Pints for 60 Cents

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For Christmas 2007 we journeyed from Munich to Malta. We flew for pretty cheap on Air Malta as winter is far and away the off-season for tourism in Malta. As our flight touched down at the Malta airport everyone on our plane broke into spontaneous applause. At first this seemed kind of funny to me, but then seemed a bit off-putting. Was there a reason we should be so happy that we landed safely? Maybe they had made some kind of announcement on the flight in Maltese that I didn't understand. Whatever, we were in Malta and it was a comfortable 75 degrees outside and sunny. We were happy to be someplace new.

We changed money at the airport when we found that on January 1st Malta would be transitioning from their own currency to the Euro. Essentially we would be in Malta for the final week of the Maltese Lira. It was surprising also to find that the value of the Maltese Lira was quite high. At the time 1 Maltese Lira could be bought for $3.50. I guess the nominal value of currency isn't really all that important anyway, but it was sort of odd to buy bus tickets for 40 cents and beers for 60 cents. The high nominal value of the currency in Malta coupled with their antique buses seemed to play into the illusion that I had somehow traveled back in time to the 1950's or something.

Malta has a very small population that speaks its own language and they have a long and rich history. Also, as far as I could tell there are at least two cars for every person in Malta. Every street we saw on the entire island had parked cars lined up on both sides of the street, and a lot of these cars looked like they hadn't moved in months. Malta seemed like the place were right hand drive cars come to die.

While we were in Malta we took day trips to various parts of the island. We spent time in the old walled city of Mdina, the capital and port city of Valetta, and all the places in between. We ate in neighborhood restaurants serving a strange mixture of British and Italian quinine and we drank in pubs playing British satellite TV. We saw the grotto were St. Paul stayed in Malta when he was shipwrecked there in the first century AD. We saw the cannons used to defend the port of Valetta during World War II. We saw the large domed church where a German bomb dropped from and Italian plane fell broke through the dome and landed in the aisle of the church never to explode narrowly missing 500 churchgoers.

Our trip to Malta was a pleasant wintertime respite from the snowy weather of Prague and Milwaukee.

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