The World's Ahead: October 18, 2014

Thank God there were no partiers on the bus from Fatima to Lourdes! On our way back from Fatima we ended up traveling back through Spain and up into the south of France into the Pyrenees, where Lourdes is located. When St. Bernadette Soubiroux was alive, that area spoke a sort-of dialect of Portuguese/Spanish, but now they're French speaking.

You know how I talk about becoming rich and buying a villa in the south of France? Well, there are villas in the south of France and they're beautiful. Along the Spain-France border there are a bunch of white buildings that all have similar red roofs, but they're all decorated and constructed differently. I can see where lots of architects would take inspiration from European buildings.

Once in Lourdes, we set off and grabbed another decent dinner to make up for spending the entire night on a train. We were on the sweaty train again, but this time had better seats facing forwards where we could stretch out our feet, and I went to sleep promptly. No fiestas this time. We arrived at our hostel, which was entirely pink ... not sure why. We had two separate rooms, each one bright girly pink with roses on the bedspread.

This place had a shower. I remember it especially because it had great Wifi, and a shower.

Because it got dark by the time we got there, we crashed for the night and then the next day we set off for the Basilica of the Rosary, which is also the location of the Grotto which was revealed to St. Bernadette, the spring, and the baths of holy water.

I liked Lourdes better than Fatima. Maybe I just like French culture better, but I greatly appreciated the little coffee shops and the arrangement of the buildings, the beautiful architecture, and the fact that the weather was much better than Fatima, which tended to be finicky and rainy and windy a lot of the time.

We went down and saw the Grotto, and got to touch the cave walls and see the spot where the spring comes up from the ground. St. Bernadette dug it out with her own hands.

What I didn't expect was that the whole place was located under a humongous church that looked like a Disney palace. The Basilica was enormous! Not only was there a massive church on the lower level (where we went to Mass that evening), but there was another church located on the level above it with an adoration chapel, and another, larger church on the very topmost level. There was also a church and a crypt underground beneath the main square, but it was closed for entry when we got there.

The place was so dang beautiful. The dome with the cross which is visible in some of the pictures is actually the top of the ground level church.

If you look under the right end of the castle you can see the grotto - it's the small hole underneath the strip of mossy green stuff.

I couldn't take enough pictures of this place.

Inside the topmost church

Leslie, looking like a princess

At Lourdes we waited in line for a really long time for a chance to go into the baths. This was after we had filled up some containers with the healing holy water, which just comes in a bunch of taps out of the wall. The Baths are somewhere you go if you want to be submerged in the water for a chance at healing, both physical and spiritual.

We waited in line for about an hour and a half, all the while led in prayer by a bunch of boys who sang and said the Rosary in French. They looked like they came from a private school or something, and they were very serious, enthusiastic, and good at what they did. I think they were maybe fifteen or so. I'm getting really good at saying the Hail Mary in French and Spanish, but I haven't gotten it down in German yet.

When you go in the baths, basically they have this complicated system where they wrap a big sheet around you and you have to take off all your clothes in one curtained area, and then when you go into the curtained area where the bath is, they wrap you in a white sheet and then they have you walk into the water, say your intentions, and then they have you sit down up to your shoulders in freezing cold springwater. My teeth were chattering the whole time and they kept asking me if I was all right.

They don't give you anything to dry off with once you get out, and they wrap you back up in the first sheet and have you walk back to the first curtained area, where they then hold the sheet so you can redress in privacy (but also you are soaking wet).

I'm not sure if I feel physically healed, although I know I certainly felt rejuvenated. My metabolism has been doing weird things since the trip since all we've had to eat really is pastries or carbs (it's the cheapest thing to buy), so I haven't felt super good today. I've stayed off the carbs and am going to try to rebalance my diet and eat at regular times instead of once in a blue moon or a bunch at once.

I don't know about spiritual healing either. Either way, it was an amazing opportunity to get to go into the baths at Lourdes.

I went to confession afterwards - they have a bajillion priests there, and I got a peppy British priest who reminded me of a cartoon character and was super sweet. After that we ran into a bunch of other Franciscan students including the May twins who were there with their older sister, Stephen the other dude from the gym, one of the RAs, another guy who randomly walks up and talks to people, and a few girls from the cliquey group who were there looking for the May twins.

