Welcome back to Malta, and their first snow in years!  Just my luck, we are experiencing a cold snap.  I got back from Italy late in the evening and woke up the next morning to pouring rain, howling wind and reports of snow and hail.  It was still nice to be home, too bad I had to brave the storm to stock up on essential groceries. I decided I needed some volunteer work to keep me busy and as a way to meet people.  (Don't worry Habitat friends, I'm still very involved, though now mostly with the safety program.)  My ever helpful landlady Karla pointed me in a few directions.  One was raising puppies to be used as guide dogs.  Sounds great, but they want a 10 month commitment.  The next suggestion was rocking babies down the road at a kind of orphanage.  No luck there, they have a volunteer wait list.  How about the SPCA?  Went there and they also were turning people away.  While its bad for me that ...

I wanted to go to the Archeological Museum because that's where the original artifacts from Pompeii were on display.  It is considered one of the most important a rcheological museums in the world.  The first floor was filled with marble statues.  They included Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Aphrodite, Venus, Hercules and Atlas to name just a few. The 2nd floor is where the Pompeii artifacts were and it was basically just two or three large rooms.  They had the mosaics and frescoes we had seen; The Battle of Alexander, the Faun statue, and the 'beware of dog' tile art.  One room of interest was called the secret room, the name the Bourbon Monarchy gave the private rooms which held their fairly extensive collection of erotic or sexual items, mostly deriving from excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  After the revolution of 1848, the government of the monarchy proposed the destruction of objects, fearful of the implications of...

The 2nd week in Ischia was much less eventful.  This is definitely a tourist island, and December is not tourist season, so almost everything was closed.  For the most part I walked around the island or just relaxed in the condo.  The TV was all in Italian, so I got a lot of reading in.   One day I decided to go to Sorgente Olmitello on the other side of the island.  TripAdviser described it as:  Scenic / Historic Walking Areas, Waterfalls.  I hopped on the bus, sat back and enjoyed the sights.  There was a quaint small town feel I noticed everywhere I had been.  Everyone seemed to know everyone else and the bus was a great example of that.  Riders got on and off at every stop and without fail, there was someone they knew on the bus.  It was almost like a social hub of sorts, everyone catching up between stops.  Eventually the crowd thinned out as we made our way to a more remote ...