Mini-vacations recap
So I'm back home after five days of wonderful vacations with my bf the Grumpy Bear.
As I posted here, I found a very last minute deal with a well-known Spanish travel site and we took a two day cruise from Barcelona to Malta. We stayed in that wonderful island for three days (and I must thank in public the great advice given by
paterson_si ) and flew back on quite a cheap flight from Malta to Barcelona (a little over two hours).
First things first. The cruise was a nice experience. Although you can imagine that such a bargain price meant that everything was overcrowded. In fact, the ship had its maiden trip. It's called MSC Splendida and it's the largest ship belonging to a European company. Almost 3900 people on board. This meant: pools full of screaming children (ok and some cute dads), queues to get something to eat at the 3-hour long lunch buffet and generally not-so-good food. Service was also quite bad, not because the people were inefficient, but you could see they hadn't been trained. And why do they have "I only speak some English" waiters and such? I can't tell how many times I had to translate things to waiters from Italian or Spanish to English. Things so basic as "Agua fría", which has nothing to see with "Acqua frizzante". On the positive side of the cruise, the ship was really beautiful (full of bling-bling) and the cabin was really great. The bed was even better than in a lot of hotels I've been to and we had a beautiful view as well. I have to say that prices were also very decent, so you could indulge in some stuff and not get a heart attack when the final bill arrived.
The stopover in Tunis was, er, silly. We should have taken a taxi to visit something, but we decided to see around. Well, La Goulette is just a port. We walked around and we just saw a beach full of "normal" people. This was nice, but it was all we could get there under 35ºC, so we went back to the ship. BTW, my mother just left today to Tunisia on a package trip for one week.
Then we arrived into Malta. The entrance into the port was just awesome. Such a huge benemoth had to manoeuver a lot. After arriving, everything went fine, since we had hired the transfer to the hotel. Kevin, the taxi driver, was hot :) The hotel wasn't itself a wonder but, in one hand, the hotel was clean and well located and on the other hand, the manager, Eve, a zesty woman from Sheffield (who taught Dominique what "love" and "darling" means) is just a wonderful and friendly person. So if you ever go to Malta, go to St. Julian's Hotel Adam and Eve: http://www.adamshotelmalta.com/
We didn't actually visit a lot in the island but we had time to walk around La Valletta and even take a bus and visit Mdina and St. Paul's Grotto in Rabat. Yes, we missed a lot of things, but we stayed in St Julian's as Tomaz recommended, and it was a good thing to do. Dominique is, by no means, a night person, so we seemed more a couple of retired people than two gay men in their 30s, but we had our fun.
I have to say that I expected Malta to be more "British". Despite cars driven on the wrong side of the road, buses with extinct British brands, electric wall plugs and a few Britons managing certain businesses, I mostly heard people speaking Maltese, and most things were actually either Italian (ice-cream, coffee, most food) or Spanish (All oil on tables was Borges! and most vegetables were also from here). I also tried to reply "Grazzi" to be nice and they stared at me as if I were crazy. Oh well...
As with most places that live from tourism, people aren't really polite and seem really tired of dealing with tourists. I know that because it's the same here. However, they were all complaining that they didn't have enough tourists this year because of them joining the euro and the britons losing pound vs. euro value. To be honest, things were rather empty for being mid-July but a few smiles don't hurt, and a few additional languages for menus can be useful too.
So Malta, as
paterson_si said, is a must-see.
Of course, when I got home I found a problem: the main electrothermic interruptor or whatever it's called in English gets overheated constantly and goes off. So I had to call an emergency electrician, because it sparkles a lot. I haven't found if it's an something inside the house (I've tried them all) and this is just dangerous. So I'm waiting and waiting and waiting.
EDIT: I just got his call and he's on his way.