Acclimatization!

Hmph. the one bit I hate about travelling is the, well, actual travelling part of going to places. I'm definitely going to ave to think more about planing my flight times better, to get to Malta we had to get up at 4:45am - which meant after finishing packing the night before and all, was about 5 1/2hrs sleep! We managed to sleepwalk our way to the airport for our 7:45am flight anyway, made our way out to the Ryanair prefab and took off only about half an hour late (not bad for a flight from Dublin airport!). Three and a half hours later, we finally saw a patch of land under the wing - Malta!

In our half asleep state, we had a little bit of a shock to the system - the weather. When we left Dublin it was 12 degrees and spitting rain, but in Malta, we hit 32 degrees and about 75% humidity. This felt like quite a pleasant change as we made our way to the hotel, but once we were settled in and decided to go out exploring, it started to hit us hard. Our hotel was located on the waterfront in Sliema, across the harbour from Valetta (hence the name: "The Waterfront Hotel" :-P), and as we walked along in search of something to eat, the sweat was pouring out of us (well, out of me definitely anyway).



At this point the decision to go at stupid o'clock in the morning as it was cheaper option turned out to be a not quite so good one: we were zonked out, and it was only 2pm! We took the option of least resistance: starting off with a harbour tour, offered by the many kindly gentlemen positioned about every 50 feet along the boardwalk. Unfortunately at that stage the heat, the early start and the lack of sleep started to take their toll: by about half-way around the 2hr trip Michelle was starting to doze off and I wasn't all that much better! The tour was pretty good, we were jut not in a really good mood to appreciate it. So, the saturday we arrived turned out to be a bit of a non-event, we pretty much bummed around Sliema for the rest of the day and got an early night.

The sunday started bright and early outside - unfortunately we didn't. We woke up around 9am, got breakfast, showered and dressed and were out and about by 11am. We soon discovered that by sheer accident we were in a pretty damn spot location-wise, about 200 yards from the hotel was the ferry acrtoss to Valetta, and only a little but further up the road was the main bus terminus for the west of the Island! So, we took the ferry across (for a whopping 93c each!) and started touring around Valetta. As we got off the ferry, we saw signs for "The Malta Experience", a sort of potted history of the island, 4,000 years in 30mins video sort of thing, so we decided to do that. Unfortunately we discovered that the Malta tourist board had seemingly arranged the signs pointing to this attraction with a view to giving you a tour of the city along the way - it took us ages of wandering around to find it!

After the tour we decided to take the horse-drawn carriage tour back down to the front gates of Valetta where the marketplace was supposed to be on (the signs for he Malta Experience had eventually brought us out to the tip of the peninsula), so we could maybe start the pressie shopping! Unfortunately, the market closed at around 1:30-2pm, so by the time we got there everything was shut. And then we discovered that so was everything else. We knew that Malta did the spanish-style siesta between 12 and 2, but what we didn't realise that the country was religious enough to really take the "day of rest" thing seriously - on sundays, pretty much nothing opened again after the siesta! Shops, museums, everything was shut - even some of the churches, which I thought was a bit strange on a sunday!

And then, much to our surprise, it started raining! Rain, the very stuff we went on holidays to get away from! Luckily though, rain in Malta doesn't mean the same thing as rain at home - it only lasted about 10mins and was almost pleasant (I never knew you could have warm rain before)! Once the rain was over, we managed to find one museum that was open (the archaeological museum) and so spent a bit of time wandering around that before we headed back to Sliema to bum around for the evening.