If we were looking for chips, egg and beans, an English fry up or a quiet town with multi coloured fishing boats, we would visit the area of St Pauls Bay.

The area consists of three towns, sort of merged together, Qawra, Bugibba and St Pauls Bay. The three towns seem to have a little bit of something for different tastes. If we were looking for a nice town with still some touristy feel of the shops and restaurants, we would visit Qawra. If we wanted a lively and noisy place to be with a fry up for breakfast, then Bugibba is where we would head. If we wanted somewhere with more of a local feel to it, we would visit the town of St Pauls Bay.

We started our exploring today in Qawra and had a good walk around all the back streets to try to get a feel of where the locals live. We then had a stroll along the promenade, which is a very popular past time for the locals on a Sunday afternoon. Everyone in the family from the young to old can be found along here having a stroll or stopping at the many cafes for a leisurely coffee or ice cream.

Continuing along the promenade we entered the town of Bugibba. There is a main square that is full of restaurants catering for the tourist and bars that play very load music and tends to draw a younger crowd. Just around the corner from this is a large McDonalds. You could easily forget that you are in Malta whilst visiting this part of Bugibba, if it was not for the fact that you can still look out over the beautiful Mediterranean sea.

We left all this behind and carried on walking to some beautifully bright local fishing boats, which took us into the town area of St Paul’s Bay. This area had more of a local relaxed feel to it and had some lovely views over the water. We continued from here into Xemxija which is a small, quiet fishing village and stopped for an ice cream and to catch our breath before heading back.

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Poor Peter Rabbit would not last long here in Malta, as rabbit is the local speciality.

Rabbit is on most menu’s in Malta, including the menu of the local restaurant we love but we look beyond the rabbit. It’s a really nice Maltese restaurant that serve really good food at a great price. We ate there the other evening and had starters, a main meal, a bottle of water and a bottle of red wine and it only cost eighteen euros. This was with a tip, not bad to say this works out at just over fourteen pounds.

There is also a lot of Italian influence here too with lots of pizza and pasta dishes on many menu’s and of course we cannot forget the wonderful Italian ice cream.

We have also discovered the Pastizzeria’s here in Malta, which are a great place to grab something quick to eat. They are hole in the wall bakeries that sell lots of lovely savoury pastries at good prices. A huge sausage roll is about 70 cents and a small parcel of flaky pastry filled with mushy peas or ricotta cheese (called a pastizzi) is 23 cents-bargain!

There are of course a vast array of international restaurants here in Malta, especially in the tourist areas. As for restaurants catering for the English, there are plenty offering egg, chip and beans and Fish & Chips.

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How can there be no equivalent of a Tesco or Asda here? We soon got used to the convenience of buying everything from one large store back in the UK.

Here in Malta they have smaller shops, like the UK corner shop and then fruit and vegetables are sold from vans on street corners. We have found a good little shop near us that seems to stock all our basic needs and also a lot of UK products for when we are missing food items from home. They have lots of Heinz products-soups, beans, spaghetti, Birdseye frozen goods and even Jaffa Cakes!

So far our favourite item from the shop has to be the Maltese bread, its really nice and chewy with a crusty top-yum.

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Today saw us dodging cars whilst pushing a broken down car up a very busy highway.  Just another day apartment hunting in Malta.

We met the most hard working and friendliest letting agent in the world today. He picked us up from our hotel and first of all handed out the Cadbury chocolate finger biscuits, this man had my vote by now.

Whilst driving us around to see several apartments we were on the highway when he spotted a broken down car on the side of the road with two men attempting to push it. The letting agent did not hesitate in pulling up and we all got out to help push the car up the highway. This you may think is no big feat, unless of course you have experienced the crazy Maltese drivers. It seemed to make no difference that there was soft human bodies on the outside of the metal shell of the car they still swerved that close to us that we were lucky we did not lose any skin. We then had to walk back down the highway to get our car!

The day did end in success however when we found an apartment. It was just what we were looking for and even had sea views- result!

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Dead bodies on the pavement does nothing to convince you that you are in a great area to live. Which is why we cannot understand why our letting agent pointed one out to us today.

We were on our first day of apartment hunting when the letting agent pointed out a police man stood on the pavement next to a blanket with some trainers sticking out the bottom- a dead body on the pavement! Now okay maybe we don’t know enough about the Maltese sales technique but I am pretty sure he would have been better not pointing this out after saying what a nice area we were in.

We were unsuccessful in our apartment search today. The type of apartment we were looking to rent was something quite modern with one/two bedrooms. These appear to be few and far between. The standard seems to be large three bedroom three bathroom places with a garage. Most of which are furnished circa 70’s style, it really was like stepping back in time.

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We were amazed that we arrived at our hotel with everything intact except our nerves.

What a crazy taxi ride that was, a journey that should have taken forty minutes actually took twenty. Forget the ‘Big Dipper’ or any other scary fair rides, if you want your heart to be pumping at dangerous levels come to Malta at night and get a Malta taxi from the airport.

We were in two dilemmas, the first to keep our eyes shut as opening them does nothing for the old ticker, but we were also trying to keep an eye on our luggage. As you can appreciate moving to another country you have a few more items than the normal holiday luggage and therefore the taxi driver could not shut the boot so with every swerve around those hairpin bends we were sure we were going to lose something.

Amazingly we did make it to our hotel in one piece with all our luggage-an exciting start to our new life in Malta!

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We are both originally from the UK. We have done some traveling and have lived in Spain and Canada. After being in Canada we were looking forward to living somewhere warm and sunny.

We really liked the idea of living close to the mediterranean. We chose to move to Malta as the weather is meant to be sunny and warm all year round. The Malta cost of living is low and the people friendly. A bonus is that English is widely spoken.

We decided to note our progress on the positive and negative aspects of moving to Malta on our Malta Move blog.

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