Valletta

I’m spending my first two nights in Malta in Valletta, the country’s capital. My flight landed around 4:30 this afternoon so I checked into my hotel quickly and then decided to walk around town a bit. The town is a wonderful grid of steep, narrow streets lined with shops, museums, churches and homes. It’s built on at the tip of a peninsula, so if you walk too far in any direction (well, except one, I suppose), you run into the bright blue Mediterranean Sea.

Yet the town was almost eerily quiet. The streets were almost empty of people, and most of the shops had either already shut their doors or were preparing to do so shortly. It took me a few minutes to remember that most shops in South Carolina also close by six or seven o’clock. Perhaps it’s that I’ve been living too long in Egypt, where the streets are full and the shops are open until almost midnight.
Still, I was able to browse a couple shops before finding a little wine bar at the top of a street so steep that it’s built not as a long slope, but as an enormous set of stairs. The wine bar was as little, with a small bar at one end and only about six or eight tables in total, as it was cute, with walls covered in abstract oil paintings and musical instruments. The best part, though, were the tiny tables outside on the street, where I enjoyed a glass or two of wine and a selection of local spreads and dips.

The little wine bar is at the top of this road

Evenings like this make me never want to go back to “the real world” and stay on holiday forever.