Okay, So I've been putting it off, because I hate typing up written things, but here we go. In each post, I'll put one or two entries in my journal about WYD. Hopefully they'll all be done by tonight! Also, forgive the lack of anything fancy or lovely in the writing, I just wanted to jot it all down!
August 14/15th
Got chinese food at the airport, where we chilled for 3 hours, boarded, and sat on the plane for 32 more hours because of delays due to rain. Slept through awful plane dinner, had gross plane breakfast. Landed in Spain 7 hours later, made it through security no problem! At the airport, we directly got onto a sightseeing bus, where we all fell asleep. Before that, I happened to get to see how absolutely lovely everything in Spain is. Its not what you necessarily expect, but the older buildings were just...wow. The hotel is great, my roommate Becky and I have a little balcony, and the only channel in english is CNN, so we leave it on all the time. After we got to the room, we freshened up and went to a restaurant called VIPS for a snack before dinner. Next we went to Mass, then a meeting, and then we finally, at 9:30 we got to go look for food. Around 10, we found a Mcdonalds that would take our meal tickets. nomnomihatemcdonalds. I'm writing this in the hotel room with Becky. We're so exhausted, and I'm going through withdrawal from home/family/phone/friends. Time to sleep, breakfast at 8 tomorrow!
August 16th!
Today is the first official day of WYD, and we were supposed to go to the Prado art museum. Unfortunately, the tour company forgot to give us the passes. So we amused ourselves by wandering around Madrid, learning the Subway, and which flag belonged to what country. I met a ton of people, from South Korea to the Czech Republic. Wherever we walked, people would see our little American flag, and start chanting, " U-S-A! U-S-A!" then everyone would laugh and cheer and we'd find out where they were from.
As we were using meal vouchers, we could only go to specific places to eat. After adding half of the current population of this city in Pilgrims, those places were very, very crowded, lines are long, and people are thirsty/tired/hungry/hot/cranky.So we left the main square on the hugely overcrowded metro and ate VIPS for lunch. After lunch we came to the Hotel to relax for a little bit. Becky and I put on our full pilgrim gear( Yellow hat, orange fan, yellow shirt., colorful backpacks), then off the the welcoming Mass in the square.
While waiting, ( we couldn't see or hear the Mass), we played 10 games of 20 questions, talked to people from Poland, and made friends with Canadians! During the Mass, we tried to follow along as best as possible(P.S, Belgian people literally kiss you on both cheeks at peace) Then we joined the returning throng to go to get food and sleep near the hotel ( it was about 10:30 when we got to a metro with space, the pilgrims were so crowded.) Then the search for food was on! We actually got turned away from a place because they were out of food! Finally, we hit up a sketchy little family owned restaurant and had a really simple spanish sandwich( which is meat and bread, basically). I'm writing this at 12:30 and I have to get up in 6 hours. peace!
No comments:
Post a Comment