Only a mile or two from Penzance is St. Michael’s Mount, an island community connected to the mainland by a causeway: For most of the day, the causeway is submerged. You have to look up the tide tables. The island becomes accessible for only about four hours every tide cycle. On the island, there’s a …
Toto, we’re not in Malta anymore, but we’re still packed for it. I tried to eat breakfast in Penzance overlooking the sea, and got blue toes for my efforts (yes, it is every bit as cold and drizzly here as the sky implies). So before I could embark upon my explorations for the day, I …
Here’s the top of Penzance’s shopping street: I just like this pub in the old section of Penzance because it’s called the Admiral Benbow and it has a pirate on the roof, references to Treasure Island: Here’s the harbor: Here’s the harbor six hours later with the boats stranded on the sand: (The boats in the …
Anna and I flew back to Bristol Airport and made it as far as Bristol Temple Meads station, at which point I looked at the departures board and tacked an impromptu vacation onto the end of my impromptu vacation. Okay, it wasn’t quite as spontaneous as that, but pretty close. As in, planned about 48 hours before …
The souvenirs are just Malta-themed kitsch with discreet made-in-China stamps. It’s nothing to cross the world to see… …till you look up and realize you’re in a gorgeously preserved medieval palazzo: If you look, the bones of the old building are still there beneath the tourist rubble: I wish I knew more about this building. One of …
Mdina (pronounced im-dee-na, not muh-dee-nah) has been dubbed “The Silent City” for a reason. Although it’s the oldest continuously inhabited city in Malta, the population within the 17th-century walls is now less than 300. While not quite as violently Disneyfied as Venice, you nonetheless get the sense that you’re looking at an extensive, carefully-preserved open-air …
This is just something random that Anna and I saw as we hiked into Mdina. In a courtyard between a run-down tenement and a recent section of city wall, there was this car half-buried in weeds:
Anna and I encountered one of those Google Maps-induced navigational hiccups that ended with us stranded by the side of a busy road with no sidewalks on either side, still a mile from Mdina’s gates. In the photo above, you’re seeing the bus stop. Looks okay, right? But about thirty paces further down the road, that …
I love Malta, but it has one crippling flaw: There are no coffeeshops. There’s plenty of coffee. Dolce Sicilia has the best coffee slushy I have ever tasted in my life. They make it in a slurpee machine, but it’s sweet and rich and it has this velvety texture smoother even than a frappucino. They call it …
We got to Malta planning to get our food from the grocery store and stash it in the communal fridge. The absence of a communal fridge in our hostel scuppered that plan. The thing about islands is that groceries are really expensive. So are McDonald’s and Burger King (seven euros for a hamburger!). But what …
Here are the handful of photos that survived my camera’s near-assassination at the hands of Valletta’s cobblestones. This is the beaten path in Valletta: This is us leaving it: These are a few specimens of the ubiquitous Maltese balconies: Around lunchtime, we went hunting for food. All the shops were mysteriously closed. We ended up …
I’ve been put in the stocks for the crime of stealing a sip of Anna’s Kinnie: Incidentally, the tower in the background is the 17th-century St. Julian’s Tower, part of a series of watchtowers called the De Redin towers (for the Grand Master who commissioned them). I will try to get a real picture of …
As you’ve seen, the beaches around Sliema are a little inhospitable. And by inhospitable, I mean I’m pretty sure tourists aren’t the top of the food chain. But we’d hauled our bathing suits all the way across Europe, so we decided that gosh darn it, we’re going swimming even if it kills us. (Which it might.) …
There are stray cats everywhere. One of them hissed and arched its back at us, but another one adopted Anna: (We almost went to buy cat food for it, but then it tried to bite her.) In the park, there are a bunch of doll-house-sized cat houses put out by the Society for the Care …
Off the beaten track in Sliema, we found a neighborhood grocery store: There, Anna located Kinnie, a Maltese soda: Think of Fanta. Now take out all the sugar. Make it rich and bitter. That’s basically Kinnie. It’s like a bitter caramelized orange soda with wormwood. I don’t like oranges or caramel or soda and I don’t know what …
This is not going to be nearly as interesting as you think. Wandering down the Sliema waterfront, we found a small, muddy, kelpy beach that sort of resembles a Roman amphitheater: Fiona and I neglected to mention the eels, so Anna waded in: When nothing ate her, we joined her. We found all these mysterious …
Malta has been inhabited since the Neolithic. Its amazing megalithic stone temples are the oldest freestanding buildings in the world. I have no photos because we haven’t made it to any temples yet. Google them. They’re worth it. The civilization that built these temples disappeared around 2500 BC for unknown reasons. They were succeeded by …
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 …
…is a long tragic story. Actually, it’s a short tragic story. I dropped my camera. It’s working, but it has amnesia. Don’t ask me how I managed to do this to a camera that stores its data on an SD card. Real post with Valletta photos will be forthcoming. I may have to get Anna …