Lounge people

Alex says that general attitudes in Malta are relaxed.

..See someone you know or need to talk to? Just stop in the middle of the road, other traffic will flow around you. Need to park? Just pull over and put on your hazards, that is perfectly acceptable, doesn’t matter how wide the road is (or rather isn’t). Someone parked in your lane? Feel free to squeeze between them and any oncoming traffic, they’ll surely move.

Road signs and names are mainly nice-to-have. There are so many roads, alleys and side streets missing from the maps, navigating is done mainly by luck and the GPS is completely useless. It knows the two main roads and that is it. Trying to get home today we ended up doing a very big loop of not very much, but we get to see a lot of the small unnamed streets and areas.

We drove to Mdina and Rabat (not the one on Gozo) and spent a couple of hours walking around and enjoying the scenery and buildings. We couldn’t figure out why none of the streets we were looking for were on the map, until Lorna noticed that she had been trying to navigate using a map of Rabat on Gozo. More interesting still, she thought she was getting the hang of it! Luckily Malta is fairly small. It also helps that traffic rarely moves at more than 40 km/h. On the main road (the 1) crossing Malta the speed limit is 70 km/h, so plenty of time to see the scenery and decide what to do at the intersections (although we missed a few, put up a few signs?). Tomorrow will be diving again. I look forward to a few nice wrecks!

..I thought the roads in St. Julians were bad. They’re Autobahn smooth compared to some of the “roads” I’ve driven on today. Also had a slight mishap with a curb and the front of the car, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with force, a screw driver and persistence.

Part 1