day 3, st. paul's bay

so, we had big plans to go to gozo on monday. however, we realized during our romantic valentine's dinner that our "relaxing" vacation had mostly been spent running all over the island. we decided to lay low and try to stop spending money, which meant we'd be spending the day in st. paul's bay, partly because we wanted to see where st. paul had shipwrecked but mostly because we could get the bus there for only 54 cents (vs. a cab to st. julian's for 20 euros).

the bus to st. paul's was a little complicated.

the one we thought we could catch right outside our hotel only runs every few hours apparently. our friend the concierge (who knew us well by this point) gave Beth directions through attard to get to another bus stop where we could get a direct route to st. paul's and avoid the nightmare that was the bus terminal in valletta.

thanks goodness for Beth. dude had given her a blurry, illegible map, a few scribblings that barely made sense, and a pat on the head. if i were leading the way we would have spent SIX HOURS trying to find the bus. luckily Beth has a better sense of direction. we found the bus, figured out which side of the street was headed north, and away we went. except i ended up sitting right next to the big open space where the door should have been and had to hang on for dear life. :-)

we had pretty amazing weather as we set out...sunny, not too windy, perfect. having no map, we disembarked from the dusty bus in st. paul's and basically tooled around until we found the ocean. wandering aimlessly with a purpose at its best!

highlights from our little excursion:


i don't care how dirty your horse is, you must find somewhere else to wash him.


grab your girl and your briefcase and RUN.


cool.


all the homes had religious icons outside their front doors.


pretty.




cocktail hour(s) by the sea.


life. is. good.

day 2 karnival, malta style

We woke up this morning to rain, boo! I had been planning to run, so rain wasn't ideal, but it was actually warm enough that things worked out ok. I loaded up my pockets with my room key, a 20 for cab fare (just in case) and 50 cents for bus fare (just in case). I was able to get about 40 hilly minutes in, and best of all, the locals all said "good morning" without me even prompting them! I love this place.

After our workouts, Beth and I returned to Melita (there really was nowhere else to eat lunch) where we noticed for the second day that many children were running around in costume. Our waiter explained that it was Karnival weekend and part of the custom is to dress up. He also said that there were lots of activities going on in Valletta, the capital, to celebrate. We had been planning to go to Mdina but figured we should check out the festival, so we hopped on the bus in search of an authentic Maltese experience.



The bus ride was interesting.

People of all ages were getting on in all sorts of crazy costumes. One guy had on an outfit that reminded me of Transformers and the thing was so wide he barely fit on the bus. I wanted to take his picture but I wasn't sure how polite that would be. However, there were plenty of photo ops once we got to Valletta!


All of the floats had dancers and loud pop music playing. We weren't quite sure what the theme was?


Cute little guy in costume


Statue of Liberty - symbol of freedom AND corndogs




The view from Valletta. Amazing.


The Apostle Paul was shipwrecked here in 60 AD. This is one of the many churches named in his honor, decked out for Karnival.


Seaside restaurant in Valletta


The parade


Nothing to do with Karnival, just funny :0

While Karnival was super interesting, it was also exhausting (and noisy). We headed back to the hotel around 4 pm because we had spa appointments! I'm not normally a spa kind of girl, but we decided to get facials since they were really cheap (compared to London prices). I wasn't sure what to expect...turned out to be pretty relaxing. I actually fell asleep during part of it, ha.

Afterwards, we went to our room to clean up and get dressed for dinner in St. Julian's Bay. We had to make a booking, because as at least 6 people reminded us, it was Valentine's Day. Valentine's doesn't really interest me (the idea of forced romance makes me want to hyperventilate into a paper bag), but we played along and got really dressed up, drank the silly pink cocktails (hey, they were free), and enjoyed a fixed three-course menu consisting of:

- antipasti

- some sort of pasta that i swear tasted exactly like pasta fazool with different noodles. i HATED this dish as a child (i actually cringed when i saw the navy beans soaking on the counter the morning before my dad fixed this), but i don't mind it now! odd.

