Three Months in Malta – and a Fourth is Following

For more than three months I have been living on Malta now. Actually, I had intended to finish this blog and post regular updates much earlier, but mela. Mela is a Maltese word with a variety of meanings, but among non-Maltese it is mostly known in the sense of “Whatever” and “Never mind”, which truly seems to be the life attitude of many Maltese. A Maltese Hakuna Matata, so to speak.

Since this article got very lengthy, I am dividing it into several sections that you can read independently of each other, if certain aspects do not interest you.

Why do I travel?

The question for more purpose in my life and my work has been driving me for a long time. On top of that, I felt stuck in my job and somewhat locked up by the current Covid situation. Everything inside me cried for a breakout. Furthermore, I had been desiring to take a longer trip between jobs since the end of my studies. Of course, the current situation doesn’t exactly invite someone to set off, but staying still was no longer an option for me. It was now or never!

In the long run, I would like to change to the educational sector. In my Master’s thesis, I already dealt in detail with the conception of digital learning games especially for school lessons, and I would like to follow this direction professionally. How? I don’t know yet myself – another reason why I wanted to throw myself into a completely different environment, soak up inspiration, find more time to think and maybe gain some experience as a volunteer English teacher.

Why Malta?

Through my old school friend Daniel, who has been living on Malta for several years, I became aware of this little island, which is considered a paradise for digital nomads.

As the founder of CoCoHub, Daniel is a pioneer of the so-called “coliving” concept. The principle of coliving is to quickly build a community abroad consisting of like-minded digital nomads. Location-independent employees, freelancers and entrepreneurs live together in a shared house that also offers a place to work with desks and fast internet. While they are busy with their laptops in this coworking space during the day, they use their spare time together to exchange and explore.

This concept sounded ideal for me and my goals – and I also think that coliving is very promising for the future thanks to the new acceptance for home office work. Why work from home when it works just as well from a Mediterranean island with over 300 days of sunshine a year?

What am I doing here?

I continue to work part-time for the PR agency ToLL Relations, which guarantees me a certain financial stability and for which I am very grateful to my bosses as well as my team. I also planned to try freelancing and see if this concept suits me, and how easy or difficult it is to get assignments.

Originally, I wanted to stay in Malta from May to July 2021. My reduced working hours should help me with a smoother transition into a volunteer and traveller. Then, in August, I was supposed to go to Nepal, where – in line with my goal to conquer the education industry – I wanted to help out at a school as an English teacher. But while I was just getting a foothold in Malta, the Covid Delta Digitation was raging in Asia. Almost the entire continent is now closed to visitors, which interfered with my plans drastically.

But first things first.

Malta Month 1: Coliving and flat hunting

Preparation and arrival

All preparations were made. I had sublet my flat in Mainz, ordered a health insurance for abroad, injected various vaccinations for Asia, and had everything else in my luggage which someone can need for a long journey.

With my bag and baggage I first went to my home in Dresden at the end of April to say goodbye to my loved ones. About two weeks later, my Air Malta plane was to take off from Munich. After a short stopover in Regensburg, I was finally welcomed by a pleasant heat in Malta on May 2^nd, 2021.

For the first month, I had booked a discounted room in a Coliving house. My move-in started right away with a big welcome party for all newcomers with about 25 guests, which honestly overwhelmed me a bit after more than a year of Corona measures and some travel exhaustion. Overall, I needed my time to get used to 14 new flatmates. In the beginning, I often retreated to my room because the hubbub together with the new impressions became a little too much for me.

Looking for a flat

That was soon to change, but after one week I already had to make a decision: Did I want to continue living in the coliving house in June and July and pay a rather high rent that was no longer discounted? Still overwhelmed by the impressions and knowing that the rent would eat up my entire basic income from my part-time work, I decided against it. And thus, May also became a month of flat hunting.

Malta has Flatmate, a platform for flat-sharing similar to the German wg-gesucht.de, which is structurally similar but culturally different. Unlike in Germany, the advertisements are hardly managed by the tenants who are looking for a new flatmate. The landlords are the ones putting the offers online. For them, it often doesn’t matter who is actually living there together, as long as someone pays the monthly rent, which makes it a bit more difficult to get in touch with potential future flatmates in advance. In addition, the platform is clearly influenced by the Maltese “mela” mentality: Most ads are posted about two weeks before the move-in date, which I found hard to handle with my German need for security.

Additionally, I played with the idea of renting a larger flat or even a house and advertising the remaining rooms myself on Airbnb to take a little profit or at least cover my own rental costs with it. However, finding a suitable flat (and one that was not in need of renovation), including permission to rent it myself, turned out to be more difficult than expected. A week before I was due to move out, my need for security won and I decided for a quiet shared flat with a German flatmate.

Life in the coliving house

After about two weeks, I overcame my shyness and began to enjoy the constant presence of people around me. Especially the move-in of a Dutch woman and a Hungarian-Russian couple, with whom I got along very well, made me come out of my shell.

