Valletta

I've been a bit delayed with my blogging recently (having a civil union ceremony and then moving country twice all in the same month did make me quite busy!), but I'm finally caught up enough that I'm actually writing about the country where I'm currently located, which is Malta!

Like when I was living in Chile, I plan to do some posts about specific places I've travelled to, as well as posts about life in general here. I've actually already been to a fair few places around the archipelago in my first few weeks, so I've got a bit to catch up on with this blog, but I've decided to start with Valletta. After all, it's the capital city and the first place I properly travelled to here, so it's a good place to start!

I was lucky enough to have a free day before starting my internship during my first week here, so I decided to use it to head down to Valletta. 

Valletta, the southernmost capital city in Europe, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, thanks to its amazing 16th-century architecture.

When getting off the bus at the bus station, the first landmark you come to is the Tritons' Fountain.

And then you pass through the city gate, and into Valletta itself.

The views of the fortifications are really spectacular!

The first building you come to within the city itself is Parliament House, which is much more modern than most of the rest of the buildings in Valletta, but which has the same golden colour.

That's something I like about Valletta actually - all of the golden buildings look beautiful in the sunshine, and they remind me quite a bit of the architecture in Bath. My family home is about 45 minutes away from Bath, so we take a lot of day trips there, and it always feels a bit like going on holiday somewhere like France or Italy, thanks to its grand architecture and Roman ruins. So it makes sense that I would be reminded of Bath while travelling somewhere else in Europe!

Valletta has an array of beautiful old buildings, and here are some memorable ones:

Church of Our Lady of Victory

Church of Saint Catherine of Italy

Auberge de Castille

St John's Co-Cathedral (You can go inside to see two paintings by Caravaggio. I didn't go in, because the tickets are expensive and the queue was massive, but perhaps I'll do it at some point in the next two months.)

Courts of Justice

National Library of Malta

The Grandmaster's Palace (This was built by the Knights of St John and is the largest palace in the city.)

The Royal Opera House (This building was destroyed in WWII, and its ruins now function as an open air theatre.)

On that first day in Valletta, I had noticed that the city seemed really packed with tourists, especially in the area around the city gate, and I thought that was odd for a weekday in May. But soon I spotted the reason - down below in the harbour was the most massive cruise ship I've ever seen! To be honest, I think it was bigger than any building I've ever seen, and it was hard to even comprehend its size. Needless to say, it certainly looked out of place among the beautiful old architecture, and there's no way you'd get me to go on it!

Two of the places I most liked seeing in Valletta were the Upper Barrakka Gardens and the Lower Barrakka Gardens. The Upper Barrakka Gardens are located close to the city gate, and have great views of the Three Cities on the other side of the harbour, and the Saluting Battery below. 

This week, I returned to Valletta, partly because I wanted to buy a tea towel and a postcard, but also because I wanted to visit the Lower Barrakka Gardens, which I missed on my first visit. This is a beautiful little garden which definitely made me feel like I was in Greece!

Something else I loved seeing in Valletta was this cat café, which isn't your typical café with cats - it's actually a "café" for stray cats. It's a nice idea given how many stray cats there are on the island.

All in all, Valletta is a really beautiful city with an array of amazing views.

I'm very glad that it's so close on the bus from where I live and work, so I can pop there whenever I want. I'll certainly be back a few times in the weeks to come!

My Last Month in Chile

After waiting for so long to be able to move back to Chile, the 15 months that I spent there just flew by. My first weeks there really seem like they could have happened yesterday. Because it took so much effort and patience to actually get there, it feels a bit strange and sad for it to be over already. But I suppose that's life!

I still have a few things I want to post about from my last month or so of living in Santiago, so that's why I'm writing this post today. During that time, we did manage to tick off most of the list of the places I wanted to visit before leaving (though there are still a few left for when I'm next back, whenever that may be!).

Here are some highlights!

Santiago Centro

In early April, Claudio and I went for a sightseeing walk around Santiago Centro. 

In most cities around the world, the historic centre is one of the safest, cleanest and best looked after areas, but unfortunately this is definitely not the case in Santiago. It's a shame, because there's a lot of beautiful architecture in the city centre, and it deserves to be better preserved than it is.

One of the buildings that does look at its best, however, is Teatro Municipal. This building is just as grand and elaborate on the outside as it is on the inside. It would be nice to go and see a show here, but it seems they just do operas and ballets, and not musicals, which are always my preference when going to the theatre!

Opposite the theatre, you can find Palacio Subercaseaux. This is a really French-looking palace, that isn't open to the public, but is still great to see from the outside.

Next we walked over to Barrio La Bolsa (Stock Exchange Neighbourhood). This part of the city is locked at night, so is also in good condition. It is made up of three streets (Nueva York, La Bolsa and Club de la Unión) and has some of the finest architecture in the city. This area somehow passed me by when I was actually living in Santiago Centro back in 2018, so it was good to see it at last!

Finally, we went to see Palacio La Alhambra, which was built in the 19th century and based on the palace of the same name in Spain. Sadly, it is in a very sorry state now! It used to be open to the public as a museum, and is very beautiful on the inside, based on pictures I've seen. Hopefully it will be restored to its former glory and reopened at some point in the near future.

Campus Oriente UC

This university building has been described as the Chilean Hogwarts, and is a nice place to check out!

Café Cupido

One evening, my mother-in-law, Ivonne, took us to this café which is actually located inside an old palace! It has very cute, retro décor, delicious loose leaf tea, and a good selection of vegan food. Hopefully we'll go back at some point in the future!