It's different running into people off campus rather than when you're on campus. On campus it's a little more awkward, but when we were all meeting up, all tired and sweaty and gross and with adventures to tell, it got really exciting. Part of it was because we were with Leslie, who is really popular and is friends with everyone, and everyone was excited to see her, but they were also excited by extension to see us. Christian May even got so far as to run up to Leslie and hug her, then awkwardly decided to hug everyone else too which meant I got one. Christina Praetzel, an RA, came up and told us a story about how she and Stephen snuck into Notre Dame into a mass they weren't allowed to go to, begged the people in charge to receive the Eucharist there, and then got in trouble later from some other authorities (I guess they don't like tourists going to Mass in Notre Dame).

Anyway we went to Mass, and then after a nice dinner of pasta and wine at a little French shop on one of the avenues (we also indulged and got gelato that day, second day in a row), we went to the candlelight procession at Lourdes for Our Lady of Lourdes. Let me tell you this one was exactly the same as the one in Fatima except it was colder and it was also bigger.

Note about sharing rooms with people: it takes a special kind of roommate to realize that you don't have to keep chattering with someone to be friends with them while you are sharing a room in close quarters. There are a few people I know with this skill. Thank God both Leslie and Elizabeth share that skill, because I roomed with both of them on individual times and we were all just content to catch up with Wifi or just read or sleep without talking, and it was great. We did plenty of talking and joking other times anyway.

However, Elizabeth and I both entertained each other in our sleep. She talks in her sleep about cereal, and I make sad moaning noises. The second night, she tapped me on the head to wake me up and said something I couldn't understand, only it turns out she was sleeping, and once again I was making the sad moaning noises.

When Leslie and I shared a room we were both too wiped out to notice any noises from the other person.

The next day was a brief adventure to find breakfast, go down to the Sanctuary to put our candles from the candlelight procession from the night before, and then we hit the train for our final day-long journey back to Gaming.

This one was a little more hectic than the others but I think we're getting more experienced. Our journey from Lourdes all the way back to Paris went without a hitch, and our train was much nicer. French trains tend to be on the high-class scale as far as trains go.

At the Paris Montparnasse stop, thank goodness we had enough time to grab water - which was incredibly expensive, because French everything is incredibly expensive - and then we ran up and down the terminal amidst tons and tons of people looking for our train. We ran around like chickens with our heads cut off before finding the metro and getting on it and losing Kristie in the process, and then we had to go running back looking for Kristie, got on the metro, almost got smashed in the sliding doors because the car was so full, and thank goodness the French are much nicer than everyone says they are. They dragged us onto the metro forcefully before anything bad could happen, and we made it to Gare du Lyon, the second Parisian train station from which we needed to depart.

We went back and forth in the bus section of the station trying to find the train main lines, which are extremely well hidden and there are actually three doors to different train line sections, and our tickets didn't have marked which one we needed (the Diderot) section. I ended up taking off running from my group, grabbing a policeman by the arm (he looked over me before he looked down and saw me), and begging him for help. He directed us out to the train station, where we spent another 30 minutes racing around looking for the specific hall and the specific track our train would be at. (A very kind French lady stopped without being asked and pointed it out to us.)

We made it onto the train only to hear that something was going on - there was an accident somewhere down the line - and our train was going to be delayed about twenty minutes. We sat in terror for the next how long. We had by then been traveling for about twelve hours, with an overnight train to go. We really didn't want to have to reschedule that, especially because we had reserved a sleeper car for the next and almost-final leg of the journey. If we rescheduled, we'd be out both a sleeper car (maybe) and also getting back before the rush of returning Franciscan students.

We ended up talking to a few of the other people on the train who spoke German, and the next time an announcement came on the radio, they all looked up with gleeful expressions and waited until they repeated it in English. Turns out they said something about connecting trains being held for us... at the same platform? (Which made no sense, since there can only be one train per platform.)

So we leaped off the train and hit the ground running. Some people tried to help us, but someone caught a lucky glimpse of a sign that said that a train destination Budapest was taking off soon - it was directly down the platform from us, and we started running right as the conductor blew the whistle for the doors to shut. We started yelling "WAIT" at her, and when we got there we jumped onto the platform, asked if the train stopped at our stop, and when it turns out it did, we realized that we had made our final connection by the absolute skin of our teeth.

