Living in a foreign country, both information about things that matter, as well as contacts, can be scarce – especially in the beginning.
For information, you of course have TheRealMalta.com 🙂 But even though we can give you useful tips about life in Malta, we can’t give you acquaintances or quick answers to your burning questions.
Get on Facebook!
Luckily, there are a lot of useful Facebook groups – most of them private – where people with similar interests hang out and answer each other’s questions.
Are You Being Served
The biggest of them all is probably Are You Being Served. Not really expat-related, but since the majority of the “Internet-aged” population in Malta seem to be members there (there are over 58,000 members at the time of writing this!) it’s a great resource to ask for advice or help when it comes to service providers, restaurants, or virtually anything else.
The group is also heavily moderated to avoid vendors themselves touting their own business.
The Salott
Managed by the same people as Are You Being Served, The Salott (30,000 members) is AYBS’s “sister group” that allows for a more relaxed discussion.
Where AYBS exists primarily for service feedback and recommendations, Salott is for discussions of any other kind, that don’t exactly fit the criteria of the sister-group.
But keep in mind that both of those groups are HUGE, and if you turn on Facebook notifications for every new post then your phone will start vibrating almost non-stop 🙂
Up In Arms Malta EU Advisory Group
This group doesn’t have a lot of members (617 at the time of writing this), but it’s incredibly active.
It was first started to pursue a class action lawsuit regarding the Domestic Residential rate, but has now evolved into a discussion group with a much wider focus – mostly revolving around legal issues, disputes with landlords, and other similar topics.
Check them out on Facebook!
Country-Specific Expat Groups
Last but not least, there’s a number of country-specific expat groups on Facebook, and some of these can be very useful indeed.
There’s far too large of a number of them to list them here, but most of them are a quick Facebook-search away.
Bottom Line
Play around with Facebook’s search box a little, and you’ll definitely find some nice groups to join – giving you instant access to a bunch of people willing to help you with your questions.
And most importantly – if you have a favourite FB group that you think others would benefit from, let us know in the comments below and I’ll update the article if/when there’s enough recommendations!
RUBS and Salott are a rathole. Their moderator is an incredibly self centric person who doesn’t believe in free speech and probably has a bit of a power trip. Save yourself some brain cells and don’t join these grops.
ECU i dont use either groups much but I think being admin of such a large group is a heavy responsibility to safeguard against such things as people publicly mudslinging a company/service without first addressing the problem at source.
For anyone interested in things relevant to the Three Cities/ Cottonera region, there is The Friends of Cottonera Forum of which I am administrator. Its a community oriented discussion hub where we share info, events, social causes, grumbles,recommendations etc.