Mountains

Mountains

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Finding mass in a language I speak is hard...

So I seem to be having pretty bad luck with finding a church with a mass in a language that I can understand... In Toledo I was trying to find the mass at the main cathedral but there was this huge National Eucharistic Congress going on and no one knew where or when mass was so I gave up after about an hour of looking because I had to get back to the hotel for a mandatory meeting. The mass was supposed to be in Spanish at 5pm but I couldn't find anyone to speak English and my Spanish is not very good at all.
I've been looking at a few different churches online that are close to where I'm staying for Sunday mass times. And I found one in English! So I left this morning to go find this church and to go to an English mass. It took me an hour and 20 minutes to find it, and I didn't even find the church I was looking for, I found a different one in the area. I heard bells ringing and singing so I followed this guy into one of the side chapels. Everyone is standing and there's no more room in the chapel so I stand at the back. As I'm looking around trying to figure out what part of the mass we're at, I notice that every single one of the women have their heads covered.... Oops, I didn't get that memo. So I start to settle down and try to pay attention to what's going on in the mass and it's definitely not English and definitely not Spanish. Our host mom speak Catalan on the phone a lot and it didn't sound like Catalan either. And the priest wasn't facing us but the alter and he was wearing really elaborate vestments. So I figure this could be a Latin mass, but everyone is bowing a lot and crossing themselves, which is not common in the Latin mass. And everyone is crossing themselves backwards from right to left, not left to right. So I stayed for about 40 minutes standing in the back and concluded that it was probable a Greek Orthodox mass, or some other similar branch. I left and figured I could just go the the main Cathedral of Barcelona.
And now I'm off to the Cathedral. On the internet it said that the Spanish mass is at 6:30pm. I'm hoping it is accurate. And these are some of the pictures I took when we were on a tour of the city.


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