- meat. there was a pork thing with tomato sauce, which was great, some kind of meatloaf with a lemon flavor, also really good, and what i think was beef? i don't know, it was a lot of meat. :-)

- cheesecake with pomegranates. this was so good that i accidentally ate the pomegranate stem in my quest to get in every last bit of cake. oops.

We had to take a cab back to our hotel since there was no direct bus, and our cab driver was excellent! He was excited to learn we were American and chatted for the entire 20-minute ride. Such a sweetie. The people here are amazing...

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

the ins and outs of low-cost holiday airlines

Beth and I decided last week that we needed a mini break. I had 1.5 in lieu days to take (basically free vacation due to the amount of overtime I've worked), and I found myself hunting around lastminute.com with an absurd but persistent urge to book a nice beach trip. Portugal? No, headed there in March. Spain? No, been there. Malta? Hmmm! Sadly I wasn't even sure what or where that was. I just knew I wanted to go there.

Long story short, we booked a crazy cheap three nights in a five-star spa resort and an equally crazy cheap flight on Ryanair out of Luton. The days leading up to the trip were stupidly busy at work and I didn't get home before 10 pm most nights, which meant I was really, really disorganized in getting myself packed and to the airport.

Nevertheless we made it to Luton after an hour train ride from Farringdon, breezed through security, and stood in the endless cattle call line for the flight. About 30 minutes before we were scheduled to depart, the ticket agent came around checking everyone's passports and boarding passes. She looked at Beth's first, then mine, then shook her head and said "you can't get on this flight. you don't have the right visa clearance."

Huh?

Sure enough, at the top of the ticket (which had enough text on it to be considered a novella), there were four lines about non-EU passport holders needing to get their visas checked before they could board the flight. Except you don't need a visa to go to Malta, only a passport.

We did have 30 minutes to spare but the woman insisted we would never make it through customs (why would you have to go through customs if you didn't leave the airport?), back through security, and out to the gate. Our only option was to wait until our flight left, at which point we would be escorted out of the airport to figure out how to get another flight. Keep in mind that this isn't any kind of Maltese regulation or even an air transportation regulation. Just a little something nice Ryanair does to try and squeeze a bit of extra money out of people.

That said, being escorted by security is kind of amusing.

She didn't have weapons (as far as I could tell) but she did make a great fanfare about lifting up all the security line ropes as we cut through customs. Ha.

The next Ryanair flight wasn't until the following afternoon and would cost a hefty surcharge to rebook. However, the easyJet desk was just two doors down and their flight to Malta left at 7:15 the next morning. Boom. We still had to pay extra but at least we would have almost a full day Saturday on the island.

The only catch was that the flight was out of Gatwick. And we were in Luton. These airports are on opposite sides of London (think of the distance between DAY and CVG). Luckily, we were able to catch the train door to door and I was able to catch a catnap en route. Since Gatwick is so far from where Beth and I live, our flight was so early, and we would need to be at Gatwick at 5 am (gross), we decided to stay at a hotel near the airport. A Hilton is attached to the south terminal, but it was full, so the concierge booked us a romantic night for two at the quaint Cambridge hotel about 15 minutes away. Free shuttle service.

I have to say, I enjoyed a pretty solid night's sleep (maybe because there weren't drunks staggering around in front of my window at all hours) and we got to the airport in plenty of time for our flight. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of flying a low-cost holiday airline, our morning looked a lot like this:

- 1 hour wait in a line of sleepy, cranky children and their crazy parents. One dad had a shoulder bag with buttons on it that said: "I love your mum.", "I love beer." and my two personal favorites "I love tits." and "I love ass." This father of the year had two pre-adolescent boys with him. Their poor mother...

- 40 minute walk to the gate, which I swear wasn't even in the same airport.

- A giant, massive queue that spanned all directions and funneled into one, tiny hallway where people pushed and shoved to try and get on the plane first.

- A relatively new airplane with seats that didn't recline (luxury!), and that charged for everything from bottled water to peanuts.

But. At least we got there, which we finally did three hours later. It was 11 am when we arrived in Malta and considering that we probably would have slept late anyway, we really didn't lose any time! Best of all, the Corinthian hotel didn't charge us for the night we missed. Awesome.