Settling In

We are settling in here in Xemxija, enjoying the island living and the views!

On Friday we went out for a traditional Maltese dinner with some of the guys from the team and their families. Our appetizers included snails, and pasta mixed with rabbit and peas. The main course was bowls of fried rabbit. They had everything from the heart to the skin, and we ended up trying most of it. It was actually very good. Tasted a lot like chicken. The snails actually weren't bad either. The look of them when we pulled them out of their shells was a little off-putting, but they tasted fine.
They tend to eat pretty late over here, and our dinner got done around 11:45. After the meal we headed out to a town called Paceville, the place where all the youngsters go to get rowdy. We stayed out later than we wanted to, but we had a great time.

We've tried to spend a lot of our free time exploring, and one of the places we came across is this Rotunda church in a town called Mosta.  The church is beautiful inside and out, with hand painted ceilings, and tons of natural light pouring through. The church is famous in Malta because during World War II, people gathered inside the church to pray and hope for protection from the bombings. In 1942, about 300 people were inside the church when a bomb penetrated the dome and landed in the middle of the church. Amazingly, the bomb did not go off and no one was hurt. There is a replica of the bomb inside the church and people come from all over to witness this miracle. It was definitely a beautiful place to explore, and we hope to find many more places to visit in the weeks to follow.