What’s it like in Malta?
This newsletter is going to be short, because even though I loved Malta, I haven’t had much time to write about it…BUT I’ve written at least one newsletter for every country we’ve visited on this trip and I will be goddamned if I end the streak now!
We expected Malta to be a lot like Sicily — it’s just about 100 miles away (a 30-minute flight), and was actually part of Sicily from 1091 to 1530. But we arrived to find that in fact Malta is it’s own whole unique thing, a fascinating mix of influences from across the Mediterranean. (Country comparisons can be fraught, but are also inevitable and the more we travel the more we comment on how places are like other places…)
Here’s a brief recap of my impressions:
There is a lot of Italian food available, but I’d describe Maltese food as much more similar to the food on Crete — hearty stews and veggies, lots of rabbit, thick pizza-like bread and cheese snacks, and delicious date-filled pastries.
The architecture is quite grand — walled cities and fortifications and dungeons and arches and forts. Croatia’s Dubrovnik is famous as King’s Landing (Game of Thrones), but Malta was actually used for a lot of filming in season 1.
The language sounds much more like Arabic than anything else, with too many consonants for my pronunciation comfort. [Ok I watched a video: Maltese derives from late medieval Sicilian Arabic, and the syntax and grammar are Arabic while the vocab is 1/3 Arabic, 1/2 Sicilian, and the rest from English and French!] Most people easily switched to English when they talked to us, and even though I read that 66% of the population speaks Italian, we didn’t really hear any.
This tiny island was colonized by Britain from 1813-1964, and there is something distinctly English about the culture (in addition to driving on the left side of the road). Maltese people are similarly polite and orderly — no one ever rushed us and everyone was nice but not outgoing — imagine a warm-climate version of the British.
I’ve never seen anything quite like the geography of the Valletta (capital city) area. Fingers of land create a series of bays and peninsulas, each crowned by a huge fortress, and all so close together. It’s like neighborhoods of one big city, except you have to take ferries to get from one side to another. The rest of the tiny island is hillsides and steep cliffs, so tiny that if you’re at a high(ish) point in the middle you can see the sea in all directions. Remember in GoT when Khal Drogo married Dany? And later collapsed on a cliff edge? That was all Malta!
We spent a week home basing in Birgu, checking out the Valletta area, and taking day trips to Mdina and the Blue Lagoon on Comino (a tiny island just off of Malta).
A very nice Maltese time was had by all!
What am I reading?
Just finished: The Wolf Den (Elodie Harper)
Currently reading: Call the Midwife (Jennifer Worth)
Up next: Children of Dune (Frank Herbert)