As you make your way around Malta, you will experience many new (old) sights and tastes. Seafood has been an integral part of the Maltese culinary experience for thousands of years. When you spend time here, you will see many and varied types of seafood at the restaurants on the waterfront. Much of Maltese cuisine is aligned closely to that of Sicily, its close neighbor to the north. As a result, the seafood tastes are very Sicilian, mixing pasta with plenty of shellfish.

My all-time favorite shellfish is the king prawn. The very simplest way to prepare them is add butter and finely chopped garlic to the sauté pan. After the garlic starts to get soft (medium high heat), lay in the prawns. Don’t crowd. After two minutes, turn them over. Sauté for another two minutes. Then sprinkle some crushed red pepper on top, along with a squeeze of lemon juice and chopped parsley. Serve with crusty bread. Have plenty of napkins handy as this is real hands on fun.

The best way to see and taste the bounty of the sea is to visit Marsaxlokk on a Sunday morning at 9AM. Set up on the seawall between the harbor and the restaurants that line the adjacent street, there are literally a hundred stalls selling fish and shellfish, some of which most of us have not seen before. In addition, numerous stalls sell veggies and fruits, most of which are picked long before it’s time in the States. Also, many stalls selling clothing of all sort for everyone.

Learn some Maltese

Squid= klamari

Octopus= Qarnit

Tuna= Tonn

Salmon= salamun

Clam= callista

Shrimp=gambli

Fish= Ħut abjad

Conger eel= sallur tal-konger

 

One of the first things a visitor to Malta will notice is the absence of open land. One town runs into another, while cities butt side by side with each other. You are hard pressed to find green areas, save the wonderful gardens throughout the country. Most of the population is centered in the northeast of the country. Most of the open space is in the rest of the country. 51% of the land is devoted to agriculture. (Although large amounts of this acreage is left fallow/abandoned.) Fully 22% of the country is urban. To put it in perspective, The United States devotes 3% of its land to development. Malta is crowded! The UN agrees. They ranked Malta as the eighth or ninth most dense country in the world (http://statisticstimes.com/demographics/countries-by-population-density.php)

So, it was a wonderful surprise that the apartment we chose abuts farm land, which is completely surrounded by housing. When we first visited in February and decided to move here, we went out to find our apartment. We saw some open land out of our bedroom balcony. We thought it was just open land, soon to be developed.
By the time we moved here, the open land was growing. Some sort of grain or forage. A few weeks later, it had grown high. “Farmer Brown” came out on his small tractor and cut it down. Three weeks later, he piled it in long lines. And today, he rolled it up, and hauled it away. Wow, the complete cycle. That was a cool experience. The next time I wonder if there is any open space left, I will remember this day.

 

When we decided to move to Malta, for all the obvious reasons, there was one that we truly didn’t appreciate until we moved here. Living in the ‘burbs in Washington, outside of Seattle, a car was truly mandatory. Without one, getting around was not very doable. My friends living in Seattle gave up their cars, and never looked back. For them, buses are abundant. For picking up large quantities of purchases, there was always Uber or hourly vehicle rental. They literally saved thousands of dollars a year in maintenance, license and registration fees, parking costs, insurance and gasoline. It’s like getting a raise, after you retired.

We researched and believe that we can live almost exclusively on foot and by bus. E-cabs are available for runs to the airport, as well as spots where bus service was poorly served or non-existent. Malta has some seriously good bus service. Just takes a little bit of planning. All our travels around Malta start here:

All roads in Malta start from here.

Until 2011, this was the “standard” bus service on Malta. Mostly second-hand from London, they provided bus service, mostly as a tourist attraction. Finally, they were replaced by a fleet of new buses. While buses are always filled, and often pass bus stops because they are filled, you will not find any articulated buses here. The new buses are barely able to fit on the existing roads.

And we read about the many pitfalls of driving in Malta. When we got here, we took several looks, and said no way to driving. Virtually no road is straight for longer than 50 meters. The condition of many roads here are not to believed. And Seattle thought it has a pothole problem. The streets here can swallow up cars. For another, the roads are very narrow. For those that know their Maltese history, the thousands of years of their development did not allow for tearing down whole towns and starting over. Too many historic sites. Considering that streets were built to carry carts, not motor vehicles, the roads are generally very narrow. The concept of front lawns is non-existent. Buildings are built right up to the street. In some cases, they must pull over, if there is space to do so, and allow opposite direction traffic to go through first. That’s why you see so many very small cars here. And it is why many of the cars have dents and long scrapes on the passenger side of the vehicles. Oh, and the steering is on the right side. However, the Maltese take all this in stride, and drive very fast anyway. 

We made the right decision in not wanting to get in the driver’s seat again. We became full-time pedestrians. It has its challenges, too. Those very same narrow streets that we walk in every day are the same ones that the vehicles occupy. As a result, many streets have inadequate or no sidewalks. So, we often share the space with the speeding vehicles, that show no inclination of sharing the roads with us. And whatever you do while visiting Malta, do NOT forget rule #1. When crossing the street, first always look to your right. If you don’t observe this rule, other rules are irrelevant!

Lija, founded in 1594, is a village of 3,000 people. Along with the villages of H’Attard and Balzon, they make up the “Three Villages,” known throughout Malta for its historic architecture. Located between the medieval capital of Mdina and the current capital and port city of Valletta, Lija is about 8km (5 miles) from Valletta. It should be noted that Malta is about the physical size of Seattle. With a population of 450,000 people and about 350,000 vehicles, it’s not hard to envision traffic jams. Certainly, a primary reason for us to decide to ditch our driving when we moved here. That and some good public transport. We decided that we wanted to live in a residential area, as opposed to the commercial/touristic areas on the coast.

A real clue as to Lija’s residential/farming heritage is their motto:” Suavi Fructo Rubeo”. Translated from the Maltese: I glow red with sweet fruit. Not only are citrus trees grown commercially, many people have citrus trees of all types growing in pots on balconies and front yards all over the village.

As I said, orange trees are everywhere.

We needed a place to live. As we plan on buying an apartment/maisonette after we figured out the best, affordable location we decided to rent for a year in the area we thought would be our best choice. Right out of the chute, we found the ideal location for us. Three bedrooms (one for my famous British detective writer wife to write about finding out the perfect way to commit a murder: https://aklakelett.com/ , a good view as well as being close to a bus line, (actually two). Oh, and did I mention a great price! Yes, we did it. Just a few pictures to show you it is real: https://1drv.ms/f/s!AlfJxADd96zK6sImwi3JB3LA-R6lNg

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