Mdina is Medieval

Public transportation in Malta is a trip and a half. The buses are mostly owned by the drivers, so vary in age from those built in the 1950s to those built in the 21st Century. No bus is the same - from where the bus number is displayed to how you signal the driver to stop.

Street signs are mostly absent; towns run one into the other; the bus drivers do not announce stops. If you miss the welcome sign at the beginning of a town, there's no way to know where you are. The island is small, and the implication is that you should know where you are, so what's the point of belaboring the obvious? But the fares are cheap: Lm 0.20 (about $0.65) will get you most places on the east coast, and Lm 0.50 (about $1.75) will get you everywhere else.

So I sprang for the Lm 0.50 ticket and rode the bus to Mdina, near the center of Malta. Mdina was the original capital of Malta until the Knights Templars decided to relocate to Valletta, where the harbor is. It is as medieval as a town can get, with narrow curving streets that surround a church with its plaza, an enclosing wall, and big gates. Three hundred people still live in Mdina, with the rest of the nearby population in Rabat, the suburb.

Mdina is also known as the "Silent City" because it is so quiet. This is currently the "off" season, between the busy summer and winter seasons, and the streets were mostly devoid of people. The town was very clean, in contrast to St. Julian's, where we have been staying. I'm thinking that drenching rainstorm we had the night before probably swept all the debris to wherever it goes with the runoff.

Click the photo montage in the sidebar to see more photos.