New to the story? Start with the Prologue.

I am going to love it here… as long as I can find a place to stay

19th of March 2024

I step out of the plane and I am immediately slapped in the face by a wave of hot air. 

‘Oh sh**… I might not need that spring puffer jacket after all.’ I tell myself. 

The bus takes us to the small airport hall, I collect my baggage, quickly stop by a restroom to make sure I look presentable, and off I go to find the driver the company had sent to take me to my temporary accommodation. I quickly find him and we wait for another person who turns out to be a Czech girl also working for the same company, but coming in only for a few days for some kind of training. In the car we talk mostly in Czech, but as soon as she’s dropped off, the driver starts talking to me in English and gives me some advice concerning searching for an apartment . 

‘Don’t search here! No, no, St. Julian’s, Sliema, Pembroke… too expensive! Do you know how much my friend paid for a room in St. Julian’s?’

‘I don’t.’ I answer.

‘Guess!’

I quickly ran over all the prices of the rooms in this area that I’ve seen online: ‘Around six hundred?’ 

‘Six hundred… humph! Nine hundred! And he even had to share the bathroom!’ 

‘That’s quite a lot.’ I have to agree. I don’t remember seeing any rooms for such a high price online. And I have seen quite a lot of them during the past three months. 

‘Find something in Naxxar, and xxx or xxx.’ He advised me and I thanked him. But I didn’t even get the two other names and they didn’t seem that important at that moment. 

Two minutes later he dropped me off in front of my booked apartment in Paceville and said:

‘Good luck! And be very careful around here.’

Paceville has quite a reputation of being the centre of the nightlife. I’ve read as much.

We shake hands and I enter the reception of budget apartments straight above Paceville square. I check in and the guy at the reception helps me with my bags to the fourth floor because the elevator is out of service. Poor him, my baggage is pretty heavy. 

When I enter the apartment, I’m quite positively surprised. Given the reviews online I thought it was going to be much worse. I practically only booked this place because I was desperate for something cheap but private at the same time. They let me book the entire apartment despite being alone and the apartment having five beds. 

‘Alright… I think I can survive here for a week.’ I tell myself and check the view out of my window. I raise an eyebrow. 

‘Or maybe not.’ 

I’ve read before that there was an LCD advertising billboard across the square facing my windows, but I hadn’t imagined it that big. I chuckle to myself and quickly prepare my backpack. I need to head out for a meeting with my future flatmate and a potential landlord.

Finding an apartment from abroad? Nope, not an option…

Moving to a new country without knowing where I was going to live was new for me. It took me a few months of watching the complete utter chaos in the facebook groups concerning flat sharing and rental of properties in Malta, to understand that booking something in advance simply wasn’t an option. 

My language school has some accommodation for teachers, but only for the summer season. As I was about to arrive before it started, I needed to find my own place to stay. But I didn’t mind it at all, because I prefer my privacy and I honestly feel too old to share a room with someone I don’t know, somewhere at the teachers’ residence. 

I published my first announcement that I was searching for an apartment at the beginning of January in one of the facebook groups and the amount of scam messages sending me ‘the lead’¹ was almost funny. They were closely followed by false apartment owners sending pictures of luxury apartments where you could get a room for a reasonable price, but had to pay the deposit immediately to book it. I know that some of them might have even been real, but who the hell sends money online for something they can’t be sure exists?! 

1. 'A lead’ is sent by a person on Facebook and usually leads to a false owner of a non-existent apartment or an existing apartment of someone else not connected with the scammer at all.

I also got contacted by a few real people who were in search of flatmates, but unfortunately, it was too early for that. They all needed someone immediately, to fill in for their ex-flatmates. So I decided to postpone my search. But I kept observing the course of the events in those facebook groups. It was quite disturbing. Scammers posting photos of apartments, pretending they were the owner, then the real owner commenting on those photos, revealing the scammers. People who got scammed commenting under the posts of scammers and between all of that, dozens of reactions of real estate agents to every single demand for a room or an apartment. Complete utter chaos. 

About a month later I created a profile at flatmate.com and waited for what was going to happen. It seemed a little more trustworthy than Facebook, but nevertheless, some of the apartment owners I contacted through this platform were equally suspicious. I might have been paranoid at that point, but when I got a message from some 21 year old girl from Spain, who immediately vomited her whole life story to me in her first message and when exactly the same type of message arrived from a 55 year old woman two days later, I knew there was no way in hell I was going to find an apartment before coming to Malta. 

That’s why, when I got a message from some girl in mid-February, asking if I would be interested in searching for an apartment together, my response was cold and uninterested. I thought she was another scammer. To my great surprise, she turned out to be a real person, who was about to move from Malawi to Malta for work in about a week. We decided to try to find a place together and she was alright with visiting the potential apartments as soon as she would arrive, which was about three weeks before me. 

