Moving to Malta With My Best Friends
Updated: 20 hours ago
People often ask me why I moved to Malta. The answer is quite funny. Malta first caught my attention while I was scrolling through TikTok. My feed was flooded with videos of the island, and it looked like a dream. I immediately sent them to my best friends Martin and Filip, and we agreed that we'd do everything we could to spend the summer there.
Martin was a friend I'd known since high school, when we were about fifteen. Filip, on the other hand, was someone I'd met while living and studying in France. He's Czech, I'm Slovak, so naturally we became friends instantly.
At the time, I was working in a supermarket in France. The job was supposed to help me save money for our summer holiday. Unfortunately, at the end of the month, I was told they wouldn't extend my contract.
So there I was, with one month's salary, no savings, and a summer holiday I was supposed to finance. Then Martin told me he'd found a job in Malta. Suddenly, everything changed. What was supposed to be a holiday turned into a one-way trip, with absolutely no idea what we were going to do once we got there. I bought my plane ticket that same day.
Ten Days to Get Ready
Usually, when people decide to move to another country, they spend some time planning. We had ten days. And honestly, I wouldn't even say we used those ten days particularly effectively. Most of our time was spent saying goodbye to friends and family.
Since I had no idea how long we'd stay in Malta, I packed almost everything I owned. I even brought a winter jacket. You never know.
Our flight was from Toulouse at nine in the morning. The problem was that Filip and I lived more than two hours away. We had to figure out how to get to the airport.
Fortunately, about a month earlier, I'd met a girl from Toulouse through Tinder. So I wrote to her and asked if we could spend the night at her place. And she agreed!
On June 14, 2021, we spent the evening with Cecile, who had a beautiful view of the Garonne River and the sunset. Everything was going perfectly. Well, apart from the bottle of vodka we drank that evening. Somehow, we still managed to wake up feeling surprisingly fresh and excited. After a two-hour flight, we finally landed in Malta.
Welcome to Malta
Martin had arrived three days before us and had already arranged accommodation in a hostel in San Ġwann, not far from St. Julian's and its famous nightlife. All we had to do was get there. We could take a bus or a taxi, but after hearing stories about Malta's unreliable buses, we decided to go with a taxi. We didn't particularly want to get lost on our first day.
As it turned out, our accommodation wasn't exactly what I'd imagined when watching those TikTok videos. We were sharing a room with two other people, and since we'd packed for an actual move rather than a week's holiday, you can imagine that there was hardly any space to store our things.
There was also no air conditioning. In Malta. In the middle of summer. And then there were the cockroaches. I'd never seen cockroaches in my life before moving to Malta, and let's just say I wasn't particularly excited about it.
We ended up spending around a month in that hostel. About fifteen or twenty people were staying there, and we got along incredibly well. We made some of our first friends, and those friendships continued long after we moved out. That's the funny thing about travelling. Sometimes the places you'd never want to stay in again are the ones where you make some of your favourite memories.
Enjoying Malta Before Finding a Job
Now, considering that Martin was the only one with a job and I'd arrived with practically no money, the smart thing for Filip and me would have been to start looking for work immediately. Well, that wasn't exactly our priority.
For the first two or three weeks, we were simply enjoying life. We were going out, exploring the island, discovering the nightlife, meeting people, and generally living as though we were on a very long holiday. Was it financially responsible? Probably not. But we were having an amazing time.
One of my favourite memories from those first weeks was a day-long road trip around Malta. Now, if you've ever driven in Malta, you'll understand why I still remember it. The roads can be narrow, the traffic is chaotic, and on top of everything, they drive on the left.
I was so convinced something terrible was going to happen that I actually recorded a video in the car, just in case I died. I'm not even joking. Fortunately, we survived, and it became one of those ridiculous memories I still laugh about.
Eventually, though, we had to accept that our hostel wasn't somewhere we wanted to live permanently. We started looking for an apartment through different websites and agencies, without much success. Then, while getting a haircut, a barber suggested checking Facebook Marketplace. And that's exactly where Filip found a beautiful three-room apartment. Sometimes the best advice comes from the most unexpected places.
