Opening Hours, Light Switches
A few details of Maltese life:
Malta still has the old fashioned opening hours. This means that stores close from 1pm to 4pm for lunch/siesta, and then open again from 4pm to 7pm. So whatever you need to buy, if you do not make it to the store by 1pm… you have to wait. I am not used to this. In the US there is the 24 hour culture, and even in Peru they did away with lunch closing hours years before I was born! Just yesterday I wrote a letter, but finished it around 1:30pm. The local post office in my area does not reopen in the afternoon, so I had to wait until today. I did find another one that opened in the afternoon, but I had no idea where it was.
(Which leads me to respond to a few comments… Google maps only has half the country at a detailed level, and it is the half that is less inhabited, so I cannot use it for the places I need to go. I am still looking for a good road map of Malta, before I go crazy trying to figure everything out).
Pharmacies close at 7pm too, like all the other stores. I asked at a pharmacy if there is one that stays open later in case of emergency. The cashier looked at me puzzled. No, she said, after hours you go to the hospital, where they have an emergency pharmacy open 24 hours. Silly me, how did I not think of that.
Yesterday I was also on a mission to get a converter plug so I could recharge my phone. It is international and multi-voltage, but it only came with a US-style plug. My trusty store at the corner did not have what I needed, so I had to go hunting to another hardware store. The plugs here are not European, with two round holes, but rather British. This means they are square, not round, with a third hole for the ground/earth. These plugs are only used in Britain and some of its former colonies. The odd thing is that each individual socket has a switch. That is, you can turn it on and off as if it were a light. I found this bizarre. Why would you turn an electric socket on and off? Who ever heard of such a thing? This adds another level of decision making to my every day life. I am done with the toaster, should I… turn it off? I have turned off the radio, should I… switch the socket off too? I only appreciated this yesterday when we used a power drill to make a hole in the wall. You really do not want to leave that thing plugged in, as bumping into it the wrong way could cause injury. So, M leaned over and… turned off the socket. Pretty neat, eh? Also, you *can* make European plugs fit, meaning you do not have to buy a converter every time the appliance you buy happens to have a European plug (most of the time, now that Malta is in the EU and things get bought across borders). To do this, however, you have to stick a pen in the third hole to “trick” it. I saw M do this and freaked out. “You are sticking a pen in the electric socket!!!!” Ah, but do not worry… he had turned it off first.
The new dishwashwer is coming this afternoon. I am excited as we will not have to hand wash everything any more. And this is where learning Maltese is coming in handy. The delivery men will call on the phone and speak Maltese. I will understand what they are telling me, even if I wind up replying in English. At least it worked last week.
