My New Life in Malta

Thank you for the suggestions received so far on finding a job, and please keep them coming! I appreciate any tips you can send me so that I can try all possibilities. The campaign is on to make sure I can stay in the country! Just now I was trying to find leads on the internet, and oddly enough I found a forum for foreigners living in
Peru giving each other tips on visas, work permits, and immigration issues. At least it was comforting to know that I am not the only one dealing with these problems, and I am sure there are many in Malta in my situation as well.

In other news related to life in Malta, I decided not to continue with the Maltese class. After attending twice, I came to the conclusion that since I am at a more advance level it is really not the right class for me. If it was not in Mosta, I might keep going for the socialising aspect, but having to take two buses to get there is just too much. Alas, I am left with the dilemma of patting myself on the back doing such a good job of learning the language on my own, while at the same time still not having a forum in which to practice with others who, like me, struggle to form correct sentences without having the conversation turn to English.

As a test of how good my understanding of Maltese really is, I went to the cinema to see Qerq, the Maltese cinema box-office hit. Malta makes very few movies (I have asked many people and they can only think of a couple of other films ever made in Maltese) so this was a great opportunity to hone my language skills. It is being shown without English subtitles, so it would be over two hours of total immersion. M told me that local productions tend to be bad, so he would not go to see it. Determined, I went on my own. Now I would have nobody to ask if I missed part of the plot, and I was ready.

What can I say… I expected that it would not be an Oscar winner. I assumed they had a low budget so there would not be special-effect wonders. Mostly, since the Maltese tend to look down on things made in their language, I thought people were mostly doing their usual if-it’s-in-English-it’s-better complaining. In the end, I can use only one word to describe it: bad. No, actually it would be more like BAD.

Never mind the fact that it had all possible clichés thrown in: babies switched at birth, re-entering society after years in a mental institution, re-entering society after years in a correctional facility, the corrupt rich businessman whose perfect family does not know of his criminal dealings, the criminal gang that performs Mission Impossible style operations (including the unexplained use of a laptop to somehow magically shut down a store’s security system), and the melodramatic over-acting. All of these can be found in Hollywood movies, but not usually all in the same film! The editing was like something a teenager might do with a video camera. Product placement was done without even the pretense of blending it into the background. It was more a case of: pour wine of X brand into a glass, then zoom in to the bottle for several never-ending seconds to make sure the audience reads the label.

To make matters worse, it was not actually film quality. It was a DVD, being played on a laptop computer that was hooked up to the big screen. During the entire time, I could see the Windows cursor arrow in the corner. At one point, somebody in the back room must have pressed a wrong button, and all of a sudden the image shrunk and we could see the desktop, including the start menu and icons! Then we were treated to the arrow clicking around trying to get the movie back full-screen size. It was like a PowerPoint presentation from the perspective of an ant.

As a language learning tool, though, it was great for me. Everyone spoke in exaggerated but complete sentences, and I followed the plot in its entirety! I did miss out on where the extra baby switched at birth came from, but I think that was a plot hole and not a language problem. In the end, I came out of the cinema glad to know that since the movie is not subtitled, no tourists will be watching it. I really hope it does not get distributed abroad. I would feel ashamed to have it represent Malta.

As I write this, my neighbour is blasting Olivia Lewis’ “Vertigo” for the whole building to hear. After watching Qerq, maybe she is not such a bad cultural ambassador in comparison.