Flashback Friday: Chester Arthur and House Hunters International, Malta

I am afraid my husband has recently questioned his decision to marry me.  

We were watching House Hunters International yesterday evening.  House Hunters International is a show that is particularly intriguing to us because, really, when will we ever shop for real estate outside this country? We might as well live vicariously through others.

The couple was Italian, apparently. I am not certain of this, but the woman's name seemed very Italian to me.

They were looking for a home on Malta in the "multi-million dollar budget"   range. This intrigued us even more as it is not very often that House Hunters participants have a multi-million dollar budget. 

The people who generally participate are average, middle-class folks who are just trying to eek by. 

 When I come across House Hunters that involve jet-setters and millions of dollars in their budget, I get sort of a sick voyeuristic curiosity that washes over me and I take notice.  .

The show also caught my attention because I wasn't sure exactly where Malta was. 

 Geography has never been my strong suit. 

(Addition: It hasn't gotten any better.  Three years later, I just realized that the Cayman Islands were WEST of Cuba.  I always had believed them to be somewhere East of Puerto Rico.  )

I mean, the last House Hunters International show I watched was in Panama. I could vaguely picture the Panama Canal, although I couldn't tell you much about the country itself, except it has strip of land that was highly contentious during the Carter administration.  

Even more perplexing, though, was that the man-half of the couple mentioned that he had children in Belfast, and the Malta didn't look anything like I believed Belfast would look like. 

I could tell by the architecture that Malta must be Mediterraean, though.

I considered the options: I could sit through the entire show and not know where the hell this House Hunters was filmed, or I ask my husband and risk him making fun of me.   

"Honey," I asked.

"What," he said distractedly, playing Angry Birds

"Where is Malta?" 

"Seriously, Mary.   Where do you think Malta is?"

"Greece?" I asked. The look on his face wasn't encouraging. "Italy?" I continued. He didn't say anything. "I feel as if it is an island," I carried on. He nodded a bit. "Off the.....coast....of.... Italy?" I questioned.

"Malta is where Maltese come from," he explained.  

The light went on,  although the intellectual respect had been greatly diminshed. 

 In his mind, it was sort of like in 1992 when his sister asked where, exactly, the Star Fleet Academy school was since she had been seeing so many stickers on the back of cars recently. Was it a new college?

So it was with great horror that tonight the husband witnessed another error in judgement as we sat and watched "Antiques Roadshow."

It came in the form of a signature in a book about Indians that dated...well...before any of us had been born.

The signature was that of Chester Arthur, to which the commentator referred to as "President Chester Arthur." Really? We had a president named Chester Arthur? I made a mistake saying this aloud.

"Are you freaking serious," he asked. "You don't know who Chester Arthur is?"

"Well, they just said he was the President, but I don't remember him at all." My husband prattled off some sort of trade agreement fact that only a history major with a photographic memory would remember.

According to Chris' little Iphone,  that he whipped out to demonstrate his coolness, Chester Arthur was the 21st President of the United States. 

 Add that to the list of "Things I Don't Know," I guess.  Such as where Malta is, or that the Cayman Islands are farther west than I had always believed.  

Combine this with the fact that I haven't taken a shower for the past two days, I have gained a considerable amount of weight in the past month or so. Oh, and I'm a bad housekeeper.

I am really quite a catch. Really. Quite a catch.