Malta

Malta came up on my radar when I was toying with the idea of living in Europe. It ranked highly on some liveability tables. There is no consistency between tables; depending the measures, different countries will come up on top. It was unclear to me why it ranked well. It gets extremely hot in summer, though some might prefer that to freezing winters; the shortage of water means desalination; and electricity costs are high. On the plus side, it has friendly people, heaps of cultural activities, and excellent communications due to being a junction for sub-Mediterranean cables. Perhaps the ratings were done by British ex-pats, as the British heritage is comfortable for them. Anyway my curiosity was piqued and I noted that the land and sea scapes are lovely, especially on Gozo, so I picked Malta out of my bucket list, even though I'm not an aficionado of Knights Hospitaller history.

When I was researching Malta, practically all the results of a library search were to do with the sieges of Malta, most recently in WWII and also further back. Well, I'm not that keen on military history, so I won't get started here, but I will remark on memorials to significant events as I encounter them.

Maltese is a Semitic language, the only one written in Latin script. It has inherited words from Italian and Sicilian, as well as Arabic, as you can see from these greetings: merħba, aw habib, bonġu, bonswa. No surprise what grazzi and skuzi mean. The rest of the language is illegible and unintelligible to me as I don't know enough Arabic. In any case English is widely spoken and I'm sure locals don't expect visitors to speak Maltese.

Arrival and customs were perfunctory. I had to wait a while for the bus to Ċirkewwa for the Gozo ferry as they only run twice an hour. The worst part was being downwind from smokers, looks like Maltese bus stops are not smoke-free zones.

(Continued in Gozo post.)