Good Morning! We’re back! 🙂 After almost 8 (!) hours of travelling by 5 different means of transport, we’re back from Gozo, one of the small islands of the Maltese archipelago. We were going to “broadcast” from Gozo on the beat, but it turned out that the Internet illegally borrowed “from a neighbour” doesn’t work unless we hang our computer from the second-floor balcony, and that two two-year-olds successfully keep us from finding an Internet café and from posting in peace and quiet… Therefore, we’ve spent quite a lovely, relaxing week “offline” and we’ve discovered a really nice place worth recommending to everyone who enjoys peace and quiet, intimacy, and local specialties… Gozo! We’d like to invite you to read about our very first quick impressions!
bay in Marsalforn
WHY GOZO?
Exactly, why Gozo? To be honest, it was a pure twist of fate. This is a rare situation for us, because we usually choose our travel destinations very carefully, and we plan our journeys at least partially before passing our fate in the “hands” of flight search engines and flight prices. However, this time the sequence of events was quite different. We planned to have a short holiday with our friends who have a daughter in Maks’s age, until the 5th of August, in a warm, nice place in Europe, preferably to rent a house with a swimming pool, so that both parents and their children could enjoy their stay. Our additional criterion was to search for CHEAP flights! We couldn’t take a car from Poland because our friends’ little one suffers from motion sickness. Our desired destinations included preferably Crete and secondly Croatia. So, “let’s go”! We’ve spent some time searching but we couldn’t find anything on Crete or in Croatia in a reasonable price, in the preferred time. Almost ready to give up, we were considering a car trip to Croatia, when we came across quite cheap return tickets to Malta – PLN 950 per person. A quick call and we went for it!
Now what? Now it’s going to be easy: we’re looking for a house! It wasn’t “easy” at all, I’m not going to say much about these difficulties because I didn’t help with that, as I was swamp with work, but we spent long hours chatting on Facebook and over the phone about it, and our friends went through many offers on such sites as www.holidaylettings.co.uk or www.booking.com. We didn’t find anything interesting on Malta – our first choice, but we managed to trace a “farmhouse” on Gozo – with a pool, quite large, two bedrooms, Internet “from the neighbour” that I’ve mentioned above. Let’s do it!
At that time we didn’t know much about Gozo, however, I vaguely remembered my trip to Gozo with my mom during our holidays on Malta in 2002. I remembered the ferry, the beautiful views, and that Malta is tiny and Gozo is even tinier… we started to joke that even if the house is in the middle of the island, and Gozo is approx. 7 km wide, we’ll be able to walk to the beach on foot 😉 However, it turned out to be a bit different…
a dream house on Gozo in the area of Xaghra
We reached Gozo in the middle of the night. We took the plane at 9:00 pm from Warsaw to Malta – a perfect time for a trip with a little one – ours was asleep 😉 Afterwards we had to get to the ferry – a wild bus drive through uneven roads, here also my motion sickness kicked in, waiting in the harbour for a ferry and taking a ferry at almost 3 am to Gozo. The house owner was waiting for as with a small car, and there was 4 adults + 2 children, as well as 4 suitcases of various sizes and a few bags and backpacks (don’t ask why so many. Or don’t ask me ;)) and of course 2 McLaren buggies. Please, don’t ask me how did the owner manage to squeeze all of that into one car, and how does it feel to drive with buggies tied to the roof with a string!!! 🙂 If I hadn’t been so tired due to the long journey and Maks who reactivated himself after we left the plane, I would have definitely taken a picture of this interesting means of transport… When we reached our place it was quiet, dark, no stores nearby, no restaurants, not a living soul… we got to the gate that was basically in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing there. And we kept on joking: “if that’s his car, how does his house look like?”
We found out soon enough: the mysterious gate hid a patio with a spa, and a two-story house behind it, in beige stone, with a swimming pool upstairs, deck chairs, two bathrooms and everything we’ve been dreaming of! Success! Phew! We were so happy that, despite the long journey, when our children-monsters went to sleep for good, we stayed up and greeted the day at 6 am by the pool and in the spa with drinks in our hands. I call this a holiday! 🙂 And here is the first advantage of a house in comparison with a hotel: when kids are asleep, you are not stuck in the room with a remote control in your hand, but you have a pool, spa and you can do whatever you want! I’ll probably write another post about other advantages soon.
