I am currently sitting on deck sailing towards the south of France after 3 amazing days in Malta. If you do not know Malta is a small island country to the South of Sicily. If you look on the map Malta is the little speck right underneath the "rock" that the "boot" is kicking. I honestly knew nothing about Malta until I came on board but according to my history professor and several of my tour guides Malta was one of the most bombed countries in World War II. At a restaurant I ate at one of the waiters proudly claimed that the Allies would have never won the war. So that is pretty interesting!
The first day in Malta I had my last field lab for class. The class is Anthropology of Tourism so we went to a lot of touristy places to observe tour groups doing different things. We went to the Mdina which is an old walled medieval city. The city itself was really beautiful. There were small narrow roads and buildings with really nice balconies that looked out onto the streets. It reminded me a lot of the streets in Italy. The city was on the top of a really high hill (this seems to be a theme in European countries) so we had a beautiful view of the whole island. We also got to tour a really beautiful cathedral before we went to a glass blowing factory. Malta is known for their glassware so we were able to watch the class being created in the factory and it was really really cool.
The next day I went on a tour of the island of Gozo which is one of the five islands that make up the country of Malta. It took about 20 minutes by ferry to get there. We went to an OLD temple that was apparently the oldest free standing structure in the world! My history buff friends are going to kill me (Sorry Jen) but it honestly just looked like a pile of rocks. But then we went to the Azure Window which was absolutely amazing!!!! For all you Game of Throne fans this is apparently where some character got married int he first season. The Azure Window is a cliff that has been basically eroded in the middle by the waves. It was really cool and the rocks along the cliff has tons of piles of sea salt.
The third day in Malta was pretty relaxing. All of my friends were on an overnight trip so I went around the city of Valetta on my own. It was a lot of fun to be able to do everything I wanted because I was the only one traveling. I love everyone that I have met on the ship so far, but we live in VERY close quarters so it is hard to get some alone time. So it was nice that I got to take advantage of it.
We will get to Marseille, France on Saturday and I will be taking a train to Paris early Sunday morning!!
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