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three days have gone hunting down places to live in. Not an easy task considering the different factors involved: hundreds of cheap tourist accommodations in 1970's style with golden anodized aluminum window frames, outrageously priced apartments with badly kept furniture from 1965, enough fake Louis XIV to make Ikea look like the MOMA and much more: help!
One interesting aspect is that more often than you can imagine, the outside of the buildings and even how the roads look have NOTHING to do with what you'll find inside the apartments. One good example is when we got to visit this apartment in the heart of St. Julian.
The old little street crawling up the hill is shaped by the traditional Maltese family houses with their typical limestone brick walls and enclosed balconies.
Here we are thinking about the British Colonization, the arab influences, the fishermen, the wooden boats with the fortune bringing eye carved on to them, the Knights et all when we stop by a front door. Golden anodized aluminum and darkened glass greets us again! We try to hold our breaths. Up three steps and we are in a dark, little hallway where the handmade leaves of an iron rail of a staircase winds up and around an elevator shaft made by the same maniac who made the front door. The walls haven't seen the kindness of a brush since WWII.
Voices of elderly women. The squeaking of a door opening in the darkness casts some light on the hallway. Two figures risen straight out of an Middle-Eastern version of Psyco look at us and shut the door again with a loud BANG!
“Hello and welcome, come right in!” says the middle-aged man from the door on the opposite side of the landing. “Please come in” encourages us the young lady from the agency with her leopard high heels sandals, red fingernail polish, a tight black skirt rapped around her prosperous waist and a white shirt on the verge to explode.
We step in and we find ourselves in a brand new I-would-like-to-be-a-New-Yorker's-penthouse ground floor apartment with halogen spots built into the ceiling, custom-made furniture in exotic wood veneers, floor-to-ceiling windows opening on the central courtyard, central AC system, hi-fi, a 36 inches flat screen TV and white leather couches!!!
How about that? What will we see next? We are ready, now. Or not? :-)
