* Michelle Buttigieg, Malta Tourism Authority

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Michelle Buddha Judge is with the Malta Tourism Authority, and
I'm visiting with her here at Virtuoso on our radio broadcast,
and she's just telling me a spell binding story of
her childhood when in history the British Navy sailed away
and Malta became an independent republic.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Then they became in nineteen sixty four, and then in
nineteen seventy nine is when the ships, the final ships
left because as they used to use mant as a bass.
So you know, as I said, what happened?

Speaker 1 (00:32):
What did you do? What happened?

Speaker 2 (00:34):
My grandfather is a proud Maltese and you know, and
he took all his grandchildren to the Grand Harbor to
wave what we had little British and Maltese flags, and
we waved the sailors out of the board together with
a lot of other kids.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
And that was singing.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
And though I was very very little, that's still embedded.
It has a special occasion for me that i'd done
with my grand father, how passed away many years ago.
But also it was a history. I realized at that point,
even so young, that.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
It was a historic event for us, you know, And
Malta with eight thousand years of history, had so many
historic events and you know, and I was proud to
be part of that.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
And they dressed you all as sailors.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, my grandmother made us little sailors to the girls
had sailor dresses and the boys had the sailor pants
with the heads. That was special. I still have the outfit.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
You're kidding. History as a child, and then of course
you had history as well. When our President Bush came
and met with Mikhail Gorbcho Malta me.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Well, Malta.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
If you look at the location, you know we're in
the middle of the Mediterranean.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
So politically we've always played an important role in bringing
the you know, North to to to South like a middleman.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Our language have you know, really speaking the only my
Semitic language left in the world, so it's easy for
us to speak Arabic and other languages.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
And also our official language is English, so we are
English speaking. Hence why it's important, very popular with North
Americans to come and visit because you're going to its
ease of communication. But politically we have always been important.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
That's why we were sought after the Nights of Malta,
where in Malta after they were kicked out of Rows
and spent over two hundred years of Malta for the
Ottoman away from mainland Europe and Malta and I believe
Austria were considered the gate waits of Christianity.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Come to Malta, you'll be treated like a president or
the British. I got friends like a friend