Things I’ll Miss About Malta

Another Fowleresque list. We’re leaving Gozo on Monday, and Malta for Morocco on Wednesday. I’ve got a few more posts about Malta in the hopper (meaning my head), but here’s one on things I’ll miss. It’s not comprehensive, but really more gestural:

• The awesome retro Coke bottles. The kind they drank from at the drive-in in American Graffiti. I actually just made it to the island on time for this one.
• The locals’ ambivalence toward their pets. Shortly after we arrived, I was talking to a neighbour about one of her cats:
  ME: How many do you have?
  HER: I’m not sure. Three or four.
  ME: What’s this one’s name?
  HER: I don’t know. Cat?
• The subsequent names we manufactured for the local cats: Dine ‘n’ Dash, Kitten (lovely, but afflicted with shocking flatulence and halitosis), Bread-Eating Cat (it would sneak into our house at night to raid our bread stash), Cairo (it looked particularly Egyptian), Bell Cat (it wore a bell) and Fat Albert.
• The bath tub temperature of the ocean in late summer.
• The fantastic (at least to me–I’m a noobie) snorkeling in that water.
• The fruit. I’ll never look at, well, nearly every fruit back in Canada, the same way.
• The temperature outside. On the day of Christmas Eve, I went for a walk in a long-sleeve t-shirt.
• Dwejra Bay, with its extraordinary settings and killer swimming holes.
• How everybody knows everybody.
• The resulting extraordinary trust. I had an item to ship back to Canada, and the courier came by to pick it up this morning. I opened the door, he said “are you Darren?” I said “yep, here it is”. He picked it up and left. No invoice, no waivers, no receipt, no nothing. And yet I have faith that it’ll make it back to the homeland.
• The peculiar array of cars. Due to some import taxes based on engine size, there are many, many tiny cars from all over the planet. I got a lift in a Skoda today, for example.
• The remarkable and intense Catholicism, which has been quite educational. More on this in an upcoming post.
• How everything is so close. You can walk across the whole island in under three hours.
• How Gozo busted some of my stereotypes about Mediterraneans. They drive very sedately, they’re not particularly fiery and they’re very prompt.
• The church bells, and their unusual patterns.
• Starting work at 13:00. Though maybe that habit will stick.