Monday, Sept. 26 (first full day in Malta)
NOTE: I still have limited internet until Friday, but finally had the brilliant idea to compose this in a Word doc and then just add the photos on when I’m on Blogger. Hey, I’m still jet-lagged, give me a break! J
I headed down to the lobby at around 8:20 or 25, and asked about the shuttle to go to the University, and of course it had come at 8:15 and that was the only one today. I will be up and down there early tomorrow so that I don’t miss it! Apparently the girl yesterday had it wrong and it is 8:15 all week (Fri they come for us at 8 or so for the Orientation) and then next week, when school starts, it is on a more regular schedule and comes every hour or so.
Foiled in my plan to head to the university until tomorrow, I decided to just walk around the neighborhood a little bit. Directly across from the entrance to the Residence is an elementary school, which was just getting all of its pupils in when I headed out so the kids were loud and jumpy – I bet it was the first day of school, since it was Monday. A girl wearing a backpack walked out of the University Residence (henceforth referred to as UR) just ahead of me, so I decided to follow her – lesson learned, don’t just follow people. I didn’t really get that far or that lost, but I should have looked at Google maps or whatever the map is here before I headed out, because I went the opposite way of how I meant to go! Well, I didn’t see too much in that direction after awhile, so I headed back towards the roundabout with the “Wedding Cake” in the middle and then saw the local parish church, St. Saviour (on Misrah it-Trasfigurazzjoni, which translates to Transfiguration Street! Yay for random HP sightings!) The outer façade is pretty, but the guidebook says it is plain in comparison with the interior, which I did not see because I didn’t go open the giant doors. I might get to see it on Sunday if that’s where P (one of my fellow ETAs) wants to go to mass.
The “Wedding Cake” is actually Lija (lee-yuh, not lee-juh) Tower (pictures below) and is now a roundabout that used to be a part of the San Anton Gardens and Palace. The palace was built in the early 1600s by Grand Master Antoine de Paule, and is now the official residence of the President! Therefore, the palace is unsurprisingly closed to the public, but the gardens are open and free during daylight. The locals call the tower the Wedding Cake as it was built for Paule’s wedding, and because it looks like one!
I then stopped in a very small local grocery store on that same street to get water and a few basics. I also got a bottle of Kinnie, the local soft drink. It’s a carbonated bitter orange and herbs drink, and it’s a bit too bitter for me! I did get the diet version though, so perhaps it is sweeter in the full sugar regular kind. I also bought my first small baguette of fresh Maltese bread, and felt good when the owner started speaking to me in rapid Maltese before realizing that I only spoke English. I managed to throw in a “grazzi hafna” (pronounced grat-zee aahf-nah, meaning thanks very much) at the end though, so at least I tried! After collecting my 10 Euros worth of stuff, I headed back down the street towards the roundabout where the “Wedding Cake” is, thinking that that was the way to get back to the UR street.
Alas, I found myself literally going in circles around the roundabout, probably to the amusement of the older guy sitting at the bus stop with his spaniel. Finally I thought that I must have just forgotten a turn over by the playground, which I remembered seeing on the way out, but remember, on the way out, I had been following backpack girl! Finally, I walked down a street that I knew wasn’t the right one because I had spotted the mail-man, and figured that being the mail delivery guy, he should have both knowledge of the streets and speak English, being that a bunch of the mail is probably in English, right? Umm, no. He did know how to get back to the UR, but we ended up playing the point and gesture game, as his English wasn’t up to direction giving, and my Maltese is basically limited to yes (Iva), no (le), and grazzi hafna! After going around the roundabout one last time, I headed up the street where the grocer I had just been was, only to realize that the street I had been looking for was not directly off the roundabout, but rather off of this street the whole time. So I had basically been about three blocks away from the UR the entire time I was ‘lost’. Whoops!
Anyway, I finally made it back to my room with the food, put it away, and then headed back down to Housekeeping to rent cooking supplies. How it works is that you choose whatever you think you might need from their selection, and then each item has a price that they total up and then you put down the deposit in cash up at Reception. So now I’m out 70 euro for the time being, but I will get it back when I return all of the supplies upon checking out.
