Valleta, Malta

We’re again, taking things easy.  It’s the weekend for goodness

 sakes and we’ve been hardly working all week, but we still go way over our 10,000 steps because we decide to try out some Maltese mass transit and go to Valleta by way of “that’s the bus coming and where it’s going” type planning.  We wanted to come to Valleta at some point, but just happened to do it today.  We head up to the Upper Barrakka gardens and see the cannons that fire off twice a day, have a coffee and some breakfast up there (the Maltese have a pastizzi that is ricotta cheese and flaky phylo dough that is 

amazing), but the pigeons are something out of a Hitchcock movie and we have to go.  Even the cats that are living here are intimidated by them, we see a huge tabby inching closer to the water trough and scared that the pigeons might come after him.  We decide to walk around the walls of the city some and come back for the 12pm firing of the cannons.  We watch some stupid girls taking pictures of each other walking on the walls.  Now, granted the walls are thick and slightly sloped, but the drop is 100 ft easy….it’s one 

of those selfie accidents just waiting to happen.  We head back to the gardens and get held up in the streets by a parade with the church icons, a band, lots of church elders and find out that it is the 150^th anniversary of the Festival of St. Joseph….that was a happy accident and there are fireworks going off which Oscar is afraid are the cannons firing without him.  We make it the front of the parapet to watch the cannons, but nothing happens.  There is a huge crowd of people lining the railing and none of us took the time to see that

the cannons don’t go off on Sundays….so, we head into Valleta and go to the Archeological museum in order to prepare for our trip to the hypogeum on Tuesday.  When we enter, we are approached by a person doing a psychology survey regarding museums like this one and agree to take part.  There is a McDonald’s across the street and one of us can take Oscar there while the other does the 30 minute survey after the visit.  It was great to see the actual pieces that were found in the places we’re going to visit.  There was a time line in the museum that put things in perspective regarding the time

frames and these places are ANCIENT.  It’s not a large museum and we are in and out in under an hour, Oscar and I let John do the survey.  We have ordered and gotten our food and John walks in.  He states that the survey was screwed up for him, so I leave him with Oscar and go complete it.  It was a cool study and still, they’re having to beg to find participants.  It made me happy that John didn’t do surveys for his visits.  It would have taken all of the fun out of going anywhere.  We find a place to eat down the street from a place showing a soccer match.  We leave Oscar standing in front 

  of the big screen down the street and watch him from our restaurant.  I have some traditional Maltese food, Beef Olives or Bragiolini I think.  It’s like meat loaf with a ragu instead of ketchup and in a different loaf form with peas spread around it.  It’s not doing it for me, but the pasta that John got was to die for.  We’re heading to St. Elmo and the WWII memorial before heading out of town and back to our little village.  We skip the church (big mistake, we have to go back now because there are two Caravaggio’s in there) and the Malta “fun train” that takes you around Valleta. 

We also refuse a horse carriage ride and can’t enter part of the fort because they are filming and Italian movie in there right now.  Malta is the home of so many movies it’s kind of scary.  John called this stop “magical” and it really is.  The whole town is a Unesco world heritage site.  And we haven’t even scratched the surface of what Malta has to offer and John suddenly is looking at the Malta map in a new way.