Mdina, Malta

We find our bus back to our little village in the huge bus terminal situation that is set outside of the city walls in Valleta.  There are 2000 bus stops in Malta.   You can pretty much reach anything by public transport and it’s super cheap.  Oscar’s free and winter fee is one euro and 50 cents per person

with transfers for two hours.   I want dessert at the first place we ate our first night, but there is premier league soccer going on and every place is packed, the boys can’t find a table where they can see the match and it turns out, I have two boys who could care less about being at a table with me because of the game.  We try to get some extra sleep tonight, but at 1am, John and I are both awake

after one of our adapters overheats and blows my cell phone out of it with a burning smell.  So, we can’t go back to sleep for a while and have unplugged everything from the walls.  But this is what I get for getting one of the universal adapters at the crazy store…..none of the others have acted this way.  But my lord are we connected on this trip.  There’s so much that needs to be plugged in, the laptop, the 3 cell phones, the batteries for the cameras, my fitbit so that I can keep up with our stepcounts….it’s a lot.  We get 

  up and enjoy the balcony again, do some laundry in the sink because we need socks and Oscar needs some more pants before we get to Athens.  I do some shopping around the place and we have a nice easy morning before John decides that we should take some buses to see more of the island.  We get on the first bus and we decide to get off at a stop to catch a bus out to Mdina, but there appears to be no way to cross the street at Bombi stop to get the busses going the other way.  You would be taking your life in your 

hands to cross that street and we just take two more stops up to get to the Valleta terminal and then catch a bus out to Mdina.  We get to Mdina and are trying to get pictures of it from the bus window, which never works well.  But the city rises out of the plain in such a way, that you have to try to capture it.  We get off at the first stop that we think is a good one and it happens to be right in front of the Roman villa that I wanted to see.  So, I go in there while Oscar and John walk around the city gardens.  There is a Malta fun train here too and it appears to go around the walled city and out of it, so we

give in to a 5 year old who wants to ride in the train….It turns out to be a good choice because we weren’t wanting to walk this far and we get that nice picture of Mdina from a distance that we wanted on the bus.  The little train is not the best for taking pictures out of either because it’s kind of bumpy, but Oscar gets to wave to people as we pass and we get to see all the things around Mdina.  It’s cold and windy today and when we get off the train, we have to go warm up by entering Mdina proper and finding a café for coffee

  and a donut for Oscar.  We get lost in Mdina’s twisting, turning small, alleyways, but you can’t seem to get upset about it because you know that there’s not far to go and it’s beautiful.  Every house seems to have a Della Robbia ceramic at their door that is of Mary or fruit and I want one.  Can you see that in Canadian Lakes, Michigan?  No, not really, but it works here.  We head back to Valleta to catch a bus back to our little village and this doesn’t take

 as long as you would think.  But we do finally see some of Malta’s rush hour and are glad that we got on the bus first because it keeps filling up and filling up with people going home from work.  We head back to the place right under us because Oscar’s pizza looked so good, I want one.  We have heard mainly Maltese here, some English and some Italian because this place is seen as an extension in some ways of Sicily. 

 There is a ferry that goes there regularly and there is a ton of pasta, pizza and other amazing Italian dishes, so I’m not feeling guilty about pizza.  There’s also an amazing gateau that goes with it to top off the night and the waiter remembers us.  We’re starting to be remembered in this little town and everyone has been incredibly friendly to us.  We spend the night preparing Oscar for the fact that

he has to be a “big boy” tomorrow because we have tickets to the hypogeum where they only let 10 people in an hour and is an enclosed space where you have to be 6 or older to get in.  We had to get these tickets a couple of months ago and are looking forward to this.  I’m worried about him being in a tour where we can’t get out and it’s really enclosed….but it is what it is.  Which is how I finally get to sleep successfully.