Having successfully reclaimed Anna from the airport the night before, we got a lazy start on our first full day in Malta as a threesome. This entailed setting out in a random direction and walking our feet off.
Malta is very, very small. It consists of a scattering of islands, the main three of which are Malta, Gozo and Comino. We’re staying in Sliema, which is a shopping district and resort area on Malta. It’s fairly touristy; the quay is crammed with ferries, yachts, catamarans, Captain Morgan cruise boats, and the floating equivalent of hop-on, hop-off buses. Most of the shops in our area are designer, plucked straight from Cardiff St. David’s or any of a hundred other UK or US malls. But the food is cheap and good, the bookstores are plentiful, the ocean is turquoise, the rock beaches are uncrowded, and inland from the seafront, the architecture (always the clincher for me) is local and full of character.
Seafront Towers is quite close to the ferry terminal. The best beach is actually on the other side of the point tipped with a British fort (I got no pictures of this because it’s only a hundred and something years old—not really my era). Beyond the point, the waterfront plazas get greener and so does the water:
We wandered around while Anna petted the stray cats, Fiona lamented the lack of sandy beaches, and I hunted for year plaques to help me date the architecture. We found a number of lovely specimens of what looks to me like baroque, but with the exception of things built by the British during the colonial era (1800-1964), very few of the buildings have years on them:
This one is from the ’20s:
This is a lovely plaza. I have nothing else intelligent to say about it:
And these—we finally left the tourist drag behind and plunged into the residential neighborhoods of Sliema—are some of the ubiquitous Maltese balconies. Looks can be deceiving. Many buildings that look medieval, with their stained and crumbling stone, their splintered shutters, and their long-faded paint, actually date from the 1920s. Salty sea wind is really hard on wood and limestone.
Almost every house has these projecting balconies. Many of them are green, but we found a few rainbow houses:
