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someone we know in Malta
Friday, July 17 2026
location: room 302, Gomerino Hotel, Valletta, Malta
Today was to be spent entirely in Malta and not on any form of transportation designed to leave it. We'd be staying in our wonderful room on the Gomerino another night, which made the morning cheerful and relaxed. Since a real breakfast was included with out room and the Gomerino was aware of our annoying dietary requirements, we headed down to dining room to have that experience. The dining room staff weren't aware we were vegan until we told them, at which point they fetched a special vegan menu. Gretchen was very excited about the stuffed tomato item, but it would require more notice for the kitchen to prepare, so she ordered us both those for tomorrow morning. For this morning I ordered the "English breakfast" and Gretchen ordered some sort of rolled-up bread item filled with savory deliciousness. Both were surprising good; mine came with a side of mushrooms and included some sort of savory pastry. Interestingly, the coffee was only mediocre. Gretchen tasted it and thought it might actually be Nescafé. One would think Malta would be an equal with Italy when it comes to coffee, but the coffee provided in our fancy hotel room had been just Nescafé. This had Gretchen wondering if perhaps even Italian hotels provide Nescafé with their rooms, since they consider proper espresso (and cappuccino) a completely different league of beverage.
Today's main act of tourism would be a visit to the old walled city of Mdina further west on the island of Malta. To get there, Gretchen used the Bolt app on her phone to call up a rideshare car similar to an Uber, since that it how ridesharing is typically done on Malta. The drive to Mdina was across what looked like a semi-arid landscape where that stone used to build things in Valletta was everywhere, sometimes parts of a ruined wall or in other places just some bedrock sticking out of the shallow, stony soil. When our Bolt let us off outside the Mdina gates, it turned out that Bolt is a cash-only system, perhaps because of a law meant to thwart companies like Uber (genius!). What that meant for us is that Gretchen had to get euros out of an ATM while I sat in the back of the Bolt serving yet again as collateral (this time Gretchen actually used that term as she was stepping out of the car).
After I found a place to piss under a tree with strangely branching fruiting structures, we were ready to enter Mdina's main gate, which was one of the shooting locations for the first season of Game of Thrones. It looked smaller than I felt it should've been, and of course it was absolutely choked with tourists. We ended up going all the way around the city just inside its walls, getting views out across the landscape periodically along the way. Then we passed through something closer to the center of the city. The main cathedral charged admission but didn't look like anything we needed to see. Later we went into a smaller, older church whose interior was so cluttered and poorly curated that it reminded me of that Hindu-influenced Buddhist temple we'd seen in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It had that same thrift-store æsthetic, though without a pile of machine guns. Occasionally to get out of the heat, we would wander into one of the many gift shops to marvel at the knick-knacks, which included sea turtle figures with shells decorated with starfish and yet more sea turtles. Overall, Mdina had that same lovely look as Valletta, but it was all scaled down and more human-sized.
Gretchen had been excited to learn that there was a restaurant in Mdina called Coogi's that offered vegan calzones, so of course that was what we had for lunch and they were amazing. I also had a fine glass of the house white wine.
When we wanted to leave Mdina, we hoped there would be public WiFi near the entrance gate, since that was where one would put it and we'd heard public WiFi is a thing in Malta (one we'd yet to encounter here or, for that matter, in any of the cities of our Mediterranean cruise). But there was no WiFi, so Gretchen tried hailing a cab that had just pulled up. The driver said he would drive us back to to Valletta for thirty euros, and Gretchen replied that she could get a Bolt for 21 euros. He countered with 25 and she took the deal. On drive to Valletta, the driver talked some about the Maltese language, mentioning where it borrowed from French and Italian and playing down that its nuts and bolts are all Arabic. He then grumbled some about the government while admitting it was mostly okay, but that people with money pay bribes to avoid building according to laws than enforce the Maltese æsthetic, the thing we'd been finding so beautiful. Gretchen of course complained about our government led by Donald Trump, something I would not have done because I would want to hear his unbiased opinion of the state of our oligarchy.
Gretchen had the cab driver let us out near the Upper Barrakka Fountain, a place she'd spied last evening up the hill when we'd been walking near the harbor on our way to that suspected group of prostitutes. There are cannons up there that are fired periodically for some reason, and it's huge draw for tourists, but all we had to do was look around for five minutes and that was done. From there, we walked back to our hotel.
We ended up spending hours in downtime there, with me just hanging out on the bed drinking kratom tea and Gretchen spending much of her time up at the pool. One of the things I did was post a bunch of Malta pictures on Facebook, and this caused Susan, one of my old friends from college, to mention that she hoped we would be meeting up with a John Chapman we'd both gone to college with, since John now lives in Malta for some reason. Gretchen saw this comment and was intrigued. She'd remembered John and was curious why it was he'd moved to Malta. So she actually did some communication and set up a little date where John and his wife Julie would take the ferry across the harbor (which they live south of) and meet us at a cafés along one of the stepped streets leading down to the harbor.
But that wasn't our only pop-up social obligation. Kelly and Brian were still in town and they wanted to say goodbye for some reason. I was worried we'd have to go somewhere for some prolonged goodbye ritual, but they ended up coming to our room so I didn't even have to get out of bed until the inevitable hugs. Gretchen told them about the meeting she had set up with someone we used to know in college who now lives in Malta, and this led to an extended discussion of the gender tricks I used to play with John Chapman's last name. John, you see, was one of those men who was so in touch with his feminine side that he routinely wore skirts, and some of use used to refer to him as "John Chaperdaughter," since "man" and even "person" were too masculine. When Kelly and Brian left, we haved goodbye not just as they disappeared around the corner in our hotel but also from our window as they crossed St. Paul Street and vanished. (The British practice of always waving goodbye has become something of a running joke between us.)
At about 5:00pm we headed out to the café where we would be meeting up with John Chapman and his wife Julie. When we met them, John was recognizable, but I did not recognize Julie. She, however, recognized me and reminded me that we'd once been in a secret society together. It had been called "the Amanita Society" (I'd come up with the name) and it existed only because Oberlin's rules forbid secret societies. We'd only ever had one meeting and never did anything afterwards because there were no real leaders in our group. That nugget of something I did remember caused some neurons to fire and I eventually figured out who Julie was. My freshman year in Harkness co-op, I'd had a roommate from the Boston area named Geoff, a skinny guy with sharp features. He eventually got himself a real girlfriend named Julie, and it was during their relationship my sophomore year (I was no longer Geoff's roommate by then) that the Amanita society briefly existed. (My memory of that meeting was mostly about a young woman named Lori who was also there; she and I would make out numerous times some months later.) I don't remember much about Julie except for what Geoff said about her, and I had a memory that she might be a bit manipulative and even somewhat cruel. The fact that she lived for a time in Keep co-op checked out.
There was no available seating actually on the stepped street, so we had to inside the café. There I ordered some sort of variant of a margarita, while the other three all ordered a vaguely purplish drink. We also ordered two bruschettas for the table (and out waitress pronounced that "c" like a hard "k").
In our conversation, we mostly talked about John & Julie's life. They'd been living in Seattle and have a transgender daughter who is now in her twenties. Fearing the ant-trans cruelty of the Trump administration, they'd done some research and found that the most trans-friendly country they could easily move to was Malta. A close second was Spain, though things have backslid a little there. A big advantage of Malta is that it used to be part of the British Empire, so most people speak English. John and Julie are trying to learn Maltese, but it's not easy. They said they had been living in Malta a little over a year and are both "semi-retired." I chuckled and said that I too am "semi-retired," and then Gretchen chimed in that I am a software developer and it's hard for developers my age to find jobs, especially with companies thinking they can just replaced developers with AI. The conversation was interesting and went on for awhile, but it was also a bit awkward, as I think John and I had hated each other (I forget now why) the last time we'd seen each other back in the early 1990s. When we went back out to the street and said our goodbyes, there was no hugging.
For dinner, Gretchen wanted to get food at a mall-like food court (called the Is-Suq Tal-Belt Valletta Foood Market) across St. Paul from our hotel. It was big food court wrapping around an escalator, but there was no actual mall. (Downstairs was a supermarket where I ended up buying a beer to drink with my meal while we waited for them to be prepared.) We opted to get foods from two separate vendors; I got the rajma kidney bean curry from an Indian food place and Gretchen got some sort of noodle from an Asian place. We ate our food back in our hotel room while watching an episode of Jeopardy! followed by an episode of season one of Dark Winds. I thought my curry was quite good, especially with a little Bear Cantina hot sauce, though Gretchen found her noodles disappointing.
Rock clifs along the highway as we're leaving Valletta. Click to enlarge.
The gate into Mdina. Click to enlarge.
The inside of the Mdina gate. Click to enlarge.
A marble statue. Click to enlarge.
A perfect set for a scene set in medieval times. Click to enlarge.
A view out of the Mdina wall. Click to enlarge.
Another view out of the Mdina wall. Click to enlarge.
A tower and arches holding up something. Click to enlarge.
A Mdina street. Click to enlarge.
Sprigs of green in a Mdina alley. Click to enlarge.
A façade in Mdina. Click to enlarge.
A roof front in Mdina. Click to enlarge.
Outside view of the Mdina wall. Click to enlarge.
A glass balcony in Mdina. Click to enlarge.
Beautiful thin columns holding up an arch over a window. Click to enlarge.
A corner landmark in Mdina. Click to enlarge.
Trinkets in a Mdina gift shop. Notice the sea turtles on the backs of bigger sea turtles. Click to enlarge.
The cathedral in Mdina that you must pay to enter. I got this photo for free. Click to enlarge.
The ugly church with mismatched decorations. Click to enlarge.
Another sculptural landmark at a Mdina corner. Click to enlarge.
The white guys in blue shirts draining from this small piazza behind the Black gentleman had just been standing together in a group posing for a photo and making a noise that I characterized at the time as "dudebros in rut." Click to enlarge.
Cannons near the Upper Barrakka Fountain. Click to enlarge.
Us near the Upper Barrakka Fountain with a view of the harbor. Click to enlarge.
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