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Just like the Phonecians, Romans, Byzantines, French, and British (in that order), I conquer Valletta, making each street my own. The city is small enough for me to walk the whole perimeter, and big enough for new things to stand out to me every time I do.
1. I ride the elevator with a baby, who turns to me solemnly, babbling nonsense with an air of utmost importance. That is, I think it's nonsense, until I realize that the babble is not in fact babble but French. An immature dialect, if I do say so myself. Babble or not, it is irrelevant. Either way the words rattle around in my brain but fail to make sense, and I leave the elevator, chastising my seven-year-old self, who spent her after-school French lessons making flags out of paper and toothpicks.
2. Being a European capital, Valletta has a 'shopping district,' which consists of one wide street, one Cartier flagship, and about a thousand souvenir shops. There, I see herds of beautiful women toting along their men with one tanned arm. The possessive language gives me pause... men belonging to women and such. I deduce that, in this instance, it is not only necessary but beautiful. Castrated by love, boyfriends and husbands are relegated to the shopping district, doomed to buy suntan oil and beaded bracelets. One beautiful tourist argues with her man in tow. They're lost. You're right where you need to be! I want to shout at them. To some, this hierarchy is home.
3. There's lots of feral cats in Valletta, and they're braver than most cats I've met. They don't dart under cars or through fence grates when you approach them. Like little deviants, they climb trees and statues. One jumps into my lap and decides my jeans are a suitable bed. Locals place tupperware and paper plates on their thresholds — makeshift watering holes. They know the area better than I do, and their attitude matches that fact.
4. Speaking of locals, there's a woman who lives in a ground-floor unit that I walk past every day. She's always home, and every day, I count on her to stick her head out the window as I pass, eager to get a glimpse of the upstart whose leather shoes make such noise on the cobblestone! The perpetrator is always me. I'm sorry! All the streets here are cobblestone, by the way. It's picturesque and sweet and deadly when it rains. On my first morning here, it drizzled, and a woman quite literally slid down the street.
5. Girls in sundresses, either study-abroad Americans or vacationing Brits. I pride myself on being able to differentiate the two before I hear their accents. (The trick is to look at their tans.) They are always in a hurry, on their way to happy hour, or on their way back from happy hour. You can tell which one it is by how flushed their faces are. They are swathed in linen and Santal 33 and giggly camaraderie. I miss my friends.
4. More tourists announce themselves with pastel clothing and wide-brimmed hats. Try as I might, my status as a foreigner is just as obvious. I mean, who wears leather shoes to the beach? It's a casualty of walking through an unfamiliar city: Inevitably, you will come across a tempting set of downward stairs that you just have to descend. When, at the bottom, a tiny, rocky beach greets you, who are you to deny it? Leather shoes be damned, I wear my scuffing and sunburn with pride – impromptu souvenirs.
5. I like to blend in when I'm traveling, or at least pretend to. I take it as a personal failing when locals instinctively opt for English when they greet me. This challenge is more or less obsolete in Valletta, a city, which, despite its Sicilian-Arabic roots, is undoubtedly, alarmingly, Anglicanized. I've never seen a European city embrace iced coffee so wholeheartedly. Just a few mornings here have confirmed my suspicions: Each Maltese cafe has a different interpretation of my coffee order, a fact that I find charming, though it was surprising to receive an Americano that was the color of sand. Trying to blend in and all, I didn't dare send it back. It was also quite good.
6. Everyone is taking photos, all the time. Tourists on the beach take photos of themselves with other tourists just out of frame. I like to imagine what all their photos look like. In the pictures, everyone is alone on the beach, but here, now, we are all together, nobody cropped out. Two women are posing in the street, they wear a shirt that says "Malta" and a hat that says "Malta." The fonts are different, so I read them differently. I'm not matching with them, yet, I end up in the background of their picture.
7. I learned a word in Maltese, not here, but a few months ago, on a Wikipedia page titled "Malta (country).” Xewqa, derived from Arabic, as most Maltese words are, means "desire" or "craving" or, as the webpage pedantically puts it, "that which one wishes or wills for." Xewqa is also the subject of a Maltese pregnancy superstition — of which there are many, the Maltese are very pro-natal — in which "pregnant women are encouraged to satisfy their food cravings, for fear that their baby will bear a xewqa, or representational birthmark." I think about my own birthmark, on the back of my now sunburnt right calf. It's shaped like Jamaica, or at least that's what a stranger told me once. I wonder if my mother was craving a vacation.
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