Travel Tuesdays: Saint Julian's and Sliema, Malta

Good day, and welcome to the first episode of Travel Tuesdays. :) You can read my intro post to this series here.

Today I'm going to introduce you to the two towns I lived in in Malta: Saint Julian's and Sliema. They are directly next to each other on the northeast coast and kind of blend into one urban area, so I thought I'd join them in one post.

First, a little background: what was I doing in Malta and where the heck is Malta anyway? I've been asked both of these questions many, many times.

Malta is a small island (17 miles long and 9 miles wide) in the Mediterranean, 50 miles south of Sicily. It is part of the European Union. Its official languages are English and Maltese (Maltese is a descendant of Arabic with a good sprinkling of Italian). It is sunny for 300 days a year and the rest of the time it rains, but never freezes.

I ended up in Malta through a surprising sequence of events that went approximately like this: I was going from one bad job to the next during the American economic crisis. Someone suggested to me that since my parents are European, I should apply for EU citizenship and try to get a job in Europe. This turned out to be way easier than I expected.

In fact, after I got my new passport, one Saturday I sent my CV to all the English schools in Malta that I could find online (about 25, though there are around 40 English schools there the last I checked), by Tuesday I had an interview, by Wednesday I had the job, by Thursday I had a contract, Friday I handed in my notice at my much-hated job, on Saturday I bought a plane ticket, and two weeks later I found myself in Malta!

It was quite a whirlwind, but I really felt like it was the right thing, as it indeed turned out to be.

My job was in the office of an English school, where I first worked in admissions and later moved on to sales, agency relationships, and printing and publications. I really learned a lot while I was working there.

About a year and a half into my stay in Malta, I found a little film school and started attending classes there. I had always wanted to make movies since I was a kid, but it had always seemed so far out of reach. I still find it ironic that it was on this tiny island that I got my start in the film industry.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the two towns that were my home for 3 years!

Living by the beach is awesome. I used to go swimming almost every day six months out of the year. My special swimming place was over there on the right. My evenings often consisted of taking a swim out into the bay, then buying a thing of chips (fries) from the little kiosk with the pointed roof, and sitting to eat them on "my" rock while the sun dried me off.

This is the street I lived on in St. Julian's.

Unfortunately a lot of cats lived on the street too. There are tons of stray cats in Malta. People love them and feed them and build little shelters and parks for them, but they really are feral animals. They tear up the garbage and spread it all over the street, smell really bad, and have fights in the night, so they're pretty much Maltese raccoons.

This was my room for two years. I loved it. It had its own balcony and that's a lemon tree out there. I used to keep one of the balcony doors open all summer so the cool air could come in at night.

The apartment belonged to the school where I worked, so I had many different flatmates coming and going, staying anywhere from one week to several months. I met a lot of interesting people this way, some of whom I'm still in touch with.

Houses have flat roofs in Malta. This was the roof of my apartment, where we hung up the clothes to dry. I also had a little garden of sorts up there, where I tried to grow flowers and vegetables in containers, but it was quite a piece of work to keep them watered.

And this is looking out the living room window during the "mud rain." The scirocco is a wind that blows up from the Sahara, covering everything in a layer of fine dust. Then it rains and the air looks yellow and everything gets covered in white mud.

After I stopped working at the English school, I moved to a studio flat in Sliema, closer to the film school. I loved this apartment too. It really felt "mine." I was pinching pennies for most of the time I lived there, but one day I saw these flowers for sale in the street and allowed myself the luxury. The only downside to the apartment was that it had no air conditioning, and sometimes I felt like I was going to die from the heat. But I didn't. :)

My time in Sliema was very "Bohemian." I was a poor student artist, studying, creating, trying to sell my art and work odd jobs where I could, ravenously learning. (As you can see, I didn't have any large plates, so that's why I was eating one meal off three.) I did a lot of writing at this table, and I grew a lot. Oh, the rich times when we were so poor!

This is a quote that spoke to me deeply during that time, so I painted it out on a large piece of paper and hung it on the inside of my door where it could be a watchword for me every day.

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Thank you for reading! Have you ever been to Malta?

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