of fortresses and fending enemies

salam. so. how have you been? :)

a trip. a travel. a runaway from the cold, dark, gloomy feel of winter. an escape. or ESCAPEE~ (as Dory in Finding Nemo) from the horrendous nightmares of OSCE.

MALTA

Alhamdulillah. was a good trip overall. with me lovely housemates. NF kuasa dua. (NF1 & NF2). hihi 

i think i went a bit manic over there, a lot of giggling. which i rarely do in public. kihkih.. how could i resist, the housemates has infected me with the giggling virus.

I think I learnt a lot going there. About myself. About friends. About Allah. About Allah's creations. 

Basically a bit about Malta. It's a small island in the Mediterranean.  Their national language is English and Maltese.  Malta apparently had been invaded by a lot of powers, dating back from the Ottoman empire, to Italy, to America and lastly Britain. Valletta is the new capital where it is surrounded by a 14 feet thick brick wall which served as a fort back in the days.  Going on the sea cruise it's really astonishing to see the structure from water and thinking at the time at how amazing Allah has equipped mankind with the skills to bring hard land into towering structures. 

Basically in Malta there are 350 churches so people would visit one church every day for a year.  and there is also one mosque in Malta. Here's the catch, Malta was under the Muslim reign for 200 years until the Ottoman empire went down and was under British government for 170 years.  so, I'm wondering what happened to the other mosques?  Anyway, I was very amazed at how Islam spread during those days.  Honestly speaking, I wouldn't have imagined there existed an Island called Malta before.  For my own consolation, it's absolutely tiny if you look on the map.  Like a little dot.  But Islam still managed to get to the dot in the middle of the sea where there exists humans.  MashaAllah, their passion of spreading peace.  And to this day, there are a lot of Arabic words used on the island, for instance, the place where we stayed was called Sliema, which is short for Tas-Sliema, which means peace or comfort, and also the addresses is Tariq bla bla..which in Arabic means road.  I'm not quite sure about the Muslim population in the country though, I don't think it's that many since I didn't manage to see any locals wearing hijab throughout our stay, which is quite a shame since it is really a very very calm and soothing place to live where you can barely see any litter on the road.  the view is so amazingly beautiful mashaAllah.  I might consider living there someday, if I end up a spinster, I might just settle down in Malta and open a Malaysian seafood restaurant or coffee shop for tourists.  Maybe open a surau if I manage to collect a lot of money.  okay, I'm drifting away.  

Another thing that caught my interest was apparently Malta is known to people studying language, which is quite understandable with all the mixed cultures and heritage.  The lady in our hotel who prepares breakfast for us says she sometimes hosts foreign students.  She can speak English and 1 or 2 other languages but could understand 12 languages.  Whoah! Amazing mashaAllah.  Suddenly I feel like sending my children to Malta to learn languages. I used to ask mama to join Mandarin class but painting lesson and taekwondo and swimming lesson, no way hosey. jdlah impian utk anak2. baiklah. sekian.

p/s: the song -> in taxi on the way to Malta airport.a rainy day on the last day
-nadmj-