A bar owner was cleaning his outlet at 3 a.m. when he heard a lot of commotion outside and found two English language students jumping on the roof of his Alfa Romeo.
“One boy slid down the back glass onto the luggage boot when he saw me and ran off, yelling something in Spanish,” Gaetano Walker told the Times. He had to fork out €500 worth of repairs after the incident.
This is just one of the cases reported to The Times of foreign students running riot while studying English away from home, apart from several recent letters to the editor complaining of students’ atrocious behaviour in the Sliema and Swieqi areas.
Another angry Sliema resident told of how he was being forced to sleep with the windows closed in the hot summer because of the rowdy students living in two nearby hotels, the Diplomat and the Windsor Terrace.
“The hotels have opposing balconies on one street and it’s not uncommon for English language students to have a screaming match at any time, day or night,” the resident said.
A few weeks ago, a folding mattress was flung outside a balcony into the street and the students were pelting each other with toilet paper and wooden planks, while some cars on the street were covered in shaving foam, he said.
The Sliema resident complained the students were impossible to contain as they had a student to team-leader ratio of 30 to 1.
Moreover, these team leaders were not much older than the students themselves, “so they find it very hard to control them”.
When contacted, a spokesman for the Windsor Terrace Hotel said the students involved in the mattress incident had been asked to leave the establishment.
English language students have also been making the headlines for the wrong reasons over the past few weeks.
Four Italians were charged with stealing items from a Buġibba guest house, two Spanish students turned violent and resisted arrest after being told by their teachers they would be sent home for unacceptable behaviour, and a 16-year-old Russian was charged with the attempted murder of two Maltese teenagers when he allegedly stabbed them during an argument.
Just last week, two Spanish students and four Italians were admonished in court and given a suspended sentence for skinny dipping on separate occasions in St George’s Bay, St Julians.
Even in hospitals, these international students are leaving their mark: According to doctors, Saturday nights are renowned for their intoxicated visits to the casualty department.
The Federation of English Language Teaching Organisations Malta (Feltom) insists that recent incidents have to be seen in the perspective of the tens of thousands of students who visit Malta every year.
Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association CEO George Schembri said: “Students are students. Youngsters in general just want to have fun.”
He said the MHRA had received no formal reports on the students as such but was working with the Malta Tourism Authority to find ways of reducing any impact on the tourism industry as a whole.
This year, for example, student leaders were properly trained, which empowered them to further direct the student.
A spokesman for the MTA said that in contrast to previous years, when the main complaints originated from tourists because of the young students staying in the same hotel, this year it had no such recorded complaints from tourists over the past months.
This year’s complaints were originating from locals due to the impact of the congregation of students on the residential community, resulting in disturbances.
“The main complaints have been about the noise emanating from the places of accommodation used by the schools, and concerning the disturbances caused by students loitering and ‘enjoying’ themselves in streets and public areas,” MTA said.
According to the MTA, the complaints originated mainly from Swieqi and Msida.
The authority said that when complaints were received, it liaised with the police for an increase in foot patrols to the area and with hotel management for its security staff to cover the early hours of the morning.