Marsascala, Malta

Marsascala is the town we are in on Malta, we’re on the far south and east of the island.  We decide to spend our first day just

checking out the place that we are staying in for the next week.  We’ve already found one amazing restaurant where Oscar got to facebook his class who were way more interested in seeing him than any place that we are.  He really enjoyed that and tried the chocolate cake dessert that we got there

and liked it.  We take off to the left of the harbor and find construction, go out to the Mediterranean washing up on the rocks and walk out among them.  Everything feels perilous when there is a 5 year old with you for some reason.  The rocks feel unsafe, the sea feels incredibly close, but he is

loving it and thanks us for coming out with him to this place.  He enjoys scrambling over the rocks, looking at tide pools, looking at the salt pans, seeing divers in the water and imagining that we are discovering buried treasure.  We get to touch some cacti

  which he thinks is super cool because he thought you could never touch them because of thorns.  We come back past the church and check out the inside because the choir is practicing.  We come back to our place and rest for a little while, have some lunch with apples and fruit that we bought from the fruit trucks

at the end of the street and Oscar discovers that he likes Ambrosia apples even better than Fuji apples.  We go through 3 apples in the first day and I guess he’s not going to starve on this trip anymore.  We head off to the right of the harbor and this is much more uphill, much less scenic and 

 even though we see the sign for the “tower path” we can’t tell where it leads.  We find another map and realize that we have to go up more and in more, then go right past it and are on a cliff path with multiple warnings about falling rock.  Makes you feel safe, but I told John that we don’t have to go to

Dover now because the cliffs here look the same.  A man tells us where to find the tower and tells us that it’s behind the old Muamar Gaddafi hotel that is deserted now.  John goes in while Oscar and I check out the tower and the cat sanctuary set up around it.  John says it’s really cool in there and we’re shocked to find pictures of it open and filled with people not too many years ago.  It’s a shell now and it’s amazing how fast things go down hill.  Speaking of downhill, we’re lucky that our walk back to our place is mainly downhill, because we’ve taken a

   Saturday stroll and turned it into a marathon again.  We have dinner at the Corner View bar that is right under our place and while it’s hard for sleeping on the weekends when people are at the bars all night, it’s easy for finding a good place to eat, because they’re all clustered here.  Oscar eats almost a whole pepperoni pizza on his own and we have good solid food.  I need to try some traditional Maltese food soon, although the Brits were here so long, fish and chips is now considered “Maltese” food.  John keeps complaining that we have seen plenty of dogs, none of them Maltese though.  It’s like they’re avoiding the namesake dog here….