day 1 exploring! lunch, the bus, and dingli cliffs

After a long day/night of traveling adventures, Beth and I were pretty hungry, thus, finding food was our first order of business in Malta. The hotel we were staying in was kind of fancy and didn't appear to offer anything of the lunchtime variety. The neighborhood we were staying in was fairly residential...




A bike rack shaped like a bike :-)


fabulous wayfinding - triq means "street" from what i could tell

...but there was a cute restaurant called the Melita around the corner. Score! One thing we noticed straight away was that there are stray cats EVERYWHERE in Malta. This one climbed into the tree above our heads, stalking some poor bird or something:



We ignored the cat(s) and focused on more important things, such as lunch. A favorite Maltese snack is called pastizzi, which involves layers of buttery phylo dough and your choice of either ricotta or mushy pea filling. Guess what I chose!



Even though I went with cheese, the whole mushy pea factor points to an interesting factoid (according to me) about Malta, which is that it is really a fusion of many different cultures:

- British (used to be a colony I think?) - the plugs are British, they drive on the other side of the road, they have mushy peas, put corn on odd things (like salad), and the red phone booths are all over the place.

- Italian/Mediterranean - lots of olive oil and Italian-type food dominated most menus (fine by me!). Italian was also prevalent in the language, for instance, "thank you" in Maltese is "grazzi"...just a different spelling of gratzi!

- Moroccan - this was less noticeable, but there was definitely Moroccan flair in some of the buildings we saw and maybe in the Maltese words I couldn't pronounce.

One other thing Malta shares in common with Britain are the zany buses. Except Malta buses are way zanier than London ones. The drivers pimp them out like they are taxi cabs, and despite the fact that some of them are pimped out kinda dirty, they all have religious memorabilia hanging somewhere or other:


Check out the Holy Family above the driver. Cool.

Thanks to my almost four months in the UK, I am no longer afraid of buses, so Beth and I looked at our map, figured out which bus went to Dingli Cliffs (#81 if you really must know), dug .47 euros out of our wallets, and were on our way!

Dingli Cliffs was something that my friend Cush, who is Maltese, recommended we check out. The whole island is really rocky and the cliffs promised some good hiking. They didn't disappoint.

















Hiking around all afternoon is thirsty work, so we headed back to the hotel. We were a bit chilly (Malta is only about 55 degrees this time of year and WINDY), so we ordered some Irish hot chocolate to warm ourselves. As we sipped, we noticed that we were in a proper cocktail lounge and decided to make it our mission to find a "signature drink". (don't judge! i was on vacation!)


my first manhattan. not bad, but probably not my signature...

Eventually we decided dinner might be in order, so we went back to the Melita for some grub. In our defense, there really were no restaurants around besides this one and we were exhausted, having been up since 4 am. However, we had the best food! Salad with fresh octopus, pizza with Italian salami and rocket, and a Maltese cake for dessert. Heaven. We finished our meal, grabbed another drink in the hotel bar, and called it a night around 11. I'm gettin' old. :-)


Runner's World makes a nice coaster for my Johnnie Walker