Getting friendly in Malta - Part 1

Writing in Canada's Globe and Mail, Sandra Martin writes about her week's stay in Malta:

Good friends moved to Malta recently as refugees from supposedly idyllic southern France, where they had been reminded once too often that bureaucracy is a French word. Malta seemed an ideal address - still Mediterranean, undeniably beautiful, richly historic, with recognizably English laws and an amicable tax scheme for expatriates - but they longed to share their discovery and, more important, have their prescience applauded by others. Come and visit, they entreated.

Malta promised a respite from the depths of a Canadian winter and a global recession, so we arranged a week's stay...But how could we maintain our "good" guest regimen on a tiny island in the middle of the Mediterranean? Malta, an archipelago 90 kilometres south of Sicily, about 300 kilometres from North Africa, consists of three main islands - Malta, Gozo and minuscule Comino (an offshore underwater paradise for scuba divers and snorkellers) - with a total land area of just over 300 square kilometres, about half the area of Toronto.

And to complicate matters, our friends, kindly souls, insisted that they would chauffeur us around, as there were still plenty of sites that they had yet to explore. To demonstrate the seriousness of their stricture against rented cars, they picked us up at the airport.

The ideal times to visit Malta are spring and fall - perfect for any number of sports (golf is good) and particularly for swimming and snorkelling. But in the winter, Malta can be rainy and cool. The temperature didn't deter us, as we are not sun worshippers and can think of nothing worse than a Caribbean solar broil on the beach. We quickly learned to carry a pocket-sized umbrella and to wear jackets or heavy sweaters while walking and exploring...