What happen to my new Malawian friend, Fefi, during her first week after her arrival would make up for a separate chapter, so let me just quickly summarise it like this:

1. Her bags got lost. 
2. Her bags were found but were seriously damaged. 
3. The taxi driver left with half of her bags before she managed to take them all out of the car and she had to pay him again to come back with them.
4. Malta in February is much colder than Malawi and she wasn’t prepared for that. She quickly needed to buy some warmer clothes. 
5. Taking out money from her Malawian account turned out to be a huge problem. 

Fefi had even more struggles, but I don’t recall all of them now. 

She spent the following days after her arrival visiting apartments she had found or that I sent her to. Her conclusions were quite disturbing:

1. The apartments never looked like those in the pictures. They were usually in much worse condition. 
2. It was extra hard to get in contact with the owners and the real estate agents seemed to be everywhere.
3. The real estate agency fee was 50% of one month’s rent plus 17%.
4. The real estate agents were really pushy.
5. Every apartment that she visited was rented within three hours. 

Even when we managed to get through to an owner or two, those apartments were too far off for both of us to commute and our preferred localities seemed to be held by some spells casted by evil real estate agencies. 

After a week we just decided to give up and wait until my arrival. We were hoping that something might pop up in the meantime, or that my friend would get some contacts when she started working. 

I needed to publish two more search announcements in those Facebook groups, and reply to at least thirty estate agents, before I got contacted by an owner who was just finishing a renovation of a two bedroom apartment in Birkirkara. The place would be available in approximately a week and a half. That meant in less than a week after my arrival. I immediately booked a viewing. 

Is this the right place for us?

‘Can you go down with the price?’ I ask our hopefully future-to-be landlady. 

She makes a face, obviously not pleased.

‘Well, we were hoping we would really get the 1200 €. You know, everything is new and…’ 

‘I know, that’s totally understandable. But we had our budget set at 1200 € including bills and we would really like to fit into that. Can you just think about it?’ I explain and she promises to talk it through with her husband. Then we start talking about other things concerning the apartment and the potential contract. 

I almost start wishing she would say ‘no’ and we might have a good reason to search for something else. Because 1200 € is really the top of the top of the budget that we can afford. At least I hope I can afford it because I am going to be paid on a pro-rata basis and I have only a rough idea about how much I’ll be able to make. Therefore, paying 600 € a month only for accommodation while my net salary might touch only around double the amount, is pushing it. 

But just a few minutes before, we had a discussion with Fefi, my future flatmate, and it went something like this:

‘So what do you think?’ I asked her. 

‘It’s like none of those apartments I’ve seen before.’

‘In good or bad?’

‘Good! This is super nice.’

She is right. It is super nice. We are standing on a ground floor apartment of a three floor house. The apartment has its own entrance, terrace with a grill, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a giant kitchen and a small TV room. Plus it’s just after renovation and will only have final inspection in two days. 

I groan internally. 

I would love to live in this place, because it only took me 18 minutes by bus to get here from my future workplace and the bus wasn’t even super late. That, I understood, is something exceptional in Malta. But 600 € plus utility bills is just too much. 

‘I might go down to 1150 € then with the bills you should be around 1200 €’ the Landlady says in the end. But the discussion with her husband is still needed.

A bit later we say goodbye, with a promise to think about it on both sides. My new friend Fefi and I head out towards her work place. We discovered that she might actually be able to walk from the apartment to work, and we wanted to test how long it would take. 

I was left breathless by the beauty of the architecture in the historic centre of the town called Birkirkara, which we needed to cross. Small houses with colourful and decorative shaded balconies, nooks and crannies with flower pots, and decorative ceramics or religious pictures on facades. Birkirkara really breathes out an atmosphere of unspoilt tradition and as this is my first real step into a Maltese town, I am all charmed. 

Google said the walk towards Fefi’s workplace should take us about twenty minutes and we managed it even faster. I would honestly love to be in Fefi’s shoes, if we end up taking the apartment. I’d love to take a twenty minute walk to work every morning. Instead, I would be left with a twenty minute bus ride in unreliable Maltese buses. But nothing has been decided yet, so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. 

First impression of Valletta

Half an hour later, we are buying c.heap pizza slices in one of the stalls right in front of The Triton Fountain, by the entrance to the historical city of Valletta, Maltese capital. Fefi decided to take me there immediately, so I could take in some Maltese beauty. 

‘You are going to love it here, I’m sure,’ she says with her darkly coloured voice when she leads me through the city gate. But I am so hungry at that point that I don’t care much about the view. We sit in the Hastings Garden, just behind the gate to the left and eat our pizza while discussing the other options we have regarding the apartment. 

There aren’t many. Either we take this apartment or we get in contact with some estate agent, let them find a cheaper place but end up paying the same, because of the agency fees. Plus, according to Fefi, this apartment was far the best quality, compared to everything she has seen before. It truly seems that there is nothing to think about. But I still have some doubts. It’s a lot of money after all. 

A few minutes later, she takes me to her new favourite place – The Upper Barrakka gardens. I step through an arched terrace area and the view that opens before me is breathtaking. That is the moment I know Fefi was right:

‘I am going to love it here.’