I’ve been walking around Malta for a week now, and though I’ve been here a bunch of times, I’m always struck but how public life is here. People strolling on the streets, bars and restaurants spilling out onto the sidewalk in ways that would break bylaws in Toronto, and a real sense of urbanity, even in the small towns. It’s a late night culture too — you can eat at midnight and often you will see kids out until one or two in the morning with their parents (it reminds me of nights at my parents’ Maltese friends when we ran wild and exhausted ourselves while they drank Rum and Cokes). You can also get a variety of street food from the permanent Kiosks around, like the one above in the seaside resort town of Bugibba, where I got some Gelato last night. Other’s sell espressos, and some full-on dinners.
The Kiosks below are all temporary, parked in the village of Zubbug where their feast was taking place last weekend. Feasts have a carnival feel mixed with serious religion. Inside the church people are saying the rosary as the patron saint is carted around, constant flash bombs are going off in the air outside (for hours, every minute or so, an explosion up above) and bands marching through the streets.
You can get all sorts of food from the temporary kiosks (much of it bad for you), even beer, which is such a guilty novelty. Some people sat in makeshift cafes that in normal times are gas stations. It feels kind of loutish to carry around a bottle of beer in the street, but it’s best to fit in when you can, even as the dour religious figures all over cast shame on the sanctioned activity.
Perhaps an homage to a typical Toronto response to having a drink in the streets?
7 comments
It’s a great point about the permanent kiosks. I don’t think we have any in Toronto. Toronto needs to have rules that allow permanent kiosks to be set up in high-pedestrian-traffic places where there isn’t space for complete new buildings.
Those kiosks in front of Nathan Phillips Square are semi-permanent. The Ice Cream guy on Bloor west of Bathurst is sort of always there. It wouldn’t take too much to give them a better home, and people do like them. I think the ones here are hooked up to services, so they don’t need to run generators and have running water.
A lot of city bureaucrats and politicians would have a heart attack if we had kiosks like these in Toronto. It has always been beyond me why such small-minded people control a great place like our city.
Those “kiosks” in front of Nathan Phillips square are just old trucks painted in garish colours and now one even has an illuminated panel on the back with Pepsi ads running on it.
These things sell nothing but highly processed, fatty foods and make south entrance to this semi decent public space look like a flea market.
Bring on the vendors with ethnic food and small, well designed carts rather than these hulking French Fry trucks pushing trans-fat laden, artery clogging foods.
(yes, I am a vegetarian)
Alex> It’s true much of the stuff that they dispense I’d never eat (too much deep fryer) but there are ones that do non-trans-fat things.
During the Nathan Phillips Square redesign competition, it was interesting to note how many people said they want those french fry trucks to stay. Maybe people just eat them on special occasions.
I don’t see a word of Maltese on the signs at any of these kiosks. Don’t they have some kind of Bill 101=type legislation to preserve a very unique and possibly dying language?
I was thinking about that the other day when I noticed all the stop signs here say “Stop” not “arret”. There is no bill 101 type regulation here, english is on signs, menus…(that is, I have no problem navigating life here, not speaking Maltese) but the language endures and is strong, despite nearly 200 years of British rule, being taken over by everybody else at one time or another. There isn’t any of the panic, that I can gather from hanging around Maltese, that the language is going anywhere as in Quebec — though perhaps in official corridors there might be.