a million magic malta moments

this island makes me want to write standards with alliteration titles. i duno why. different ones keep crossing my mind.

So i'm here in malta, and I happen to be here during one of their highest holiday of some maltese saint, so last night, when I got in around 7:30, there were marching bands lining the streets, fireworks, street vendors (they had doughnuts, although i refrained from getting one) people with tiny dogs, children, statues, ornate red banners, and decoratins everywhere. I walked around and tried to get pictures, but just like most of the streets in italy, everything is so narrow here, its hard to get a good perspective in photos.

Anyway, the hostel I'm staying at is heavenly. The woman who runs it is an angel, and she has tried to/succeded at planning the 4 days I'll be here. Today I was planning on going to Mdina, the oldest city on the island, and she told me to go to Valetta first, because there's a sunday street market and then I can take a bus to mdina from valetta and make it back to Sliema (the town I'm staying in) in time for the huge procession of the saint's statue tonight. I duno, It doesn't sound like much, but i'm just so excited about everything here cuz this island is like some weird exotic paradise that I never knew about until 2 months ago. Anyway, I had 10 swedish roommates (all in the 50s or older) until they left this morning and now I'm in a big room all by myself, but still there's free breakfast that's bomb, really clean rooms and bathrooms, and I have two amazing balcony views (pictures to prove it).

Maltese, the language, is like a mix of arabic, french, italian, and english. It's sooo strange to here, and such a small population speaks it, that its more of a dialect than the real language. However, people know if ur really maltese if you speak maltese, but they dont teach it in schools and dont have books printed in maltese, because there's no publishing companies on this island, so everything's in english. The woman who owns this hostel speaks french, italian, english, maltese, and is learning swedish. I can only aspire to be soo culturally accessible to other people. I love that europeans are interconnected linguistically. its so cool.

I had this killer head cold the day I left for lecce that made being in bari and flying to malta miserable. I thought my head was going to explode when we were landing in malta, cuz my ears popped 4,000,000 times and my sinuses had tons of pressure on them. There was a baby crying in the back of the plane and I was like, ya baby, i know how that feels right now. I managed not to cry though.

Ryan air flights are awesome. Love that airline. They're punctual, simple, you get to sit wherever you want, and they're mad cheap. thanks, ryan air (haha i'm a commercial)

I'm here till wednesday night. My sole goal is to see some awesome stuff, and take a few pictures. Thursday I'll be in bologna. Can't wait to have my stuff all in one place for a whole year!!! how exciting!

ciao