International Breakfast
One of the things that I personally find interesting about life in Malta is the number of international products available. A trip to the supermarket proved to be like a day at the United Nations. Every other item on the shelf seemed to come from another country, mostly European but not always. Malta joining the EU a couple of years ago has meant there are no import duties on European products, though I am told that it was this way even before. All of these food items are packaged with multilingual labels. Since I am a bit of a language nerd, I spent way too much time reading the different languages and just being amazed by it all. In some cases, however, it comes in handy being multilingual myself, since the languages vary from label to label. Sometimes it is faster to just read the Italian ingredients list because it is the first one listed. Other times, there are many languages that I cannot figure out, and so it becomes a hunt for a decipherable language on the package.
Along with this comes my international breakfast. I have just had Cypriot orange juice, Italian toast, half Belgian and half British soya milk (the first package ran out), honey from “Croatian and Latin American” sources, English tea, Maltese water, Danish butter, Italian cereal and the bananas were not labeled, but the last time they said Colombia. The Italian yogurt did not turn out to be very good, or was it the German one? In any case the Malaysian soya milk is out of the running. I think I will have some soup from the U.S. for lunch, along with those tasty Italian potatoes. And some fresh local fish is still in the refrigerator.