Becoming Bartenders
With our accommodation sorted, there was still one rather important problem. We needed jobs. With Filip, we were still unemployed. And finding something together wasn't necessarily going to be easy.
Malta has two official languages, Maltese and English, which was great for me because I could communicate in English. Filip, however, had a small problem. He barely spoke any English. At the time, his vocabulary wasn't much more advanced than: "Hello, I'm Filip."
We found a job opportunity at a restaurant in Valletta and went there to introduce ourselves. After a short interview, they offered me the chance to come back the following day for a trial. Unfortunately, Filip wasn't accepted because his English wasn't good enough for the position.
I didn't want to leave him searching for work alone, so I politely declined. We'd moved to Malta together, and I wanted us to find something where we could help each other.
On our way home, we were walking along the waterfront in Sliema when we came across Surfside Restaurant. There were several signs advertising vacancies. We had nothing to lose, so we went inside to ask.
The boss told us to come back at 19:00 for a two-hour trial. If he was happy with us, we could continue working. If not, well, that would be the end of it. We arrived early, determined to show that we really wanted the job.
And then something unexpected happened. He sent us behind the bar. The funny thing is that neither of us had ever worked as a bartender before. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing. But we gave it everything we had.
Two hours later, the boss was happy with our work. We were hired. As bartenders. I couldn't believe it.
Life Behind the Bar
Surfside was a fantastic place to work. The restaurant had three floors. The upper floor was an open terrace overlooking the sea, the middle floor was a sports bar with air conditioning and another beautiful sea view, and downstairs was the beach bar.
The sports bar was usually quite peaceful. Unless there was football. When Italy won the European Championship in July 2021, things got pretty wild.
But what I enjoyed most wasn't just the location or learning how to make drinks. It was the people. As far as I remember, apart from our boss, almost everyone working there came from a different country. We had colleagues from the Balkans, Nepal, Latin America, the Middle East, and other parts of the world.
For most of us, English wasn't our first language, which made the atmosphere particularly welcoming. Everyone understood what it was like to be somewhere new, trying to communicate and learn a job. And people genuinely helped each other.
One person I particularly remember is Kumar, a colleague from Nepal. Without him, I'm not sure I would have survived my first days behind the bar. He taught me so much, patiently explaining how to prepare drinks and helping me whenever I had no idea what I was doing. And trust me, that happened quite a lot at the beginning.
We had more than forty cocktails on the menu, and learning them all wasn't exactly something we could do overnight. But gradually, we got better.
I also made Colombian friends, and thanks to them, I picked up quite a bit of Spanish, which I loved. Then there was Dosty, the Czech DJ who worked there during the summer.
Having another Czech speaker around was great, especially for Filip and me. It meant we had our little Czech and Slovak corner at work, somewhere we could speak our own languages and feel a little closer to home. And let's be fair, having a friend who's a DJ is pretty cool.
The friendships weren't limited to working hours, either. We went out together, organized parties, visited each other's apartments, and spent a lot of our free time together. It was an amazing lifestyle.
But the bar itself was something special to me, too. It was my first real experience working behind a bar, making cocktails instead of ordering them. I discovered how much I enjoyed hospitality, learning something completely new, and working alongside people I genuinely liked. When you enjoy the people you're working with, even a busy shift feels different. And we were having the time of our lives.
When I think about Malta now, I still find it funny how everything started. Three friends, no plan, and me arriving with one month's salary and a winter jacket.
A few months later, we'd learned how to make over forty cocktails, and Filip could finally put a sentence together in English. Not bad for two guys who'd arrived without jobs or bartending experience.
Malta was where I discovered how much I enjoyed living abroad, meeting new people, and building a life somewhere completely unfamiliar. And to think that all of this started with a few TikTok videos and a holiday that never happened.
Thank you, Malta.
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