is a very noisy place, I am not sure an incomer would be well regarded if they complained but with so many bells you quickly get used to it.

The owner of the hotel in Valletta warned us that Gozo was “very hilly” and that walking would be tough. I thought that perhaps I had mis-read the guidebook as I was not expecting any climbing. It seems that to someone brought up in Malta, Gozo is mountainous but to those of us used to the mighty peaks of the Shropshire Hills Gozo is fairly flat.
They do however have some serious dry stone walls, all the lanes are lined by them, the stone is very porous so the stones soon degenerate and the walls have to be rebuilt quite often.
We had a very pleasant walk today from our hotel which is in the centre of the island to the north coast where there are thousands of salt pools used to extract salt from sea water during the summer. We had lunch in what is supposedly a trendy smart resort (it looked a bit scruffy to us) and then walked back again. No significant hills were encountered.