Sliema, Malta
Greetings from Malta! Both of my blogs have been silent for the last couple of months, as I've been weighted down with tours to guide and books to promote. My new book about how to write great travel journals is now on sale. And over on my other blog, I've just posted some snarkage about my attempt to re-enter the blogosphere after so many weeks away.
I've got one more tour to guide this season, starting next week, but in spite of that, let's see if I can breathe some life into “WordSplash.”
People often ask me what sort of journal I use when traveling. It depends. I abandoned long ago those fancy, high-quality, leather-bound, blank books due to their cost, weight, and the fact that a travel journal tends to get beaten up after a few weeks in my backpack. That's not to say nobody should use such a journal. Some people are into the idea of a physically gratifying keepsake to contain their words. I always suggest: find the sort of notebook, and the sort of pen or pencil, that feels best to you. You'll feel more inspired to write that way.
The notebooks I write my travel diaries in have been getting smaller and cheaper over the years, to the extreme that recently, much of my journaling has taken place in those little pocket-sized spiral notebooks you can buy for less than a dollar and hold in your palm. Sure, I fill these notebooks quickly, but I can always carry one with me and scribble down random thoughts throughout my day.
But arriving last night in Sliema, a coastal town just north of Malta's capital, I decided I wanted a larger set of pages to write in on this trip. So I followed one of the tips from my book, Globejotting, and bought a slightly larger (yet still thin and lightweight) notebook at the shop next to my hotel.
Buying notebooks in foreign places can be a fun cultural esperience. Often, the thousands of minuscule differences about a place all glob together in our brain to create a sense of foreignness. And something as simple as buying a notebook in a foreign country can capture one of those tiny differences. Notebooks from other countries simply look different sometimes.
The downside to purchasing a notebook locally is, of course, the fact that when you first arrive, you have no journal to write in. You must traipse out quickly to find a journal before you can begin writing about your travels. But the uniqueness of a notebook purchased in another country can add hints of “I've been somewhere different” to your travel diary.
Case in point: My new Maltese journal. It cost me 37 euro-cents. It has 48 pages – perfect for documenting my six days here. And the unique part? At the bottom of the cover, there's a message to school kids urging them to say no to drugs and offering – in both English and Maltese – a hotline number they can call if they have personal problems.
Do I need a personal advice hotline while I'm here in Malta? Let's hope not. But the message in Maltese is there, serving a different purpose for my travel journal. Maltese looks unusual to me. It's a language related to Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic, with generous pepperings of Italian. It's the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet.
My notebook is a notebook I would find nowhere else in the world, other than this tiny island nation. It splashes uniqueness across the cover of my Malta diary.
Very cool!
I like ephemera--metro tickets and the like--and writing in a locally-purchased journal is a great context for place-specific memories.
Posted by: Jeri | September 17, 2008 at 07:56 AM