Malta

Last week Amy and I began our Easter Vacation early by skipping a school trip to Florence and heading to Malta. Florence isn't our favorite place and the natives are getting restless anticipating the end of the school year so it was an easy choice to make once the Resident Director gave his approval. We were able to exchange our timeshare in Aruba for a week at Golden Bay on the main island. I brought along my iPad and we had wireless internet access, but I hate writing anything of any length on the pad and I still haven't bothered to figure out how to upload photos so I saved all my blogging for our return.

We decided to drive to the airport and park our car rather than take public transportation. Our friends the H-Ps joined us so it turned out that parking and gas were less than half of what we all would have paid to take the slow train from China. Amy reserved the parking online and it turns out they were having a special where valet parking was the same cost as park and take the shuttle. We're not crazy; we went with the valet. We had to wait a bit longer than they suggested at the terminal, but they did show up at both ends of the trip, the car was fine and away we went.

The flight from Rome to Malta is direct and takes about 80 minutes, barely enough time for them to get to cruising altitude, serve a snack and make it back down. We arrived in the early afternoon to bright sunshine at the Malta International Airport. I'm not sure how it could have been anything other than an international airport since the only places you can fly to or from are foreign countries. I guess you could take a hop to Gozo, the other main island, but I'm not sure where they would put an airport there since it is only 30 square miles! The entire country is only 122 square miles and has a population of 410K, including permanent foreign residents. In many ways it is quite quaint. It must be the only airport in a European capital that you can walk to on foot. Well, it is actually quite a way from the capital city of Valletta, but there are sidewalks right up to the terminal from the main road and the bus stop.

Malta has a long and storied 5000+ year long history which I will write about later. Most recently it was a British colony. Everybody speaks Maltese (a combination of Arabic and Sicilian) and English. It was quite different to be able to walk in and speak English. At one of the first restaurants we went to Amy reverted back to ordering in Italian which amused everybody involved! Malta is one of the members of the EU currency union and uses the euro meaning we didn't even need to exchange money. Public transportation covers the entire country and is inexpensive, but we opted for the freedom of renting a car. As a holdover from British times, Malta is one of the 7 countries in the world where they drive on the left side of the road. Amy did all the driving while the rest of us navigated. I'm not sure who had it worse, Amy shifting with her left hand while fighting to keep to the left or me sitting in the passenger seat (our driver's seat) working the pedals that didn't exist.

Malta is slated to be the European Cultural Capital in 2018. A huge infrastructure upgrade is already underway. That means maps aren't always reliable as new roads are popping up and existing roads are closed as they are improved. In addition, Malta has fallen in love with the roundabout or traffic circle. Few intersections are left. That can be confusing when you "know" you should go out of the "next" traffic circle at "9 o'clock" but the next traffic circle isn't actually the one on your map! Parking, except in the metro Valletta area and Victoria on Gozo, isn't a problem. All in all, Amy did a great job and we did see some incredible sights and drive over some .... interesting roads.