first impressions of beautiful Valetta

Did I mentioned this was going to be a relaxing holiday!?

After yet again sleeping in and having a more than yummy breakfast, the three of us just lingered around the hotel and surprisingly enough met up with a nice elderly couple from a city near us. They were leaving today, but it was nice to have a chat with them. It turned out that they won this trip through some game on the Belgian television and although the weather wasn’t always at it’s best, they had a fun time here on this island.

They gave us some pointers on what to see and before we even noticed it, it was already 11.30 AM, which meant they had to grab their bus to the airport and we had to go to our meet up with the sales person of the tour operator we booked this trip.

If I have to be honest, this is not my favourite moment of the trip, but we had to go and meet her coz otherwise we didn’t know when we were going to leave and second of all, since I was so lazy and didn’t really prepared anything, it was easier to just book a trip to Gozo through their office.

I know I could easily organize everything myself, but hey, this was my lazy trip and in a way it was nice to meet some other Belgian tourists as well, for my parents that is. This way they could talk to other people besides me. Am I not the perfect daughter!?

Our hostess turned out to be a friendly enough girl and after a complete dialogue on what we were doing here, besides the obvious, she told nearly her life story to us. Sometimes I really do get the feeling that I am a shrink, but not with the same paycheck. Sigh!!

Anyways, it was already way past lunch time when we set foot outside the hotel and walked towards the harbour area to catch our ferry towards the capital city.

Upon our arrival we only had to wait for about 5 minutes, talking about timing!

It seemed we weren’t the only ones travelling to Valetta today, it was quite busy, but we managed to get a fair enough seat and within a few minutes we reached the other side of the waterfront and arrived in Valetta!

At the docking area, we noticed that a lot of people payed a bit of money to be taking up the hill and since my dad wasn’t up for such an adventurous walk, we did the same thing, but I must say, they had better warned us of the adventurous ride as well, sitting on a small stool in the back of the minivan, I felt more like a milkshake than anything else and I was more than glad to reach our destination in mere minutes.

Valetta is truly an amazing city. Seen from afar it has something magical, but when you walk trough the many narrow streets, I got the feeling of being in an Arab city with nice decorated houses. I really liked it.

When we walked all the way towards the end of the city towards the fortified walls, I even thought for a minute I was in Egypt again. Strange thing that is!?

From all those first impressions, we got really hungry and while we searched for a nice enough place for a bite to eat, we found it at St. John’s square.

I am so sorry that I forgot the name of the restaurant, because it is worth to write about, the pasta I had was more than delicious and writing about it now and reliving that moment I get hungry again. It truly was a nice pasta!

Since it wasn’t really the touristic season yet, we noticed that a lot of works were going on on most of the buildings, the scaffolds were sometimes really ruining the picture, but I can understand that they wanted to make sure everything was ready for the big season.
Walking through several streets, we easily found our way down towards the fortress of Saint Elmo, but unfortunately even this was closed due to maintenance works.

There was not much to do for us than wonder through the many streets of Valetta and gaze at the beautiful houses and of course take a break from time to time at one of the many terraces of the city.

On our way down again towards the ferry docking area, we were lucky to catch the last one back towards Sliema and yet again it surprised me that we weren’t the only ones.

The walk back towards the hotel didn’t take us all that long and since we paid for half board at the hotel, we dediced to go and try the hotel restaurant. The food itself wasn’t all that bad, but it was italian night, which meant we had a broad selection of pizza and pasta, I must admit this looked like a major disappointment at first sight, but what the heck, it is not like I couldn’t eat pasta twice a day!

Although it was already quite dark outside, my mum still wanted to go out for a walk and was in the mood for a night cap at one of the local thingies on the boulevard, so out came our jackets and into the dark we went.

It was quite chilly outside, but we soon found a nice enough place and together with a yummy hot drink the cold was soon forgotten.

We arrived back in our room after midnight and after a quick shower, it was time for me to hit the sack coz tomorrow another day of sightseeing awaited us.