Mopeds, Horsemeat and Pynchon - Part 1

The New York Times Frugal Traveler is embarking on the Grand Tour, 'reimagining the classic European journey as a budget-minded, modern-day jaunt'. As part of his 12 week 100 euros a day journey round Europe, Matt Gross visited Malta and Gozo 'in search of cool hotels, memorable meals and contemporary culture:

Last Friday night, Sunny Bar & Restaurant filled up quickly. Families, couples and friends gathered at the simple wooden tables to share bowls of snails and platters of spaghetti with rabbit sauce, while men of all ages stood at the bar, drinking Cisk lager and watching the tense Croatia-Turkey football match on TV. Occasionally, one would wander outside to greet a friend in front of the huge, moonlit church that dominates the main square of the village of Mgarr, on the west side of the island of Malta.

Amid this warm, quaint scene, I ordered a dish of braised horsemeat and tried to relax. It was not easy, despite my steady consumption of Blue Label ale. For one thing, I was trapped — my rented moped had run out of fuel, and the two-pump gas station on the village square had closed long ago. Worse, I was stuck on the wrong island. My bed-and-breakfast, Number 43, lay on Gozo, Malta’s sister isle, and to reach it, I’d have to travel 45 minutes north and catch a 25-minute ferry ride (4.65 euros, or $7.25 at $1.59 to the euro, round-trip). How I’d get there, I wasn’t sure.

And then there was the bald man. Staring at me, his face shiny with drink, he gave me a three-fingered salute whose precise meaning I couldn’t fathom. Five minutes later, he punched another customer in the head. As Sunny’s owners threw the bald man and his victim into the street, I took a bite of my horse. It was rich, lean and tender, with a metallic tinge of iron — you might even call it ironic.

I had come to Malta — an island nation of 400,000 about 60 miles south of Sicily and 180 miles east of Tunisia— with the most high-minded of ideals. The 18th-century Grand Tourists were obsessed with Classical culture. But because of the difficulty of travel, they rarely ventured past Sicily. In Malta, I planned to do what they could not and explore a place that was ruled by virtually every culture that ever launched a boat in the Mediterranean, from the Phoenicians and Romans to, more recently, the British, who ran it as a colony from 1814 to 1964. Edward Gibbon, eat your heart out.
It helped that Malta seemed phenomenally affordable. My one-way flight from Rome on Air Malta was 62.42 euros. And for 25 euros a night, I had the biggest room at Number 43 on Gozo (43, Triq it 28 ta April; 356-2156-5435; http://www.gozobedandbreakfast.com/), a year-old, British-run B&B in an old stone house in the picturesque village of Qala.

Even better, I had free Wi-Fi, a washing machine, a swimming pool — and the chance to experience one of the oddest melting-pot cultures of the Mediterranean. The Maltese language is Arabic in origin, but written in the Roman alphabet, with significant loanwords from Italian. Also, most people speak English well, a legacy of colonialism. The state religion is a version of Roman Catholicism so orthodox that abortion and even divorce are illegal...

Check out the accompanying Frugal Taveller Malta video