Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [117]
“They’re local. They’ve been playing here for years.”
“This will be fun—listening to Maltese music. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard it before,” Micah said.
“Oh,” the dealer said, “lots of people will come in tonight to hear the band. It will get more crowded later. There will be dancing.”
Micah smiled. “Sounds even better.”
Later, we could hear the band setting up behind us; because we were concentrating on the game, we didn’t turn around to watch. A few minutes later, we heard the first chords being struck. At first, we couldn’t quite place it—we knew we recognized it—and just as we began to identify the song, the lead singer suddenly began belting out the lyrics from “Coward of the County.”
Kenny Rogers? When we turned around, we blinked in disbelief. There, in an upscale casino in Malta, was the local band, dressed in cowboy hats. Singing American country-western songs with their boots tapping to the beat. People in the crowd were cheering and singing along. Micah and I glanced at each other, then burst out laughing.
A moment later, joining in with the chorus from the rest of the crowd, we gave each other a what-the-hell shrug and began to sing along.
Just when we thought we had the trip all figured out, something like this would happen. The world, we’d discovered, was always ready to surprise us. Never in a million years would I ever have imagined that I’d be singing a Kenny Rogers song while attempting a Maltese accent.
In the morning, we visited Hagar Qim, another replicated set of ruins. Set near a cliff, the view was more interesting than the site itself, since nothing we saw was actually real. It was, however, a good place for pictures.
From there, we traveled to see two of the main medieval cathedrals in Malta; as in Cuzco, they were amazing. With high arched ceilings, enormous gilded altars, and hundreds of paintings, the detail was overwhelming. The floors are mostly marble; each slab actually the top of a tomb in which various knights had been buried.
For lunch, we dined at a seaside café; the food was traditionally Maltese—heavy in fresh seafood and bread—and from there we traveled to the walled city of Mdina. Originally built as a fortress on high ground, miles from the main city of Valletta, the streets were paved with cobblestone and boasted a viewing area from which it was possible to see a great portion of the island.
Mdina is also home to St. Paul’s Catacombs, and that was our final stop of the day. The catacombs were once the burial site of hundreds, if not thousands, of Maltese citizens, and unlike the Hypogeum, we were allowed to touch and photograph anything we wanted. Hundreds of now empty crypts had been carved into the rocky walls. The bodies had been removed and interred in cemeteries years earlier.
Micah, of course, raised his hand.
“Can I have my picture taken in one of the crypts?”
Our guide stared at Micah as if he was insane.
“You can if you want to . . . I guess. No one’s ever asked before.”
“Really? How many years have you been working here?”
“Seventeen.”
Micah winked at me. “You know what that means,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I might be the first guy ever to do this,” he said. “After the dead guys, I mean.”
He crawled in, grinning while I snapped his picture.
As we were walking along the cobblestone streets leading from Mdina back to the car, Micah surveyed our surroundings.
“I think Christine would like Malta.”
“How about the other places we went?”
He glanced at me. “You couldn’t drag her to India or Ethiopia. Or Easter Island, for that matter. For her, traveling to foreign countries means going to London or Paris.”
I smiled. “I think Cat would have liked all the places we’ve gone. But since she’s never been to Europe, we’ll probably go there first.”
“When the kids