Island Hopping

Here we are in Malta!

Some things we didn't know about Malta that we now know:
1. They drive on the wrong side of the road. (An unpleasant surprise in the car rental parking lot, when Phil opened his door and the steering wheel wasn't there. We later learned that this was the result of being under British colonial rule for nearly 200 years.)
2. There IS a Maltese falcon. It's the rent the Knights of St. John paid to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V yearly for the island. One falcon.

3. It has prickly pears, which one should not pick up off the ground and eat unless one has a magnifying glass and tweezers to pick the prickles out of one's hand, lips, and tongue.
4. The language is totally weird. (Luckily for us, pretty much everyone speaks English.)

We took Ryanair from Luton Airport outside London. Ryanair has grown up; they now assign seats, there is no more triumphal music to celebrate surviving the flight. I kind of miss its scruffy chipperness. Now it's just an airline like any other, only the seats don't even pretend to recline. . Anyway, we arrived a little late in Valletta, the capital of Malta, named after Jean de Vallette. He was one of the Knights of the Order of St. John I mentioned in this post; Malta was where the Knights Hospitallier went after they were booted out of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Rhodes. We were disturbed to find that our hotel was under construction, but the 8 a.m. jackhammers reminded us of London and helped us feel at home. (Also the view was gorgeous.)

Valletta is a beautiful city, all golden limestone, and we saw much of it on foot. The architecture is unified because the city was created out of nothing by the Knights in the 1540s (but much of it reconstructed after Malta was bombed heavily during WWII). Its crowning glory is the cathedral,

which is austere on the outside but almost absurdly dazzling inside, because the Knights of St. John ensured that every square inch of its cavernous interior would be covered with gold, frescoes, religious paintings, or inlaid marble. Each side chapel was dedicated by one of the eight chapters, or langues, from around Europe, and they compete with one another for splendor and opulence.

In the archeological museum, we read about the prehistory of Malta. The unnamed people who settled there had a liking for full-figured women;

all their sculptures are similarly endowed.

In the Grandmaster's Palace, which housed the leader of the Order of St. John, we viewed a plentitude of armor, weaponry, and historical artifacts pertaining to the siege of Malta -- the defining moment of the Knights' stay on the island -- when, in 1565, they turned back the Ottomans, led by Suleiman.

In the evening we picked up our car at the airport. I had very deliberately ordered an automatic shift, and we decided to add a GPS after our adventures getting lost and driving into trees in Mallorca. Our GPS, whom we named Nigel because he had a rather Oxbridge accent, did not quite know what to make of us (and vice versa). A typical car moment went like this:

NIGEL: Enter roundabout. Take third exit.
PHIL: What roundabout?
ME: There! Stay on your side of the road! You're too close on the left! I mean the right! Wait, take

this exit!
NIGEL: Take this exit. Take this exit.
PHIL: That was the second one! He said the third!
ME: Nigel's counting the entrances too! No, dammit, not that exit!
NIGEL: Make a U-turn at the first available instance, you pathetic wankers.

After a while, we were so lost that Nigel short-circuited and started to babble, "Turn right then left. Turn left then right. Turn right, then right, then bear right." We had to unplug him. An 8-mile drive from the airport to our beautiful hotel in Kalkara took us 45 minutes instead of 15. But the view of

the harbor from our room and the seafood pasta awaiting us were worth it.

More on Malta to come...