A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] A truism set to music in the Kander & Ebb musical "Cabaret" is that money makes the world go round...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: People who need people

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] One of the advantages of living on the other side of the equator to South Africa is that it gives you a different perspective - on everything! From a Maltese standpoint, Marcus Brewster was led to look at a recent report about population density through the other end of the telescope...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: Birds do it, bees do it

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] The Catzavelos hate speech case prompted Marcus 'The Maltese Falcon' Brewster to investigate whether hate crimes exist on the Maltese islands and his findings may surprise you...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: How to steal a million

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] Tender fraud and corruption are probably endemic throughout the world but a case has recently been unearthed in Malta that is so diabolically clever, so deviously contrived that it makes the various SAA, SABC, SANRAL and other cadre-deployment shenanigans seem blunt and clunky in comparison...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: A shot of mass tourism on the rocks

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] Question: What do Malta and Iceland have in common besides being Game of Thrones locations? Answer: More than you think...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: Who wants to live forever?

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] When people ask me what the biggest difference about living in Malta is, my answer inevitably surprises them. I have become aware of a mysterious phenomenon, one that has such a surreal quality, that I can only invoke Salvador Dali to try to explain it...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: Ahoy! Blockchain Island

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] In November this year, some 4,000 delegates are expected to descend on "the rock" for the first Malta Blockchain Summit...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: What Malta learned from Marilyn; the wages of sun

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] If there was a theme song for public relations in general and reputation management in particular, it should be the Marilyn Monroe and Frankie Vaughn duet Specialisation from her under-appreciated 1960 movie Let's make love...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: The Daphne impact

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] You may not have heard of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was murdered six months ago, but Meryl Streep certainly has and it would not surprise me if the Oscar winner optioned DCG's story...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: The invisible baker

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] Diagonally across from our village house and on the opposite corner lies one of the great marketing mysteries of Malta, a retail conundrum that would perplex even Sherlock Holmes - the case of the invisible baker...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: A capital of knowledge

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] How does a nation get ahead in the global economy if its landmass and population size is small? Although I hadn't thought much about it previously, an article in the Times of Malta made me think of my newly adopted homeland rather differently. The answer is to position yourself as a player in the knowledge economy...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: A Karnival of optimism

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] There has been plenty to celebrate in Malta this month. We learned the island's GDP growth is predicted to be the highest in Europe and secondly, it's Karnival time!

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: An economy of fireworks

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] After a decade's diet of negative South African poltico-economic views, I'd forgotten that curious feeling of civic optimism, the effervescence of possibility and the Candidean sense of living in the best of all possible worlds that good news cultivates...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: Clean sweeps and dirty reputations

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] I want to share two secrets with you. Firstly, how a lifetime in PR has qualified me, unexpectedly, to thrive in Malta. And secondly, to address the fear that all South Africans secretly have about living abroad...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: The Valletta effect

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] Because of my public relations background, I flagged a recent story in The Business Observer headed 'A great PR opportunity for the city and for Malta'. Of course, it was about the Valletta European Capital of Culture 2018 (V18) which just launched here this past weekend...

A South African's guide to moving to and making it in Malta: The culture of connection

[Marcus ‘The Maltese Falcon’ Brewster] Valletta, the baroque cityscape on the island fortress of Malta, is making global headlines this month - indeed this year - as it assumes the mantle of European Capital of Culture 2018. Last year, after having fallen in love with this little corner of the Mediterranean, I relocated to the archipelago for a sabbatical to take a front row seat for the programme of the next 12 months...