Vitacura

One weekend, Claudio and I went for a drive around this part of Vitacura, which is probably the richest and poshest area of the entire city. Unfortunately, some of the people living there have put up fences around some of the nicest viewpoints (the first of these pictures was taken through a fence!). But all the same, it was really nice to see some autumnal mountain views. 

La Chascona

La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's house in Santiago, is often described as one of the must-see places in the city. Neither of us had ever been, so we decided to go just to see if it's all it's cracked up to be. In our opinion, it's not that special a place really, especially if you compare it to Isla Negra, Neruda's beach house. You can go inside, but tickets are expensive, and neither of us were interested enough to pay to enter, as Neruda wasn't a very nice person, to put it mildly.

Oh well, at least we can now say we saw the place!

Palacio Pereira

Because we really enjoyed our visit to Palacio Cousiño in March, we decided to visit another palace in Santiago: Palacio Pereira, which is actually free to visit! We were expecting a kind of museum showing what life was like there in the past, like in Palacio Cousiño, but actually Palacio Pereira is more of an exhibition space. 

When we were there, there was an exhibition about the Atacama Desert, which brought back some great travel memories! The main topic was the ancient geoglyphs that can be found in the desert, and the Tarapacá Giant (one of our favourite sights we've seen there) was mentioned!

The palace also has a very nice café - something I always appreciate!

Parque Aventura

Before I left, we managed to fit in another adventure activity! (We have been getting quite into them recently!) At Parque Aventura in Parque Metropolitano we tried out three different things: the zip-wire, the hanging bridge, and the climbing wall.

Neither of us did too well with the climbing wall - unlike the climbing wall I did at university, the instructor doesn't hold on to a rope on this one, which makes it feel quite weird and scary. I only made it about two metres, but Claudio at least managed to get halfway up! We will have to come back in the future and face our fears again!

The bridge activity involved climbing up some completely vertical steps using climbing equipment, and then walking around a wobbly bridge with big gaps in it, which was quite fun.

But the zip-wire was the best bit! We had amazing views over the city while going down it!

Well...that brings to a close my posts about my (little more than) a year in Chile. Life there certainly wasn't perfect all the time, but I'm really missing it already - more than I expected to. I miss our little apartment in Ñuñoa, trips to the beach, evenings at Claudio's parents' house, walking Jackito the beagle around the neighbourhood and saying hello to the friendly cats and dogs there, visiting interesting places in and around the city, pan con palta, mote con huesillos, the mountains, skyscrapers and palm trees. But most of all I miss the life I had there with Claudio. 

Even though part of me wanted to come back to Europe, I still feel a bit sad that I couldn't stay for a bit longer in Chile. Unfortunately, living there wasn't really financially sustainable, and security-wise, it wasn't great either. But I'm hopeful that the country's situation will improve, and I'm very much open to living there again someday if it does.

Changing the subject, I've now been living in Malta for three weeks and have another nine weeks to go. It's been mostly going well so far - I'm enjoying my marketing job, the other interns on the programme are really nice, and I've already travelled a fair bit. So there will be some blogs about Malta coming soon! The only thing is that after I've spent all day writing at work, it can be a little hard to find the motivation and also the time to write on this blog at the end of the day, especially when there are other things to do. But I still enjoy writing here when I find a spare moment, and I hope to continue posting from time to time over the coming weeks!

Viña del Mar

A few days before I left Chile to go back to Europe, Claudio and I found the time for one last little trip. It's always nice to go to the beaches in the Valparaíso region, even in the colder months, so we decided to go to Viña del Mar, which is the biggest beach city in central Chile.

We wanted to visit some castles and palaces, especially Palacio Vergara, a palace in Quinta Vergara park that neither of us had visited before. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the entrance to the park, we were told that the entire park had been closed for some anime event, and we weren't allowed to enter even just for a couple of minutes to see the palace, despite the fact that the event wasn't even taking place in that part of the park. In my opinion, it's completely stupid to close the biggest park in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country on a Saturday because of some niche event, but that is the way things are in Chile sometimes...

In the end, we were only able to see a few glimpses of the top of the palace from outside the park, which was really disappointing, because I don't know when I'll get the chance to go back. However, I know I'll be back at some point in the future, whenever that may be, so it will just have to wait until then.

It wasn't the best start to our trip, but we decided to make the most of the rest of the day, starting by going to see a genuine moai! This is one of only a handful of moai that can be found outside of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and it may return there in the future, so it was quite special to see it. Although I would love to actually go to the island someday, flight tickets there are very expensive, so I was happy to experience a bit of the Rapa Nui culture in continental Chile.

It was also nice to see this very French-looking palace next to the moai.

Next we went up into the hills of the city to visit Castillo Brunet and Cerro Castillo presidential palace. I had visited both of these places during my Year Abroad, but Claudio hadn't seen them up close before, and he was very impressed by them.

Up on the hill, we also had amazing views over the ocean and of this white building that always makes me think of Barcelona.

Of course, no trip to the beach would be complete without a walk along the sand and a paddle in the icy sea! We had a lovely walk along the city's two main beaches, Playa Acapulco and Playa El Sol, and watched the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean - this is definitely something I'm going to miss about Chile!

Afterwards, we drove over to Reñaca and Concón to enjoy some more nighttime beach views.

Finally, we went back to Viña itself to see Palacio Rioja. This was a palace neither of us had seen before, and we were both super impressed with it - it's so grand and beautiful!

By this point in the day, it was too late to go inside, but hopefully we'll have the chance to do so in the future! We both definitely want to come back.

To conclude, this day in Viña and the surrounding area was a nice way to finish off my South American travels. I still have some more to write about my last weeks in Santiago, so that will be coming next!