To return to our first impressions: we took a look around the area on Sunday. Nothing’s changed in the morning: no store in the neighbourhood, it’s roasting outside, so we’re taking a taxi to get to know the neighbourhood… it costs quite a lot – EUR 15, and you can imagine the distance, if the island is 7 km wide. But there is just one bus an hour from our “wasteland”, and we can’t walk with two little ones in 40 degrees… So let’s go!
sunburned Gozo
Tiny Gozo that is 7 km wide and 14 km long, and has approx. 30 thousand inhabitants, is deserted and sunburned during the day. We are driving in a taxi through the streets of Xaghry where we live and we see almost no people, and we meet our taxi driver the next day in a completely different town 😉 Life is thriving on the cost of the Mediterranean. First, we go to Qbajjar and Marsalforn, of course looking for the restaurant that was recommended to us. Two tendencies become visible to us right away, something that I also remember from my previous trip, ten years ago – Maltese love to spend time in the water and by the water, and they love to spend it together – with their families, friends, mates, on barbeques, eating, playing bingo… We love that! It’s fascinating that often instead of football fields we have water ball “fields”. Bays are adorable and the water is warm. Our first impressions are definitely positive!
water, water, cooling water
there aren’t many beaches around, so sunbathing on the rocks in pretty common
picturesque Marsalforn
a little bit of shadow so we’re playing bingo
A walk from Qbajjar to Marsalforn is quite nice, although the sun is ruthless on the sea esplanade… But the views make up for it! Marsalforn itself is described as a resort, and in Gozo it means a lovely little bay, maybe a few restaurants and ice-cream parlours, and rather few tourists in comparison to the “resorts” we’re used to. For us it’s a definite advantage.
a small yet “the largest on Gozo” resort
a wlak in Marsalforn
Obviously, we gathered our first culinary experiences on the first day. I must admit that the subject “food on Malta” scared us a bit: many people complain that the food it suitable for Brits, that there’s nothing interesting to eat, and my memories from my previous trip were also bad. Of course, my culinary awareness of 2002 AD and 2013 AD is “a bit” different, like in the case of all of us probably, and I was on a trip organized by a travel agent’s so I didn’t have an opportunity to discover new tastes and I only remember the English breakfasts, and children eating bacon, poached eggs and baked beans in the hotel. So… hem… we didn’t expect many culinary pleasures…
First, we went to Qbajjar Restaurant recommended by a friend. It’s a nice place with a vast terrace, there are mostly Italian specialities in the menu (like in Gozo in general, as we later found out), some local dishes (rabbit!) and of course seafood. Additionally, there are children’s courses and for that they obviously earn an extra point 🙂
As we were craving for seafood, we decided to go with fried calamari, mussels, octopus (speciality of the restaurant) and paccheri with shrimps. Our friends chose pizza and risotto, also with seafood. Qbajjar offers simple, maybe even “rustic” cuisine, but quite tasty and decent. No thrills and spills, but also no major mistakes. Only the dishes were too salty, especially for Łukasz, but this flaw allowed us to “check” the service. Their reaction (“why haven’t you told us earlier? we’ll definitely prepare the next dish to your liking… maybe you’d like another portion of mussels?”) was perfect and earned Qbajjar another extra point. Prices were decent: quite low for Europe (it was cheaper than in Italy and Spain), between EUR 5 and 15 per course, depending on its size and type. Around EUR 5 for a kid’s dish – rather large – it lasted for 3 meals 😉
Here is some culinary information about Gozo: usually every meat and fish dish comes with a bowl of chips, and a bowl of side salad (lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber, no herbs and no sauce). Taking this and the size of the portions into consideration, it is sometimes worth resigning from a starter or share a platter. I like the fact that pasta dishes come in two available sizes – of a starter and of main course, and they have two different prices. It’s worth to remember that the pasta starter can be gigantic and much cheaper (approx. EUR 5-6), so you might want to stick to it!
nibbles: bread with tomatoes, aubergine, sundried tomatoes
calamari — also over-salted but wiht a nice hint of chilli
mussels and…
octopus in white wine, garlic and tomatoes
seafood paccheri
At the end of our meal in Qbajjar we were welcomed to try one of the sweet Maltese specialties, mqaret – deep-fried cookies with date stuffing, served hot. They were quite tasty but definitely too greasy for this heat…
mqaret cookies
To sum up our first impressions from Gozo: hot, empty, quiet, quite tasty but plain, nonetheless still promising… I’ll tell you right away that it was much better afterwards, and I can assure everyone with bad culinary experiences from Malta, that we’re going to change your views, well, at least about Gozo… 🙂
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