Erasmus Malta 2022

Another quiet week. Tuesday was a public holiday, so the office was quite empty on Monday. On Thursday, we suffered a power outage. Fairly early on in the day, maybe 8:30 to 9am, everything went dark. Even the generator didn't seem to kick in. I was then given the background info, that this is not uncommon in the summer in Malta. Likely onset by the increase in fans and ACs running, the island cannot sustain its power usage. And while they are already being supplemented with power from Sicily, it seems even that is not enough. So sometimes there are outages that hit various parts of the island. In our case, the building block I'm in was hit, while the rest of MCAST seems to have been spared. A few people from my office ended up taking their work to the Administration building across campus, to finish off meetings there. I am not sure however, how much of the network would have been up, even there. We stayed without lights for a while, then went through a few different variants....

Monday This week started off with more time spent with my aunt. One thing I was really excited about doing, is walking along the Victoria Lines. The Victoria lines are a hiking/walking trail, fairly north in Malta. They follow an old wall that went from one end of the island to the other, east to west. I'd heard a lot of people talk about them at the hostel, and done my research on them. Recommendation was to start in the west, where buses don't run a lot, and make your way towards the east. Once you're about halfway through, you'll often be near well-connected cities, and can easily find your way home even if you don't finish the trek. The early west part of the trail however, may be overgrown and is a bit difficult to find your way around in. Also apparently there may be some 'private property' signs you have to walk past and ignore. I loaded my phone up with pictures, maps and routes, and we set out. I don't have the energy to add dramatic flair to th...

Tuesday Tuesday afternoon, I left work early for another trip to the airport. This time, I'd be picking up my aunt and delivering her safely to her flat in Valletta. The pick-up went well, despite my bus having a 25 minute delay; and once we managed to correctly figure out the location of her apartment, that went well too. It was a lovely little place, with air-conditioning and a sunroof. The roof especially turned out to be an incredible feature. The street the apartment was on was only one off from the end of the city, close to the water, so the view from the top did not suffer any obstructions. Sure, you couldn't see far into Valletta itself, as the buildings rose one higher than the other, but you could see the flatter parts of the island in the distance, the ocean, and across to Sliema. After dropping off my aunt's luggage, we then started a short trek through the city. We were hunting for a restaurant, if which there were many, but hopefully a little outside the busy ...

Work A batch of certificates from a course done on Gozo Campus arrived. As most of the students in question would want to pick it up from there, I kept a hold on the certificates and waited for the requests to come in.  The true work this week however, is with stipends office. As stipends/student maintenance grants are a government scheme run on a different system, I don't have any access to that information. Furthermore, stipends office isn't technically my area of work; I've only learnt the answer for a common problem or two, and to redirect to my coworker. Over the weekend however, the maintenance grants department at the Ministry for Education got busy. They sent out a large wave of letters regarding overpayments that need to be paid back by students who either failed or discontinued their studies. Phone calls and in person-visits this week were dominated by angry students who refused to understand and/or accept the situation. And as my coworker got sick fairly early on...

  In lieu of repeating myself about the routine at work, this week I will be drawing from my backlog of cat pictures. The upcoming weeks will be busy for me, as my boyfriend and then my aunt will be visiting me for a while.  I pass the sign on the left on my way to get groceries. There's a park nearby, which I guess I should consider as an option for weekend sun-times.

Work Unfortunately, I've reached the point where not much can be said about work. This week I sent out a lot of certificates to private addresses, as well as Gozo Campus. It is also no surprise that a lot of the recent graduates have come in to pick up their certificates, since they're either Undergraduate or Bachelor degrees. These people have been mostly nice, though displeased at whichever reason it was that stopped them from attending their graduation. Inquiries about the graduation photography were also common this week. Other than that it's mostly phone calls and e-mails that require general advice; sometimes they're all from the same person, who insists that they've definitely been at our office multiple times for weeks, and no one was ever there. Overall I'm very happy with the understanding I've gained of the way MCAST, the general Maltese education system and the surrounding subjects work, many of which I've gained by reading up on the things t...