Week 11

Work

A batch of certificates from a course done on Gozo Campus arrived. As most of the students in question would want to pick it up from there, I kept a hold on the certificates and waited for the requests to come in. 

The true work this week however, is with stipends office. As stipends/student maintenance grants are a government scheme run on a different system, I don't have any access to that information. Furthermore, stipends office isn't technically my area of work; I've only learnt the answer for a common problem or two, and to redirect to my coworker.
Over the weekend however, the maintenance grants department at the Ministry for Education got busy. They sent out a large wave of letters regarding overpayments that need to be paid back by students who either failed or discontinued their studies. Phone calls and in person-visits this week were dominated by angry students who refused to understand and/or accept the situation. And as my coworker got sick fairly early on in the week, it fell mostly on me to redirect these people. I hold back on details for privacy reasons, so I can mostly just insist on my statement that people were mad. It was still interesting, and exciting, and I enjoyed being more involved in another area of work, but it was also very stressful. Which is why I was very happy to pick up my boyfriend from the airport on Wednesday night.

Not Work

I hadn't really spend much time in Valetta before, since it's uncomfortably crowded. It is however one of the easiest ways to view some of Malta's churches on a time limit, as the small city supposedly managed to fit in around 25 of them. We ended up not going into any. What we did do, is view some of the gardens, the siege bell memorial, and walk around most of the perimeter. The fact that this didn't take us long, really hammers in how small the city is. After our one walk around it, I felt confident knowing my way around the city if I ever had to. The weather was gorgeous, and instead of seeing the main shopping street, we found our way along the low, rocky cliffsides where people hung out to swim. We followed that path as long as we could, along steep stairs built into the outside of the fortress walls, but eventually had to turn back to walk inside the city proper. Memorable factors in traversing the city is that you notice how much of a fortress it still is, and the verticality of all roads. With the deep trenches near the city gate, the tall walls and the remnants of forts turned war-museums, it's completely unlike the concept of a city I'm used to. And there's so much up and down! Not on stairs, but on streets that feel like a very drawn-out wave. The city dips up and down in many points and all directions, letting you look from one upper end of a road, all the way to the end of the city, where it comes back up.

Another city we visited was Mdina, located further west into the country. This is an old fortress-style city as well, up on a hill and easily visible from many points on the island; especially as the buildings thin out as you head west, and there's more rolling hills and farmlands between towns. We did visit a church there, and overall I definitely find it more enjoyable to walk around in than Valetta. Though still a popular tourist destination, it was less crowded despite being smaller. 
Mdina was just a short stop for us though, as my main intention for Friday evening was to watch the sunset from Dingli cliffs. Dingli is a city all the way to the west coast of Malta, and the cliffs are often recommended for viewing the sunset. The city itself as actually also quite nice. While many places in Malta can boast stunning views, the central parts of the country are also filled with construction -- finished and unfinished. Dingli was a more rural area, where the views are nothing special, but you can also just step to the side and view stacks of green hills leading to another city in the distance. Coming here really put into perspective how little free space there is in the more populated part of the island. 
We also found out that most restaurants don't open for dinner until 6, 6:30 or 7pm. With the sunset set to happen at 8 and neither of us haven eaten all day, this was a bit of a blow. Especially when the only restaurant set to open at 6, ended up not serving dinner until 6:30 as well. The place as nice, and we had a lovely time, we still ended up missing the sunset.

As we walked towards the cliffs, you could see the orange glow flicker through the trees here and there. But by the time we actually had a clear view of the horizon, the sun had entirely vanished. The disappointment aside, I can still highly recommend Dingli cliffs. The ocean is just a vast amount of endless nothing. There's some ground below the cliffs still, but after that the island just.... ends. And then there's flat blue, and that's it. It's an experience that photos cannot capture, because they're cut off, and the visuals are nothing without the impression. It's like you're standing at the edge of the world. We stayed at a few different spots, and waited for the night to come in completely, to look at the stars. If I were to go there again, I'd probably recommend bringing a full picnic setup, and just sit around for a while. In the end, we also managed to somehow get back okay, catching the single once-per-hour bus that runs in the area.

