Iced Coffee

I want to talk about ice-coffee. Maltese iced coffee with vanilla ice-cream to be specific. Who would say no to a glass of iced caffeine on a day when the sun is bustling on your shoulders? Well, that would probably be me, but it nevertheless does not keep me from enjoying the view of content people savoring their daily dose of caffeine. So, let’s have an ice-coffee and talk about Malta.

Hot and tired you sit down on the wobbly chair leaning on the third step of the alleyway and ask the waitress for an iced coffee. She writes down your order and a couple of minutes later she returns with a large crystal glass filled with dark coffee, two scoops of vanilla gelato and a bit of whipped cream on the top. While you press the refreshingly cold glass against your temples, you start thinking about what these past days on the island have been like. What do you think about Valetta, about Malta? It is difficult to put the impressions of the last four days in a couple of words, so maybe sticking to that ice-coffee on the small round table in front of you would make this easier.

You take a scoop of the cacao-covered whipped cream. You just landed at the airport of Valletta, enjoyed the feeling of warm wind hitting your face, and have made it to Sliema after a curvy taxi-ride. You are soaking up all the information around you: cars speeding in the narrow streets leading down to Sliema, flags as first signs of Valletta being the EU’s capital of culture of 2018, souvenir shops and restaurants trying to convince passersby to have the best fish of the island. You hear snippets of languages: English, what you assume to be Maltese, Spanish, Italian and German. At the dinner-table you have the choice between Italian classics, seafood like you can only find it in places (surrounded) by the sea and North-American chicken variations while listening to the latest Reggaeton hits.

This first scoop of your iced coffee’s whipped cream was sweet, with a foreshadowing hint of coffee flavor, but you know it was just the first scoop. You want to finally get that hit of caffeine you have been waiting for (you want to go beneath the surface of first impressions.)

You push the straw out of the wrapping, put it in the glass and take your first sip. The streets of Valletta are buzzing, tourists and Maltese strolling around or hasting to their unknown destinations. You start talking to shop-owners, museum guards and waiters, wanting to savor the coffee as much as possible by understanding its origin and preparation.

You dip the spoon with the long neck into your ice-coffee and stir it twice. Thirsty, you suck at the straw and enjoy the cold liquid on your tongue. You are taking big sips. The museum guard and the waiters tell you to pay a visit to the Blue Lagoon and the city of Mdina. They emphasize the beauty of Malta’s beaches, St. Julians nightlife and Valletta’s richness in history. Unexpectedly, the talkative owner of the café serving your ice-coffee shows you his family bunker and underground well. He tells you about his plans of cleaning the tunnels and setting up candles to make this underground world attractive for his mainly foreign guests. When you ask him about the history of Valletta’s underground network, the order of St John and the need for protection during the war come up. Without dwelling on this too long he drily puts that you might think that the facades of the houses tell you a story, but there is much more hidden beneath them.

While the cold coffee creeps up the straw, you wonder what actually is behind the facades. You are curious what the ice-cream slowly melting at the bottom of your crystal glass tastes like. But the “grazi” (Maltese for “Thank you) and the arancini sold at the bakeries on the street corners sometimes make it feel like you are strolling around the streets of Sicily again. Like in Italy, you see talking hands when looking around you. Whether it is the young man leaning against the last bus window who is gesturing on his phone or the aged man on the ferry using his hands and arms to communicate with his colleagues standing on the jetty. MacDonalds, KFC and the countless restaurants with picture books as their menu to satisfy the tourists need for certainty tell you a story of countless visitors. Among the comfortable certainty, the freshly baked ricotta pastry “pastizzi” laying right next to the Arancini is new for you and the other visitors.

Having tasted a warm pastizzi, you are sucking on your straw a bit harder now, trying to get some more of that delicious vanilla ice-cream. Then, you find out that the baker of the fresh pastizzi around the corner is from Toronto, you speak to a waiter from Montenegro and buy a postcard from a South African woman. Reasons to come here range from family connections, over job perspectives in the tourism sector and a need for a safe-haven with a European passport. Who are Maltese people and what do they value? The Maltese lady in the National Library finds that reasons to stay here are plenty. Leaving the island behind is not an option for her. You ask her to fill you in on those reasons, trying to peek behind the facade. Answers remain vague.

You have tasted your iced coffee, but you are far away from finishing it. You wonder whether you will be able to eat the ice-cream before it melts or whether it will be a mixture of ice-cream and coffee, delicious but still feeling different than taking a scoop of pure vanilla gelato. Maybe it is just your straw, that makes it difficult to actually savor the ice-cream. After all, you are only tasting your iced coffee through that tiny filter.

[Blog by Chiara Arena]