Gamophilia

It seems all my acquaintances, regardless of age, are committing matrimony. I could understand it if it clustered around an age group or religious affiliation or political affiliation, but I see no pattern.

Med Cruise: Sept 23

I'm sorry, Amy, the lockstep of the tour group prohibited me from going to church. We left the Le Meridien Phoenician Hotel where we were lodged, and passed under the pseudo-medieval gate into the town of Valletta, after which my great-grandmother was named by her civil service father. The goal this Sunday was not to see the town comprehensively, but rather to visit the Museum of Archaeology in order to better appreciate the megalithic ruins, we would visit later today and to see the originals housed here as a safeguard from the elements. These included the Venus of Malta, the Sleeping Lady, and the gargantuan base of the Fat Lady. One site to which we would not travel was the Ghar Dalam cave where the first immigrants to Malta settled. before the rise of the Pharaohs; the settlers came from Sicily.







After we returned to the hotel, we boarded a bus. We left Valletta for Floriana, and learned firsthand the seamless transition from one Maltese town to the next; our guides assured us strong village dialects nonetheless exist. Floriana yield to Marsa, whose common root with Marsala in Sicily and Marseilles in France is the Semitic word for harbor (a concept unfamiliar to the desert-dwelling Hebrews). The bus drove us through the three cities on the far side of the Grand Harbour; these cities were the center of habitation near the Grand Harbour prior to the arrival of the Knights of Malta: Cospicua, Senglea, and Vittoriosa. At Vittoriosa, the least industrially-uglified of the three cities, I discovered that my camera lacked a memory chip!







We travelled through Fgura and into Tarxien with few signs of intercivic transition. The Tarxien Temples, found originally under a field of a farmer, are now surrounded by urban development. The Temple forms a complex in the approximate shape of a fat lady. Most of the interesting items had been replaced by copies outside, and the copies were in bad shape. The bus then took us through the recent development of Santa Lucija. Around Kirkao, we passed the airport and entered an area full of quarries - the nearby gardens were all former quarrries infilled with rubbish and topsoil.



Then, after passing through Zurrieq, we reached the site of the Hagar Qim Prehistoric Temples (although the precise number is impossible to verify) whose age was even greater than that of Tarxien and whose size was even more massive. The proximity of the sea provided a welcome breeze, but there was only one tree in the entire complex. The largest store was twenty tons (tonnes?). Both sites included 'libation holes', rope holes to fasten doors, and 'oracles holes' through which the priests might have spoken but I also have found that tour guides seek a certainty about the past which archaeologists are unable to provide. a fifteen-minute walk from Hagar Qim would have brought us to the Mnejdra Temple Complex.





We travelled to Mdina, the pre-Knights of Malta capital of the island which had already suffered defensive partition under the Arabs for lunch at the Bacchus restaurant enclosed on one side by a Roman, on the other by a medieval wall. Its initial purpose, however, was munitions storage. Then we walked through the streets of Mdina, the Silent City (so called because so few people live in it) smothered in convents and monasteries - the Maltese are very religious, especially for godless Europeans - and the palaces of noble families with the scions of at least one I quarreled at Downside. The Cathedral of Mdina was spectacular and all the marble of the tombs was inlaid, not painted, and the painting behind the altar was applied directly to Malta's indigenous ubiquitous stone. Naturally, none of the other members of the group seemed to see the cathedral as a holy place rather than inert stone. From Mdina's walls we could see an arc of the island stretching from Valletta to St Paul's Bay, where lie the island on which St Paul was wrecked, according to local tradition. The exact site is unknown, but local traditions always require some spot to be chosen as the official site, or rather, more than one location decides it is the official site and argues with other locations.



For dinner, I went into Valletta for the Maltese equivalent of tapas. The streets were well-lit and crowded (and the petite Maltese girls rather attractive although I'm far too Protestant for them). The flowers were still abundant from the celebration of Independence Day on Friday.

Med Cruise: Sept. 22

Sept. 22 -
I prefer not to dwell on the plane flights, but I do wonder about Gen. 1:29-30 whether the point is not so much that everything was vegetarian as much as that God created all nourishment.