The last thing we did, was head to Gozo on Saturday. I hadn't been there yet this year, it's been about 13 or 14 years since my last visit, and I have a lot of emotions attached to the smaller island. Getting there is also a pain.
While there is a ferry connection from Valetta to Gozo, it seems to be a private company that charges a lot more than the regular Gozo Channel line. To take the regular ferry, you have to get to Cirkewwa, in the north of Malta, first. The bus right there was hot and stuffy, and took far longer than it should have. And while I enjoyed a lot of the views (once you're out of the cities), I'll admit I don't blame anyone for wanting to avoid it. Roads in Malta go up and down, and the bus drivers are happy to drive fast when facing an empty road before them. You go up and down, and follow tightly-wound serpentines up the hill, to then drive down steep, narrow, crowded roads in smaller cities. It's hard to say if you're safer being in the largest vehicle around or not. I enjoyed it, but my boyfriend did not.

Boarding the ferry in Cirkewwa was easy though, as the bus stops right before it. It's so easy actually, that you just walk on. Because taking the ferry to Gozo doesn't actually cost anything. Going back to Malta is where they charge you. 

The ferry ride is nice as well. The sun and wind come together nicely, the ocean is a rich blue-green, and there's always something to look at. You see Gozo and Comino in the distance, and you see Malta move away from you and the other islands come closer. You get to take in the different layers in the cliffsides of all of the islands, see the cities in the distance and the ruins of forts on the edges, and the contrasts in architecture between them. From Mgarr in Gozo, we took the bus to the capital of Victoria. It's a nice city, with parks and a citadel definitely worth viewing. I however, had my sights set on Xlendi Bay, the area I spent so much of my childhood in. So we took the bus there, and it really is surprising how short of a trip this is, as you can't quite grasp how small all of these islands are when looking at the map.

Once in Xlendi, we got some ice cream from the same place I'd patronized decades ago, and I enjoyed the nostalgia of a familiar streets. Sure, everything changed, and many of my memories are gone, but the layout stays the same. I took my boyfriend to walk along some slippery steps alongside a slight mountainside, stopped at the top to enjoy a view over the full bay area, and went down into a quaint grotto. 

We took our dinner early, at a restaurant that's been there since I was a kid. It in no way compares to going to the restaurant -- the one we went to almost every day and knew the staff at, where I taught them German and they gave me free chocolate, where we stayed late and I helped clean, and they baked little stars and whales into the dough of my calzone -- but that one wasn't quite there anymore, so it had to do. I still got to sit right at the water, in a place I'd sat in before, and see hordes of surprisingly large fish dart around. 
After that, we went on a bit of an adventure. There's an empty bit of rocky island, connected with a bridge, close to where we used to live. It's tiered, reaching its summit like large stairs, with a broad main level featuring a small fort-outpost-shaped building called 'Gozo Tower', and the possibility to descend to salt fields and eventually the sea. We went there, checked out the building, and spent a decent amount of time climbing around the salt rocky salt fields and getting close enough to the ocean -- and this is the ocean, touching a piece of land that juts out into it, not a walled in bay -- to get our feet wet if we wished.

And then we decided to go up. And that was a bad idea. I'm sure there's roads somewhere, as it seems like farmland and there may have been tire tracks somewhere. But we didn't find it, we just climbed slippery tiers of rock, made it to the top, went to the other side and brute forced our way down. Got scratched, slid steep slopes down on our butts and 'walked' on rocks crumbling away beneath our feet. We walked back to the bus stop a different way, so I could walk by a place I considered a summer home. We got more ice cream. And then we took the whole way -- bus, bus, ferry, bus -- home.

On Sunday, I brought my boyfriend to the airport, a trip I was starting to get familiar with, and would make again soon.