Malta – where people will steal anything left out in public
Dustbins, flowerpots off windowsills, signage, plants from public gardens, and now even the underwear strung across Bla Kondixin’s latest billboards as a promotion.
I’m certain the people who took all those underpants already have some of their own and aren’t desperate for knickers – but if it’s there in public then it’s considered available for the taking. Majtezwel hux. Malta qatt ma rrifjutat qamh.
At least we have come a bit of a way since the Regional Road tunnels first opened in the early 1970s, with their interior tiled all over in white in the manner of European and North American subways of 40 years earlier. Over the following few weeks, people went there at night and hacked off every last tile.
There are probably still one or two lavatories surviving today tiled in Regional Road tunnel ‘salvage’.
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A week ago a tourist inadvertently left behind her bag containing cash on the Gozo ferry. An employee found it and, instead of stealing it, returned it to its owner.
This act of minimal, run of the mill honesty, the majority considered totally stupefying. Literally hundreds wrote in utter amazement.
Common honesty was considered so extraordinary that many proposed that employee for the ‘Gieh ir-Repubblika’. So astonished were the majority that the employee did not steal what did not belong to him, that the Minister for Gozo hosted a press event to present the wholly un-Maltese freak to the world.
We are so unaccustomed to not stealing whenever the occasion presents itself that when, ever so rarely, it happens, it literally makes front-page headlines. How sad.
U tawh plakka ukoll lol
Actually, he got a plaque from Anton Refalo for his good deed:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140827/local/ferry-worker-who-returned-bag-with-2000-thanked-by-minister.533391
Did that tile-stealing operation really happen?
[Daphne – Yes, of course it did. Ancient people like me remember it well.]
My mother used to mention it every time we drove through that tunnel.
The before and after effect was incredibly fast.
For the short number of hours that the tunnel was tiled, the reflection of light on the tiles made the whole tunnel really bright with light.
It went from sudden light to permanent darkness regained.
I used to steal traffic cones in my partying days. Techno, light sticks and traffic cones. Bliss.