I lugged the cooking things up to the room, and then put them away and organized my food supply a little bit. I have a fridge/freezer, a stove/oven, and a sink (with non-potable water, so one wonders what I can do with the water? Does anyone know if you boil non-potable water if it is then okay to use?) but no microwave, so I will be creative in my cooking methods!
I spent the next few hours getting stuff out and organizing it from my suitcases, waiting for it to get a little later (and hopefully cooler) before heading out again to try to find the larger supermarket, which is where I had thought I was going in the morning. During this unpacking time, I also put my Kindle on ‘text-to-speech’ mode and had it read to me from the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire. Although it is an automated voice, it is much less annoying when you have already read the book and know what is happening, and it was just nice to have that playing in the background so it wasn’t so quiet in the room. [Also, if you like dystopian-esque Young Adult fiction, the Hunger Games series is well done!]
It got to be 5:30 or so, and I figured I should head to the bigger supermarket because they close at 7. I looked up how to get there on Google maps, but I have to figure out if there’s a local equivalent, because Google would only give me driving directions, not walking directions, but I figured it out. This, of course, if I had thought about it, was not a great time to go, because although it was cooler, it was also 5:30, which meant that there was lots of traffic with everyone headed home from work. I managed to get there without being run over, thankfully, and then began the ordeal of trying to figure out where the heck the entrance was. It was not in the front of the store, no, that would be far too sensible. I finally ended up going through the underground car park (aka parking garage) and taking the lift up to level 1 where the store is. I then ‘paid’ my 1 euro coin for a cart (you put in a euro to get the cart out, and when you put it back with the other carts, there’s a latch that you connect and then the slot opens to get your coin back out. The store was large and crowded, but had what I needed (and a few things besides – they have a lot of things to look at!) so I was happy, besides that I couldn’t find a small fan, though since the store is large, I may have just missed that aisle. After checking out though, that side of the store’s checkouts put me out on the wrong street, so I tried to go back in to go back up through the front, but once you check out, you can’t go back through the store, so I went out the back way and went through a couple of backstreets to make it back over to the main road. From there, I knew how to get back to the UR, but just had to deal with the traffic again, though it was lighter since it was a little after 7 at this point.
On the way back, I noticed that a lot of people were out for what I am guessing is the nightly passagiata, the evening stroll, many with their dogs (none of the dogs have been any bigger than a large spaniel – I wonder if people tend to buy/breed smaller breeds here just because they are more space effective?) and many wandering kitties – I think strays, but perhaps just neighborhood strollers? I stopped at one of the benches to take a quick photo of the “Wedding Cake” at night, all lit up. I thought about walking the two blocks over to see if the church was lit up as well, but had some cold food, so figured I should just go straight back to the UR.
The rest of my night was nothing to write home about (heehee), so I’ll leave you with some pictures of some of the things I purchased and saw J
^ The "Wedding Cake" Lija Tower
^ A remnant of the British - red QEII post boxes!
^The parish church in Lija
^View of the other balconies at the UR from my balcony
^View across the street from my balcony
^Santa Tereza School, across the street from my bedroom - if you're not up by 8:15, the kids will wake you up :)
^ The Wedding Cake at night
^ Maltese bread, Italian pasta, Maltese crackers, and italian Kinder brand 'cereal,' which is more like a little dessert than breakfast, as it has wheat cereal covered in a layer of chocolate :)
^ Kinnie, Maltese Diet Coke (which tastes more like Mexico's Coca Light than U.S. Diet Coke), 2.5% milk which tastes creamy to me since I'm used to non-fat, and coldcuts termed 'chicken luncheonmeat' which I have yet to try!
^ The reusable (woot!) bag from Smart, the largest supermarket in the area
^British dish soap! Who doesn't want Fairy clean dishes?
^Turkish Chicken Noodle Soup packet - now if I can just find out whether or not I can use tap water...
^ the little kitchen in my dorm
^and one last photo for this post - why yes, that is a Harry Potter poster resting on the (obviously not on) heater in my bedroom! Did you really think I went anywhere without HP?! :)
Thanks for reading this far (or thanks for skipping down to look at the pictures :D) and I hope to update again soon!
P.S. I just so happen to LOVE comments...just throwing that out there :)
Lots of love from Malta,
MH
