Malta continued and Gozo: Sketchy buses, toy boats, and beautiful sunrises/sunsets

Palace Guard

Wednesday I headed out and caught a ferry to Valletta, which is the capital city of Malta.  It was pretty neat and definitely has a different vibe than the areas I’d been in the day before.  The center of the city was buzzing- one of the streets (“market street”- appropriately named) had a big market all the way up and down it and there were people EVERYWHERE!  However, when I walked around the perimeter, it was like the dead zone… not scary, but just strange because the sound is trapped inside the city too so it was like there was no one anywhere, and then I turned a corner and boom!  There’s the crew.  There was a Buckingham Palace and guards outside that aren’t allowed to smile at you or anything, as well as red photo booths.  Definitely some British influence that remains! 

One extremely obvious way you can see it is that the people drive on the left side of the street.  This messes with my head for two reasons:
1.  I always look the wrong way when going to cross the street.  I can’t tell you how many times I looked right, looked left, started to cross, and- whoops!- almost get run over by a car coming from the right.
2.  I have the (false) impression that everyone in the country is carpooling.  I was so impressed with the dedication to decrease excess driving!  And then I realized that it wasn’t a passenger in every one of those cars, but the driver that is on the other side.  I just assume that there’s someone in the ‘driver’s’ seat (the passenger seat here) because I’m so used to looking for the driver there.

Malta bus

Valletta is also the main hub of the bus system in Malta.  The buses are extremely old-school and were really intimidating to me at first- hence one of the reasons I walked everywhere!  There aren’t doors, so you just hop on when it comes to the bus stop and hand your money to the driver and then when you want to get off, you pull a cord or push a button (depending on how new your bus is…) and then cross your fingers that the driver’s feeling nice enough to come to a full stop for you.  I saw multiple situations where this wasn’t the case and people literally hit the ground running ;)

Anyway, my one regret of my Malta trip is that if I would have known what the tour/cruise packages were ahead of time, I probably would have gone straight to Gozo rather than hitting up Valletta.  There is a package that is only 15 euros and includes one of those ridiculous get on/get off the bus tours in Gozo (which would have been nice just to transport around and to hit up all of the major areas) and it includes a free harbor cruise, which goes in and out of all the harbors across from Valletta.  The cruise itself is normally 16 euros (but they’ll go down to 10 in trying to get you to come)  and the ferry out to Gozo is 5 euros and the buses there are ~2 roundtrip, so it’s a pretty good deal.  I didn’t have time to take advantage of the special- maybe another time!  It was interesting to ride the bus because we really went in and out of a lot of the towns in the country, so I got a good view of the countryside.  The more rural areas are so extremely different from the cities that it feels like a whole different country.  The ferry I took out to Gozo was nothing like the ferry to Valletta- this one was really large and fit cars and trucks in too.

Crazy colorful boats

Sunset- wow

The Mgarr harbor in Gozo is full of these boats that to me look like toys.  It must be a Malta thing… I’ve seen them in lots of different harbors.  They’re painted so many different bright colors that they look too pretty to actually be functional!  Gozo has a different feel than the other main island… both places have a lot of large, old churches and small, winding streets, but Gozo seems like it’s more laid-back and low-key and less developed.  I mainly stayed in the 3 or 4 "cities" closest to the harbor, but I think I’d enjoy exploring the rest of the island.  It was like I had the place to myself- so quiet!  I tried Kinnie, the Maltese soft drink… yuch.  It’s kind of like Fanta but less sweet with a strong bitter aftertaste.  On the bright side, it’s probably better that I didn’t like it- now I don’t have to worry about finding it outside of Malta!  The sun was setting as I took the ferry back- absolutely gorgeous. One more incidence of friendly people… I met a Czech guy who was on the same ferry back and then took the same bus back to get us back to where we were staying on the main island, and he talked me ear off about everything from traveling to foreign countries to learning English and why we had come to Malta.  By the end of the 30+ minute bus ride, he asked me to dinner, but I didn’t think that it would be an especially good idea to go out by myself with a stranger late at night (I am capable of making rational decisions sometimes!) so I politely declined and told him to enjoy the rest of his trip. 

Me, Lynnette, and Cathy

I came back and Cathy, Lynnette, Michael, and Lynnette’s sister (Katrina) and I went out to the clubs.  I realized that it was one of those days where I’d forgotten to eat an actual meal, so I kept an eye on how much alcohol I was taking in.  But I can never turn down tequila shots! ;)  We didn’t end up going to the strip club (ladies night at Stiletto) but did end up visiting the Aussie girls’ cousin at a pub where we got a pitcher that was kind of like Wando’s fishbowls, a club where we were given 2-for-1 tickets, and a club where the guy outside (not really a bouncer since they obviously aren’t checking IDs and things… more like PR?) gave us free cocktail coupons and 2-for-1 vodka redbull pitchers.  It was an interesting evening, and involved pole-dancing, shots, girls that couldn’t figure out how to flush toilets, and metro Maltese boys.  All in all, a great way to go out, even if it meant that I had less than 3 hours of sleep before heading to the airport!  I was up to see sunrise, which was a definite plus. 

Malta sunrise

When trying to sum up Malta, the best way that I can describe things is that I feel like the whole country is playing a joke on me.  I already described my confusion with the cars, but the language is another key trick.  The majority of the signs are in English but then every now and then, they just mix things up and throw one in that’s only in Maltese.  And no one speaks in English, so I can’t understand anything they’re saying, but then when I ask them a question or order something in English, they respond in English, with a very strange accent that somewhat resembles British English, but at the same time sounds like they’re not native speakers.  Maltese sounds kind of like Arabic, but borrows words from Sicilian, Italian, French, and English, which makes it all them more frustrating because I pick up words here and there and I kind of have the impression that if I listened really really closely, I would understand… but when I listen really really closely, I have the impression that I’m not listening closely enough and I still don’t get it!  It’s a very difficult language to learn.  All that I picked up on my brief stay was the word for street (Triq) and the word for hill (Telgha) because I was trying to find Birkirkara Hill, but ended up at Triq Birkirkara instead of Telgha Birkirkara.  The one other word I learned was xita, which is prounced “shitta” (shitter in an Aussie accent ;) haha) which means rain.  So when you’re in Malta next, you can look up at the sky and say, shitta! 

Hoping for no xita near you  J  xoxo Allison