Rosemary's Travels: Malta

By Rosemary O'Donoghue

Travel Malta and find the beauty, the history and the ridiculous.
Thirty years ago Rosemary worked with a young Maltese fellow who managed to communicate his love of his country and it has been on her bucket list ever since. When she visits, she is not disappointed, finding herself enthralled with the beauty and the history and annoyed and amused by some tacky tourism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosemary O'Donoghue
• Release date: Sep 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370027361

Rosemary O'Donoghue

Rosemary O'Donoghue writes for work and for fun. A Technical Writer with a science background, she has published travel books and a business book, Clarity out of Complexity: Writing Effective Workplace Procedures, to share some of the wisdom she has learned from many years of writing for a wide range of industries. She gets excited about how good procedures (as opposed to longwinded, boring, repetitive procedures) can dramatically lift the performance of a business.In between (and often during) jobs, Rosemary enjoys travelling and writes daily to capture her experiences and entertain friends, family and random people she meets. In recent years she has discovered a passion for sailing and spends months at a times on a boat coastal cruising along the NSW and Queensland coast of Australia. She has written about her experiences along the way in her book North on Rocinante and will soon publish Second Season, also about her sailing experiences. She has published travel stories about Italy, Greece, Malta, Hong Kong & China.Rosemary is currently combining her technical writing and training expertise and her passion for sailing creating a self-discovery learning guide about coastal cruising.When she's not on the water, Rosemary lives with her partner, her cat and her pet python in Sydney, Australia.

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1

A Luxury Apartment and the Sliema Waterfront

Tuesday 13 September 2016

We land in Malta, our third country this holiday, with another culture and another language. Before the trip, when asking advice from Susan from work who is married to a Maltese man, she advised me not to bother learning the language.

It’s too hard and everyone speaks English, she said.

I at least check how to say thank you and it’s Grazzi, like Italian. Too easy.

When we collect our bags, we see police training a sniffer dog. The dog runs after a policeman holding a package and grabs at it joyfully.

Customs through EU countries is great. We go straight through and out the other side, where drivers are all holding up cards with names on them. We follow signs to taxis and are pleasantly surprised to find that we can pay at a booth beforehand, after telling them where we are going. We are given a taxi number and stand outside waiting for our number to be called.

We follow the driver who calls our number. In these countries we sense that they like/expect the male to sit in the front seat with the driver.

I’d better sit in the front, Stavros murmurs, but I see the driver has his lunch there.

Sit in the back please, the driver says curtly to Stavros. I have these things in here.

Where you from? the driver asks us.

Australia, we say.

Australia? Why do the whole world come to Malta? the taxi driver exclaims. Everybody come, from everywhere. Why do they come?

It’s beautiful, I say to him.

Malta is chaos, it’s mess, look this! he gestures at the traffic.

We haven’t seen it yet, but people tell us it’s beautiful, Stavros adds.

The driver is quiet for a while and we look outside at the new country. It has similar architecture to Italy and Greece, with flat-topped row houses, yet it’s different. I marvel at it, but can’t quite describe what’s different about it yet. The 2 -3 storey houses are made of yellow stone and I see lots of drystone walls.

Narrow streets in Gzira Malta

We reach Gzira and drive up narrow streets, one of which is half-blocked by a crane. A man in uniform is controlling the traffic and he tells our cab driver to turn around and go back out. The cab driver argues and swears at him in what I assume is Maltese. He tries to back the cab out but another car has come too close behind him. He gestures at the other car and argues some more with the man in uniform but the uniformed man is insistent too. The cab driver does half a 3 point turn (yes, I mean 1½ turns), then tries again to go down the same street. But the uniformed man is not that stupid and directs him again to