Malta International Airport swirled around us with the bustle common to any airport in the middle of the day.  As small as Malta's airport is, it was Monday now and people were on their way to places, from places, this way and that way and we, two tired travelers from a faraway land, were just trying to keep our brains working long enough to finish the job of getting there.  And, as the planner of the honeymoon, it was officially time to put the plans in motion and get my wife and I where we were going.

Thanks to several years' worth of complaints about crooked Maltese cabbies, the airport has added a taxi station where a ride can be paid for in advance.  Fortunately, I read that this was what we wanted to do and we got ourselves a ride to the hotel without getting screwed on the fare.

The cab raced through the streets of this unfamiliar land in the usual European mode of slowing down for nothing, least of all other cars.  The crowded streets sped along in a haze of fearless traffic that would make a Bostonian cringe and the white cab darted into roundabouts, up hills, through tunnels, around blind curves, over bridges and back down ridges with a dogmatic surety in the handling of the car, the inevitability of a gap between other cars, and the instantaneous ability of the brakes to bite just short of the tailpipe on that Peugot.  My lovely companion came off more than a little rattled by the time we arrived at the hotel, but I managed to hold up under the strain fairly well, all told.  This was thanks to the twin facts that: a.) I had anticipated that the cabbie would drive like this, and b.) substitute a Buick for the Peugot, and that is how Chris drives.

What Is a "Malta"?

Along the way, we got our first views of this place called Malta.  The land had every shape from rolling to craggy, but nothing that could be described as flat.  And all of it was covered by a city about two or three stories tall and built out of a beige limestone that seems to be Malta's only building material.  The city was never towering, but it was never any more open either.  It was a consistent, stone presence covering every buildable space available on the land we passed.  If there was space, there was a building on it.  If there was no building on it, it was because it was too steep to build on.  If it was too steep to build on, it was too steep for anything but hardscrabble shrubs and trees, so the beige rock just kept going from edge to edge.  It was all but impossible to tell if the buildings had been built up from the ground or carved out of the hills themselves.

As we approached our hotel, things did get particularly confusing for my wife when we got stuck in a line of cars and the cabbie solved the problem by turning around in the street and driving backwards down the other side of the road.  Fortunately, I noticed that our final stop was only about a hundred feet away, so I knew what the cabbie was doing and why.  Chris did not, so she was that much more discombobulated when we pulled up in front of the Intercontinental Hotel.

We're Finally There

Things went smoothly from here.  As I had made the executive decision to spring for the very nice club-level suite for our honeymoon (again, how often do we get a honeymoon?), we were ushered up to the club level check-in (as opposed to the front desk check-in) where we were suddenly in the very confusing situation of having someone be nice to us.

It is one of those times when it is necessary to step back and consider the situation in order to understand the reasons for a particular oddness in the perfectly normal.  In our situation at the time, we had just completed three different flights crossing six time zones, two continents and three countries, with a door-to-door travel time of some 22 hours between home and hotel.  After figuring all this in, according to our watches it was now four hours and one day after we had left on this little adventure and we had not showered and barely slept since then and I probably smelled something like a dead jellyfish.  Yet here we were, sitting comfortably at a desk in a five-star hotel a quarter of the way around the world, listening to a kind gentleman with an accent I had never heard before asking us if we would like some free drinks while waiting for our room and our luggage to be sent up.  It was really too much for my sleep-deprived mind to fully comprehend at the time.  And in case you wonder how exhausted we really were, try this on for size: we were too tired to accept the free drinks.

The room, by the way, was excellent.  It was going to work just fine for the six days and five nights we would be using it.

  

   

This picture was actually taken a bit later in our vacation.  Can you tell?

Following some showering and dinner-eating, we wandered around the general area and found it to be fairly pleasant.  The Intercontinental Hotel is located in Paceville, which is the hangout location of choice for the crowds of students who come to Malta every year with the expressed purpose of attending one of the many English schools on the island.  They also come to drink themselves stupid every night for an entire summer and it seems that they are exceptionally successful in that goal.  However, since it seems that most of those students are there in the warm, summer months that mark the high point of Malta tourism, it was not so bad in the Paceville of October.

A Short Tour of Paceville

We walked around a bit and saw a very vertical shopping mall that somehow got squeezed between a couple of buildings, yet somehow still had a lot of space.  It was interesting for my wife, since she works in retail design and she would never be allowed to design something like that.

We wandered down to the nearby beach to see what it was like, since the possibility of beaches was part of the reason we picked Malta.  But it didn't take us long to figure out that we would not be spending any time there, since we tend to like our beaches with more sand and less rank, reeking, rotting seaweed.

There was not much else to see in the area, so Chris and I returned to the hotel.  With only a few problems with the elevator, we made it up to our room and, mercifully, got ourselves some very, very... very good sleep.