Malta trip #6 – Day 2: The Gift of Sunrise

 

I slept well but also woke up easily at 0530 by the alarm. The sunrise was scheduled for about 0715 but you always need to be there a little before to capture the colours in the sky. I peeked out of the balcony but everywhere was dark so I waited and used that new keyboard to do some more writing. Not wanting to miss the boat like I had done in Bangkok (that story some other time) I gathered my equipment and got ready to go about 0630 while it was still a little dark. Here is the beauty of this apartment, I didn’t have to go anywhere out to greet the sunrise. I simply walked out of the apartment, went down to the pool area and just there beyond the pool was the big Mediterranean sea promising all kinds of golden hour glory. The weather was nice but I had put on a jacket because, you know, morning hour.

 

Roberta joined me there shortly. Before leaving I had said good morning to her through her bedroom door and she had said she would come down later. We loved that sunrise! For one thing, there was the ocean, then there were ferries adding another beautiful subject and motion if you wanted to capture a video. There was an island, my guess is the Comino island, and well, it was just amazing in every way. Down below we could even see waves crashing on rocks. I used my Panasonic GH5 mirrorless camera for the photos and my smartphone Samsung Note 20 Ultra for the videos because the phone has a better form factor and more advanced optical image stabilisation for videos.

 

 

You can see some examples of the photos we took and I am showing remarkable self-restraint not to upload the hundreds of photos I took because they are all gorgeous. It was easy photography because everywhere you pointed, there was beauty. If you could nail the exposure in your camera, you could take a great photo. That’s why the first and last hours of the day are called golden hour because the soft light makes everything look pretty. It would not be unfair to say that both of us revelled in that like kids in a candy store.

 

After we were finally done with the sunrise, we took our time getting ready and then went to a grocery store. It wasn’t far. It was near the extra bus stop where we had got off the bus last night. We easily walked there. And this time I was really like a kid in a candy store because their aisle of sugary treats was epic! I was so excited I took a picture. That picture shows only half of what was there on offer.

 

For the next one hour while Roberta went about carefully selecting what she wanted to get for herself and her family, I went about grabbing stuff off the shelves, then putting it back because it would be too much then grabbing something else...and so on. I think I spent about €30 there in that one visit, most of it was chocolates. But at the end of it, I feel that I had been smart because the two bags I had walked out with were not heavy. I could have easily carried them back to our apartment whic
h I ultimately did.

 

But first we stopped for coffee. The coffee shop was in a weird corner away from the main market, in front of this great building. Don’t ask me what it is, but it looked like a church. In Malta there are cranes everywhere because there is always work going on everywhere. One weird thing about coffee, or about me, is that I love Latte Macchiato which is a layered coffee – espresso, milk, foam – served in a tall, tapered glass. Don’t buy it in Costa, it’s not the same. You can’t anyway because you can only get it in Europe not in the UK. No, this doesn’t have anything to do with Brexit.

 

However, this coffeehouse did have it and they did it right. We sat on the patio, enjoyed the view and discussed our plans while we sipped the great coffee. This morning’s original plan was to go on a Segway tour of Gozo which I was very interested in because I have never ridden a Segway but it had been cancelled because the roads were closed. Roberta called the host and arranged it for the next day. That made me happy. It takes very little to make me happy. And there was lots of it in Malta.

 

When we were walking back from there to go back to our apartment, we were stopped by a woman at a bus stop. She was a chatty Cathy, actually her name was Barbara and she told us many interesting things about the islands. But then she said something that introduced a discordant note between I and Roberta. This is long, I better save it for the next chapter.