Well friends, I was going to update you on the ongoings of my life, but shortly before I left for St Paul to help out with NET Training, my harddrive crashed. While I have everything backed up, I had to be without my laptop until Thursday afternoon. Unfortunately, my flight to St Paul left Thursday morning.
Pray for me for the next few weeks and I’ll have some more updates up at the beginning of September.
Peace!
Wow. That’s all I can really say after spending the past 2 weeks down-under. I’ll try my best to hit the highlights without turning this into a 20 page essay. Nobody wants to check my grammar anyway.
The whole reason for the trip was of course, World Youth Day, a large gathering of youth and young adults that is highlighted by Mass with Pope Benedict.
So we left Hawaii around 2:30 PM on Thursday the 11th and arrived in Sydney about 7:00 PM on Friday the 12th. We went around the dateline and a 10 hour flight turned into a 29 hour time difference. It’s all very confusing and I’m sure there was a flux-capacitor involved, but nonetheless, we were down under.
We spent the first night at Olympic Park where we, for lack of a better term, froze. It’s winter down here and the night we arrived just happened to be one of the coldest nights in Sydney yet. Our accommodations were never really explained to us other than that they would be “Simple”. Apparently simple is an Australian word for “concrete floor of an airport hanger with 3,000 other people.” After being up for an extremely long time, I got about 45 minutes of sleep that night and spent most of Sunday in a fog. Luckily that fog cleared long enough for me to spot a flyer for a hotel across the street that was giving rooms to pilgrims for $50/person. Somehow, rooms were still available and we quickly made our way over to the Ibis Hotel.
After dropping our stuff we headed to St. Mary’s Cathedral where Sunday Mass was being said. Ironically, Mass was being celebrated by Bishop Martin Holley of Washington D.C. who happened to be a priest from the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee before being appointed to our Nation’s Capital. I decided to try and track him down after Mass when I ran into Joe, a fellow FSU alum who I saw last about 3 years ago in St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. He and I somehow worked our way back toward the Sacristy where we blended in with some seminarians who were saying hello to Bishop Holley. After receiving a blessing from the Bishop, I joined the rest of the NET Alumni that I am here for lunch and then a tour of St. Mary’s Cathedral.
Here’s the cool part. The coffin of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassatti, a soon to be Saint from Italy, had been brought to Sydney for World Youth Day from Turin. His body was laying in the Cathedral just to the side of the altar. I joined a sea of pilgrims in taking some time to venerate and ask this blessed man to pray for me.
Next we took a tour of the Greater Sydney area with a guide named Stephen. We were the only group on the bus so he gave us a private tour around some of the more beautiful lookouts around Sydney. He also shared some terribly bad jokes and random Aussie trivia. Did you know:
Nobody drinks Fosters
Australia was not settled as a Prison colony, it was actually settled to control the trade routes to Asia. The prisoners were brought as a work force.
Over 80% of the continents population lives on the East Coast.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
That night all the pilgrims were admitted to a professional Rugby game at the Olympic Park stadium. It was the Paramatta Eels vs. the team Russell Crowe owns, the South Sydney Rabbitohs. We were told to root for South Sydney because they were the underdog, have a coldie and eat a meat pie. We did all three and all three were successes except the meat pie. It was kind of like eating a nasty liquid hamburger in a piecrust. I was not a big fan.
We tucked in the day by heading back to the hotel where I stood in a very hot shower for a very long time and then headed off to bed.
Just a little about my first impressions of Australia.
The money is ridiculous. There are 1 and 2 dollar coins that are gold and change that is silver. The money is colored and looks like it’s made of plastic. Everyone drives on the wrong side of the road and everyone is nice. I mean really nice. I never saw anyone who was angry and anytime we had questions, people gave us quick answers with a smile and a “No Worries.”
The other strange thing is Sydney is laid out almost identically to Chicago. The trains run the same way, the city itself looks similar and the suburbs are divided the same way (north suburbs, western suburbs, south side) Even though I had never been there it was pretty easy to navigate around.
Next time I’ll give you the run down of World Youth Day and Getting close to the Pope!
G’Day