Malta - Day One

The Last Leg to Malta

When our plane touched down at London Heathrow, Chris and I began our trip quite ably. I had set up our London tickets apart from our Malta tickets so that we would have a day to spend in London on the way back, which meant that we needed to get our luggage, go through customs, then check in at the Air Malta desk. The gentleman at customs seemed a little confused by our plan, but I managed to explain it more easily with the fact that it actually saved me a few hundred dollars to book separately.

Customs went fine. Checking in went fine. Getting through security went fine. Admittedly, things got dicey when I started dropping change all over the concourse like an idiot. First I dropped a few coins in the middle of the concourse. Then, trying to figure out where some of my change got lost to, I dropped the rest of my change right in the middle of another concourse. Both occurrences left me skittering around like a moron in the middle of an exceptionally busy London Heathrow airport, inconverting a great many travelers who have mastered the use of pockets. This was noteworthy only because it was not the last thing I dropped in the airport, though the coins were certainly the least valuable.

After some difficulty that was compounded by my almost complete lack of sleep on the plane, Chris and I eventually sat down for a decent breakfast and my like-new wife quickly began asking for reassurance about our destination. No, she did not specifically ask for me to reassure her, but the gist of her questions was exactly that.

The Problem with Malta

Because Malta is something of an out-of-the-way place, it seemed like it was somewhere on the other side of civilization. Thus, she was a little skittish on just what we would find when we got there. I, of course, was able to reassure her that everything would be fine and we would see a perfectly civilized country with ATMs, restaurants, and currency exchange bureaus just like anyplace else.

Not that I wasn't rather wondering what we would find when we got there, too. After all, the travel book we were using felt the need to reassure its readers that Malta had such things as ATMs, restaurants, and currency exchange bureaus just like anyplace else. That they were happy to reassure people of that fact was good. The fact they felt that they needed to reassure people of that did not make me feel better.

So, when the question was put to me as to what we would find there, I had to admit to myself (but not to my wife) that I really had no idea what Malta was like and I had no idea what we would find when we got there. For all I knew, we could be flying some rickety old Douglas Dakota to Malta, where we would be processed through an old army tent and given a rental mule to take us to the hotel.

On the plus side, this scenario would have allowed me to provide a full report on how much, how often and how severely one does actually beat a rented mule.

Toward Malta

Heading off to the gate, Chris and I sat down and relaxed for a bit as we contemplated being deposited in a country that was a complete blank spot for both of us. That was when I had a very disconcerting thing happen to me: I was paged at the airport.

Being paged at the airport is not the most pleasant thing on earth. It implies there is a problem with your ticket or something went wrong at home or they found a strange powder stuffed in your suitcase. But in this case, it was because someone found my boarding pass lying on the floor somewhere. Thank God someone turned it in at the desk, because that would have caused a heap of problems. Interestingly, this was not the last time I would hear my name paged at an airport during this trip. But it was the last time when it would seem like a bad thing.

Getting Acquainted by Plane

The airplane ride was uneventful, but noteworthy for the bit where I had my first experience with the language known as Malti, or Maltese. It is an interesting language that has developed from a mishmash of influences that, according to the Maltese themselves, stretches back to the Phoenicians. However, philogists generally consider that Maltese originally developed from Arabic or some similar Semitic language. But because Malta has been traded from one conqueror to another rather frequently, its language has been jumbled into both a sum of familiar parts and a thing all its own. This would prove to be a good allegory for the island itself.

Later, following a three hour flight on an Air Malta plane that was refreshingly unremarkable and a meal on the flight that was dismally unremarkable, we landed in Malta International Airport on the southern end of the island of Malta. After walking down a set of stairs to a waiting bus, we were delivered to the terminal. And with a quick trip through passport control, a stop at a perfectly civilized ATM, and a breeze through customs, we exited the comfortably familiar world of the airport and entered the unknown place called Malta.