Top 10 Things I Don't Like About my Internship on Malta

Like with all things on earth there are good sides and bad sides to everything. Today I'm a little moody and that's why I decided to complain about some things here. So here we go: This is the Top 10 list of the things that annoy me on Malta:

10. The Illusion of Holidays

I have been travelling quite a lot and i always appreciated the comfort and  pleasantness of leaving cold and rainy Germany to explore sunny countries, their inhabitants and beaches. I thought this internship would at least be a little bit like holidays, but it's not. I realized it's not about the weather or the place where you are, but it's about the freedom to go wherever you wanna go and do whatever the f**k you want. Don't like your flat? Just leave and take a new one. Don't like anything else around you? Pack your bags and go to a nicer place. Well all of this is not possible here, the flat has been paid for and my working place is here so i have to stay for better or worse. I work from 8 to 5 and it's a 45 minute drive to the beach (if the buses play along, which rarely happens) so i only get to swim on weekends and even then the beach is crowded and i guess i'd be better off at Strandbad Wannsee in Berlin. Yeah, well all in all it just doesn't feel like holidays (the worst part is, I would have had 6 weeks of holidays if I had stayed in Berlin).

9. The Lack of Supermarkets

In Berlin there are dozens of supermarkets everywhere. From my home i can reach 5 different ones in 5 minutes. Here on Malta there are dozens of small mini markets, but they're much more expensive than "real" supermarkets. So until now i have found out about 3 different big supermarkets and all of them are at least 15 minutes away with the bus. And you can't drink the tap water here so in addition to the groceries I also have to carry my drinking water. A colleague of Matze was nice enough to take us to a big Supermarket by car and we bought a whole lot of water, so at least we don't have to carry tons of water for the next weeks. But still I'd really appreciate a big supermarket in the vicinity.

8. The "Subway"

The subway on Malta is not an underground train as one might think. It's just a couple of tunnels under the streets that make it possible to reach the other side of one of the many speedways without dying a horrible death. In principle that sounds pretty good, but in practice the subway is often flooded with a stinky greenish liquid that drips straight out of the walls and smells like the worst filthy honey bucket ( = Dixi-Klo, a portable toilet) at a festival that I have ever seen .. squared! So you have the choice of risking your life by crossing the road or risking your sense of smell and losing your stomach contents by using the subway. Yay!

7. The Long Way to the Beach

Like mentioned in the Illusion of Holidays part the way to a nice beach is very long from where I live. All the good beaches are in the north of Malta and sadly, I live in the south. So I have to drive for about 45-60 minutes to the beach and that means i can only go on weekends. The beach is OK, but I haven't found a good place to snorkel yet, it's just sandy and packed full of tourists. But who knows, maybe I'll find a better place to swim nearby eventually.

6. The Traffic

Malta is full of cars. And there are roads everywhere, but sidewalks only appear occasionally so as a pedestrian it is sometimes quite difficult to get from A to B. You either have to deal with the stinking subways, risk your life by crossing a speedway or waste your time by making a huge detour to get somewhere. An example: The bus station i have to go to in order to get to work is about 500 meters away, but i cross the speedway every day because it would take me another 1000 meters if I'd like to take the subway (and i don't, because it smells). So I need 5-15 minutes to get to the bus stop, depending on the traffic and the willingness of the drivers to let me pass the speedway.

5. The WiFi

The WiFi in our flat sucks. Not only the reception is horrible and the connection is lost regularly, we also only have a certain amount of traffic before our line is shut down for the rest of the month. Oh and nobody bothered telling us how much that is, they just told us not to use YouTube too much and not to download big files. We probably have about 500-1000GB traffic per month, but no one really knows and everybody has to be careful not to ruin the line for everyone else for the rest of the month. Another intern here at Intercomp once used up all the traffic and the whole flat didn't have internet access for the last few days of the month. I don't want this to happen at my flat, but I'm not used to thinking about the traffic use before doing anything online, I thought that was something from the last century before we had flat rates...

4. The Organisation

With this, i mean the whole organisation of the internship. It started in Germany where I was told I'd get a job interview by phone to get to know the company I'll be working at. In the end I didn't know where I'll work until I was already on Malta. More or less the same thing with the accommodation. I didn't get any information on anything until it was too late to change something if I didn't like it. Then there's the organisation     here, I sent an email with my concerns to them but they just didn't answer. I don't really feel like anybody cares at all about what happens here as long as I go to work and don't damage anything in the apartment.

3. The Buses

The bus system on Malta sucks. Even the Maltese think so. It was one of the first things i heard here in the introductory presentation. And now after 2 weeks i can say: Hell yes, it's true! I guess I'll have to write another separate post about the buses because more or less everything that can go wrong did go wrong and it would be too much to tell in this Top 10 list. So here are the highlights: 

• Buses are never on time
• Sometimes the line number on the display outside is another one than on the display inside, so you don't even know on which line you are
• Sometimes the displays don't work at all, but show something like TestScreen1234
• Bus drivers usually don't speak English very well (or at all)
• For some reason the buses don't stop at the same stations every time, so I can never be sure if my bus is going to let me exit at work

 At least the guys at work know about this and don't bother if I get to work late because they know I can't do anything about it.

2. No Air Condition

Our flat doesn't have air condition. That sucks because it's very hot all day, all night and I have a little trouble sleeping well in the heat. And because there are up to 8 people cooking something in the living area/kitchen it gets even hotter in there and we can't do s**t about it. A fan just isn't enough sometimes. It annoys me even more because i know some other interns do have AC, I just had bad luck :-/

1. No Privacy

This is my No.1 complaint. I live in an apartment for 8 people with 2-3 beds per room. In Germany I was asked whether I'd want to live in a student apartment together with other interns or if I would like to pay an additional 100€/month to get a place of my own. I immediately chose the 2nd option because privacy is kind of important to me. I didn't hear anything about my accommodation until a few days before i left and even then i only got the address and a few "example pictures" that showed a completely different apartment. So you have to understand I was pretty pissed because my wishes were ignored and i was crammed into a flat with 7 other interns. It's not like my roommates aren't nice, but I still like to have a bedroom of my own, especially when i was offered one and chose to take it.


So that's it. Those are the things that I don't like about my internship here. But don't get me wrong, of course it's not all that bad. Soon I will write a list about 10 things that are great here including my work, the party district, Isle of MTV, and many more. So stay tuned ;)