I have little more to add to the story - we made it back safely, we're super glad and tired, I got all my laundry done and showered and scrubbed myself completely clean. Now I've got to finish this up and probably ought to go get started on catching up on reading so that I can be ready for Monday, but I really don't want to. I've been back in Gaming since ten this morning and have done very little productive today and it's already seven-thirty. Why not laze around some more? There aren't a lot of people back and it's kind of great.

Final thoughts - everyone said the French would be really unhelpful but they were actually really sweet. As long as I approached them and said a French phrase first like 'excusez-moi' or 'avez-vous un moment?' they were perfectly willing to give me as much help as possible, even if it meant talking in French slowly so that I could interpret from there. In fact, everyone was willing to help us, and went above and beyond.

We ran into a Portuguese man on a train who wanted to tell us about how he was a veteran of the Vietnam war - I think he thought I was Vietnamese? And he couldn't communicate with us well, even though he was speaking Spanish.... if I asked him what he was saying or to say it slower he just mouthed it, which was even less helpful, or drew it with a finger on the chair, which was even less helpful. We ran into several groups of cheery French men who tipped their hats and said "bon-soir, mademoiselles!" or called us 'madame' and tried to help us when we were going the wrong way.

We also got several helpful recommendations from French shop owner ladies who were very gracious about us asking randomly for hostel locations or recommendations for places to eat.

In Portugal we had Nuno, of course, and many helpful Spanish-speaking people. I even managed to interpret a decent amount of Portuguese and I helped a group of Hispanic tourists who couldn't communicate with the Portuguese by speaking to them in Spanish. I had a lot of fun talking to people in Spanish - I could formulate what I wanted to say and got it understood, and it was a wonderful feeling. (They wanted to know where there was a place to light their votive candles and the shopowner had no idea what they were saying.)

We also ran into a sweet lady in a shop who was selling Leslie a St. Joseph statue, at which she tried to communicate to us by gesture how much she loves St. Joseph, and I watched them painfully communicate through waving their hands around, and then a little Italian lady came over to translate for us. The shop owner (Maria Jesus her name was), gave Leslie a St. Joseph medal for free and blessed us repeatedly, and the little Italian lady told us not to slip because we were beautiful and didn't deserve to fall.

We went back the next day and Leslie gave Maria Jesus her miraculous medal in exchange, and the little Italian lady wasn't there so I had to serve as interpreter. Maria Jesus pulled out a pamphlet about an American singer named Christopher Duffley and assumed that we knew who he was, and I managed to read the pamphlet in Portuguese because it's easier to read than to listen and translate that way, and Maria Jesus was really impressed and thankful that I knew what she was getting at. Anyway Leslie and Maria Jesus hugged and cried all over each other.

That's the kind of people we ran into - there were a lot of old people smiling at us and definitely glad to see young Catholics out and about. We felt really safe for the most part except for a few creepy guys in the metro, who I just ignored, and nobody pickpocketed us or even tried, I'm fairly certain. We ran into a couple of people on pilgrimage from California from Fatima to Lourdes and kept running into them at Lourdes and we traded spots to go and things we'd seen, which was really neat.

I don't think I contributed much to the group in the way of making reservations but I was definitely one of the mellowest, least-panicky people in the group, I made some decisions when the other girls were waffling, and I led the way and followed signs when they were busy panicking about where to go. I also served as the main interpreter and managed to humble myself enough to sound pretty stupid when asking for help.

I also managed to make a few friends. It was really cool to talk to them and get to know them a little better. I think it was a well balanced group and I felt truly included by the end, even if I hadn't been good friends with them for all the years they've been good friends. We went and got kebabs for dinner together at the stand in Gaming.

I also went to the Spar and got some food. Blessed, blessed food that isn't just bread. I was so freaking excited.

So overall I'm glad to be back. But it was pretty good. I regret a little bit that I didn't go with the other groups who went off to Croatia and Greece to hang out on the beaches, or to Florence or Venice, or hiking in Switzerland, but that's okay. I had my own experience and it was unique, and it's the best I could have asked for in the group-less situation I found myself in.