28/02/14

The day started off with a ferry over to Gozo followed by a quick tour of the Ggantija Temple heritage park. The heritage park has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1980. It was originally called Ggantija because the knights of the order of St. John found it, the could not believe that primitive humans had built a monument so big, so they assumed it must have been giants. The temple was the spot for a spontaneous bit of filming as we realized that the temples of Malta played a significant part of the history of Malta and the history of man so to miss this out in a video promoting the country.
We stopped for lunch at a place called Ir-Ramla l-Ħamra. Although it didn’t look much, the amount of history buried there was extremely interesting. The Maltese name translated is literally the red sandy beach and the theory is that this is the cave that is referred to by the Greek writer Homer in The Odyssey. The talk goes that the adventurer Ulysses was shipwrecked on this island and was trapped by the nymph Calypso for seven years.
Our tour guide ,Matthew, then took us to the citedela in a town called Rabat. Throughout history Gozo has been sacked various times as an easier way to get into Malta so not many people have lived there due to the danger. The citadela was the only fortification in Gozo and so the inhabitants generally lived quite close to the place.
The last feature that we went to in Gozo was the world famous azure window. The azure window was most recently used in the hit T.V series, Game Of Thrones. The scenery was so nice, that we decided to shoot our sunset there as we had all the components necessary. The whole group agrees that it was an incredible place. All of the footage that we captured will never do the place justice.
We then went back to our temporary home on the island of Gozo and prepared for the carnival of Gozo. It was certainly an experience that my team and I will never forget, the only thing that we could compare it to was the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Birmingham. It was difficult to find anyone not dressed in some sort of costume with the majority of people dressing up in ghoulish masks. However, we didn’t enjoy the carnival as much as we would have liked. This is probably due to not being dressed up in costume and sometimes it felt as though their culture, customs and humour did not translate very well. Overall it was an experience that we will never forget.