The coliving villa offers many amenities: a large roof terrace with a jacuzzi, a garden with pool, an integrated fitness room and, above all, the company of interesting people. There is the crypto-enthusiast, the day trader, the programmer of a teacher platform for digital education (exactly my topic!), the sales manager of a learning platform (also my topic!), the freelance tattoo artist, the app developer looking for financial independence and so on.

Like me, many of the flatmates were in employment and only came to Malta for a few weeks or months to give the home office a sunny makeover. Quite a few, however, had already been living in Malta for half a year or more. Very often they sooner or later ended up in the so-called iGaming industry, i.e. digital gambling. Many large companies in this field operate from Malta and, apart from lucrative salaries and opportunities for advancement, offer a variety of jobs for international applicants without huge entry hurdles.

Here on Malta, you meet all sorts of interesting personalities, which was also the case at the coliving house, which I ended up enjoying very much with all its facets.

What is Malta like?

Sunny. Dreamy. Dusty. Stressful. A little backwarded. Historically interesting. Sometimes idiotic. Freedom-loving. Mela. These attributes describe my personal mix of more and less positive impressions. To keep it short, below is a checklist of my personal pros and cons of Malta.

Positive:

• surrounded by azure, crystal-clear sea and numerous beautiful beaches
• striking landscapes with cliffs, bays, hills, lagoons all over Malta and the neighbouring islands of Gozo and Comino
• over 300 days of sunshine per year – not a single rainy day in summer
• compact size, which means you can get around quite quickly, but still have a lot to discover
• Valletta as a dreamlike capital by day and by night
• cheap public transport (75 cents per trip with the local bus card)
• historically impressive with a rich history, imposing buildings and 6,000-year-old temples from one of the oldest and most unknown European civilisations
• not always friendly, but always helpful inhabitants
• a very large and international community of expats – here you quickly get to know people from all over the world

Negative:

• The traffic: There are more cars here than inhabitants and the cities are among the most densely populated in all of Europe. This results in crowded streets with narrow or non-existent footpaths – you can rarely walk parallelly on the pavement. The constant traffic in the cramped streets can be quite stressful and would be one reason for me not to live here in the long run.
• The traffic also means that you can hardly rely on public transport – buses barely stick to the timetable and it takes a mix of Google Maps and the local public transport app to get anywhere in a halfway planned way.
• The mela mentality in all areas: be it negligence in building houses with mould as a consequence, missing rubbish bins resulting in trash on the streets attracting vermin, a lack of hot or cold water in the house (depending on the outside temperature and the age of the house) and many other small details that are not earth-shattering, but just keep causing a head shake now and again.
• The heat: I certainly don’t want to complain, especially considering the German summer of 2021. But temperatures of up to 47 degrees in the summer sun make it almost impossible to leave the house during the day without melting completely.
• Long-term, I would miss a forest. Because of the climate, the natural landscape consists more of dry bushes; trees are mostly artificially planted in cities, but they are still very rare. In general, the cities rather consist of concrete with rare green spaces.
• Prices in supermarkets are higher because hardly anything grows here and most of the food has to be imported from Italy.

Of course, it remains to say that this is complaining at a high level. Three months abroad cannot immediately erase my German nagging mentality. For a stay of three or four months, some of the above-mentioned negative points are completely obsolete and more a matter of taste. It’s not for nothing that I’ve met numerous expats here who got stuck on Malta because the island is beautiful in its entirety.

Malta Month 2: Flew by like nothing

Despite looking for a flat and working, I was still able to explore and experience a lot in May. Thanks to Daniel and his circle of friends, I quickly got to know the places-to-be, gained a lot of background knowledge about the different places and always had a point of contact outside the coliving community.

Nevertheless, my second month in Malta was initially marked by a bit of loneliness. The change from a 15-person to a quiet two-person flat-share was quite a change. The standard of living in my new, much cheaper flat was also lower than in the coliving house. For example, we had no hot water at all in the kitchen and in the shower only if you had heated the boiler at least an hour before. That required some getting used to at first. In addition, I had reduced my working hours even more from June onwards, so I fell into a small hole at first.

However, private projects kept me busy. First, I was invited to speak at an event for digital nomads that Daniel had organised. For this, I had to write a speech and practise it (I will put it online as a separate article soon). Moreover, some applications as a freelancer bore first fruits and got me trained for some backends as an editor. More details about that will follow at a later date. I also devoted some time to the publication of my Master’s thesis and the technical set-up of my blog.

Furthermore, during the course of the month, an acquaintance informed me that a Maltese language school was desperately looking for English teachers, even with less teaching experience. Well, that sounded exactly like the broadening of horizons I was looking for!

I applied and was told by my mediator friend that I had to take the TOEFL test to be accepted. TOEFL is a certificate (usually used as proof for universities) about how good and error-free one’s English reading, listening, speaking and writing skills are. So I signed up for it and learned for a week on the different types of questions. In the end, I could have saved myself the costly and time-consuming test altogether, but at least I got a small confirmation for myself with 114 out of a possible 120 points that my English seems to be quite alright.

