Sunday, April 19, 2009
I’m pretty sure this has been the craziest day of my life! It started out bright and early at 8am. We woke up and got ready for church and, in the dark, packed up everything that we own and stuffed it into our packs…so goes backpacking. Church started at 11:20am so we figured if we left at 10:15am that would give us plenty of time to get there, since we just had to take a short metro ride and walk a few blocks. Well when we got down to the metro we realized that we couldn’t just take the metro to where we thought, we had to take the metro then catch a train. The only problem with that is that we weren’t sure which train we needed to catch or where we needed to go to catch it. We thought that we should just go for it so we took the metro to where we needed to catch the train. When we got off the metro we figured that the train wasn’t really saving us anytime because it didn’t really look that far, plus we didn’t know where the train was or how to get tickets or when it left or anything like that, so we just decided to walk. Well…we walked and walked and walked. We walked on highways and bridges and almost went through a scary tunnel (Justin decided it was too scary so we took another route). We didn’t know exactly where we were or if we were close to the road we were supposed to be on or not. We figured that we were walking in the right direction and we were trying to follow the train tracks assuming that they would take us to the right road since we should have taken the train in the first place. I was a little skeptical however because the entire time we were walking by them, not a single train drove by. We were about to give up at this point since we’d been walking in unknown territory for about 45 minutes and we were still unsure if we were headed in the right direction. We figured that we would be blessed for trying to get to church even if we never made it. Then miraculously, after crossing over a major highway on a bridge I spotted one of the roads that were in our set of directions! I was ecstatic because that meant that we were at least going in the right direction! We decided that I would navigate because Justin kept telling us to go in the wrong direction so I was even more excited that we were going in the right direction. Sacrament was supposed to start at 11:20am and it was about 11:25am (according to our camera time) by the time we discovered we were actually going in the right direction so we were wondering if we should even go having probably already missed the Sacrament, but we kept on going. We walked some more, we probably walked a little over 3 miles to get to the church today in all, but we finally found it! I’m not sure exactly what time it was when we actually arrived at the church, we had left our maps, and our watch at the hostel and we were going off of the camera for time, but it isn’t very accurate. When we walked in people were singing a hymn and there was a guy in the foyer that was directing us where we needed to go. He handed us a headset and sat us down. We still weren’t sure at this point if we had missed the Sacrament or not, but then we recognized the hymn that they were singing as a Sacrament hymn! We made it! And right on time! (at least for the Sacrament) I really enjoyed going to church in Italy, there was such a strong spirit in that ward. It was so different from church in Iasi because in Iasi there are only about 10 members and this ward had at least 60! It was amazing! I also really enjoyed listening to the talks. For the past 3 ½ months everything has been in a language that I only partially understand so I haven’t been able to understand everything that goes on in church, but with this nifty little headset that the man at the front door gave me I was able to understand everything! Being able to listen to the speakers and partake of the Sacrament was just what I needed and was the perfect ending to such a crazy adventure. Little did I know that leaving church would be just as much of an adventure as getting there.
Justin and I had decided that since we were going to be in a new part of Rome that we hadn’t been in and that wasn’t heavily touristed that we would take advantage of this opportunity and have a look around. When we left the church building it was raining just a little, but we had no choice but to walk. Especially since we weren’t really sure exactly how we were going to get back home because we weren’t really up for another 3 mile hike down the freeway. We walked to a park and found some protection from the rain under some trees and sat down on a bench and ate our lunch. Well, about halfway through our lunch it started raining really hard so we left the bench and took cover under a tree that had a little more protection. We were stuck under that tree for about 40 minutes because of the rain. Luckily I had brought my jacket along, but too bad it wasn’t waterproof because I was pretty much soaked all the way through. Justin on the other hand had nothing but his church sweater on, so he was wetter than I was. It was pretty funny for the first 20-30 minutes being stuck under the tree in a rainstorm that is until our protection started leaking and we were both soaking wet and freezing cold! The rain let up a bit so we decided to make a run for it. We ran to a bus stop and luckily one of the buses was going to the train station, which was right by our hostel. We jumped on and spent the next 20 minutes freezing on Rome’s public transportation. Bring on the next adventure!
part 2 to follow soon. (didn't want to make this post too long!)
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