Instead of the TOEFL certificate, I would have needed the TEFL certificate – a training specifically made for English teachers. Nevertheless, beggars can’t be choosers, and thanks to my Bachelor studies of English Linguistics, I got the job as an English teacher, which was to start at the end of June.

Of course, I also undertook quite a lot in June, for instance a weekend with Daniel and his friends on the islands of Gozo and Comino. However, due to the many projects and some adventures, June flew by like nothing.

Malta Month 3: Hans the English teacher

July was all about work. In the morning I worked as an English teacher for three hours, in the afternoon as a PR manager for my old company, and in the evening I prepared the lessons for the next day.

For the first two weeks, I taught a class of about 25 language students aged between 13 and 18 from all over the world. Most of my students were Italian, but some of them were from Germany, Japan, Hungary, France, Poland, Spain, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Russia. The focus of the lessons was to improve their speaking skills, so it was important to encourage them to talk to each other as often as possible. Not an easy task, as the mentalities and language levels were quite diverse.

Since I had no experience as a teacher and received little instruction, I was initially nervous to plunge in at the deep end. Fortunately, the school offered some points of orientation for self-instruction, such as a specific weekly topic and a “syllabus” that suggested a few exercises per topic each day. Both this syllabus and the advice of the more experienced colleagues helped me to bring some structure to the lessons.

The good thing was that the students actually came here to go on holiday and have a good time, and many of them regarded the English lessons more as a necessary evil. Grades or learning goals didn’t matter either. Basically, I had 25 guinea pigs in front of me on whom I could try out different teaching concepts!

This worked sometimes more and sometimes less, but soon I developed a feeling for what the students liked and what not. Above all, I wanted to offer some experiences different from the typical classroom. In this, my studies of Rhetoric and my acting experience became particularly helpful. Playful rhetoric training as well as articulation and acting exercises soon became a regular part of my programme. In only a short time, you could notice an improvement even in students who were initially reluctant to learn. It was the little moments that made me a little proud, for example when a very shy 14-year-old Japanese girl came out of her shell for the first time in an acting exercise, where she mimed a heavy sumo wrestler who caused an earthquake with full conviction. The little ones grow up so fast!

The second half of the month brought another change. Due to rising Corona case numbers, 95% among international language students at the beginning, the Maltese government decided to completely close all language schools within two days. Many students left immediately and for those who stayed we switched to online classes.

This was a very different experience. Here I supervised between five and eight students in the virtual class. This allowed me to be much more personal and individual with the students. On the other hand, the campus of the language school didn’t offer the best internet connection, so we constantly had to deal with technical difficulties and disconnections. The students couldn’t turn on their cameras and I very often spoke into a black box without really knowing whether and how my words were being received at all. Additionally, I was not quite able to go through my rhetoric, articulation and acting training online, which I felt as a loss for me and my students. Furthermore, more and more students left Malta earlier due to the restrictions, or were in quarantine themselves, resulting in an understandably tense mood. Because of this, I didn’t enjoy online teaching as much as I did the face-to-face lessons before.

The preparations for the lessons always cost me a lot of time. I usually worked until about 11 p.m. every day, including an entire day at the weekend, in order to meet my own demands and not to rely on presenting boring worksheets. Therefore, I did not experience much apart from work in July.

For this reason, I was honestly somewhat relieved when the job as an English teacher ended at the end of July, because there were simply too few students left and thus no need for me any longer

Due to my busy July, I eventually decided to stay in Malta for one more month and to extend my part-time job for another four weeks. Since I wanted to change my flat another time and experience a bit more of a community, I was also looking for a flat again in July. But with more experience and a more relaxed attitude, finding a cool shared flat was much easier and quicker this time.

Malta Month 4: Like holiday!

My new flat-share turned out to be a lucky find. I now live with an Italian and a Frenchman who both work in the poker business. We were immediately on the same wavelength and Ivano, my Italian flatmate, integrated me directly into his circle of friends.

Apart from my work, I’m now devoting myself to my own projects like my blog again, but I also want to use the time to really enjoy Malta once more. Jogging along the nearby seafront, going out in Valletta, snorkelling for octopuses, going on day trips at the weekend – all this is on my agenda for August.

What happens after that? On September 1st, I fly back to Germany where, after a stopover in Berlin, I will stay in Dresden for two weeks to spend some time with my family and friends. My best friend recently became a father – if that’s not a reason to visit!

After that, I will probably move on to a next destination in Europe and wait there until Asia is open for visitors again. I am still in exchange with the school in Kathmandu where I would like to teach, so I haven’t given up on Asia yet.

Where will I go until then? I won’t plan that until the middle/end of August. So far, every country I’ve picked as my next destination had experienced a Covid surge followed by a temporary closure, so I’m not making any more long-term plans. When my decision is made, I will of course give a status update here!