Dispatch from Barcelona, May 31, 2006

I’m sitting at a small kitchen table in our Barcelona apartment looking out at a rooftop “garden” five floors up. An apartment, you ask? Well, in our research we discovered that apartments are often the same rate as mid-priced hotels and you get a kitchen thrown in (and in our case a rooftop garden). It also makes you feel like a real Barcelonan when you walk down the street with a grocery bag. Well, we might feel like Barcelonans, but my tall blonde presence always seems to invite people to talk to me in either English or German. Jeanne, however, gets addressed in the language the country. She easily passes for French or Spanish as long as she doesn’t open her mouth.

We arrived from Geneva yesterday about noon. Let’s see if I can catch you all up in a paragraph or two. Last dispatch was from France. We were about to go to evening prayer at Taize. We did, and it was, again, a very moving experience. The thousands of young people (and a few old ones like us) gathered to sing and pray. At the end of every evening prayer, the monks or brothers all gather in the center of the vast church and bow in prayer in front of a large cross icon laid on the ground with candles on it. It’s hard to convey the power and beauty of this act. It’s meant as a sign of reconciliation and of a way of letting go of all the sufferings and sins of our lives as well as identifying with suffering people everywhere. After a long time of singing, the monks disperse along the edges of the church. They are there to pray or talk to anyone who wishes. This means they each know several languages in order to converse. After the monks leave the cross, visitors quickly take their place to pray. The praying and singing goes on for hours (we stayed only a half hour or so).

The next day (Saturday) we spent mostly in our lovely chateau reading. It was dreary and misty outside anyway. Around 3 in the afternoon, we saw the first rays of sun peak out and quickly got dressed and headed for a historical 13th century chateau in nearby Cormatin. It turned into a warm, sunny, glorious evening as we took a tour and then strolled the formal gardens in the full bloom of spring (which is, we’re told, a month or so late this year).

Sunday morning, we packed up and headed for Taize and the morning Eucharist. The worship was very similar to the Ascension service, with many of the same songs, which helped us become more familiar with them and sing “by heart.” We bought a Taize CD and listened to it much of the day, singing along as we breezed through the French countryside.

We had intended to go to Lyon that day and stay overnight, but on a whim decided to go to the Alps instead. (Why try to familiarize yourself with a big city for a day and a half when you can go hiking in the Alps? It was about a three-hour trip from near Taize to Mont Blanc, which is in France. We accidentally almost entered the Mont Blanc tunnel (miles long) which goes to Italy. But we made an illegal u-turn, and ended up in a little ski town called Les Houches (which we delightedly pronounced as “the hooches”). The next day turned out rainy, and Mont Blanc, which we had glimpsed the evening before, was now lost in the clouds. Rain was predicted for the day, so we hopped in the car and took off over a pass to Lake Geneva and Montreaux. As we went over the pass, the clouds lifted and we had some breathtaking views of the alpine valleys and snow-covered peaks. In Montreaux it started raining again, so we decided to head indoors on a tour of the famous medieval castle of Chillon (immortalized in Byron’s famous poem “The Prisoner of Chillon.” He scratched his name on one of the huge pillars in the dungeon where his “prisoner” was chained.)

We ended up in a hotel near the airport in Geneva by about 6 that night, thus making a complete circuit of Lake Geneva, including Mont Blanc. But then we discovered that I had left a good jacket (my only jacket) in “the Hooches” and decided to make a flying run up to Mont Blanc and back. We broke all French speed limits and ate at an Italian restaurant back in Geneva by 9 p.m.. Not bad! Bu the way, we think we may have set a record in those two days of crossing the Swiss/French border – at least five times. But then it’s harder to get into Canada than to cross any border in Europe—they would just boringly waved us through.

So, that brings us to Tuesday, I think, leaving for Barcelona at 10 a.m. We spent the afternoon getting familiar with the tiny apartment (Our landlord Philippe, looks just like Picasso and thankfully speaks great English), shopping in a super market, which like most European ones looks more like a gourmet food market, with full aisles of only varieties of vinegar, oils, or olives, with half an aisle for, say, cereal. Oh, and we tried unsuccessfully to get money out of countless bank machines in order to pay for our apartment. Philippe was incredibly generous in letting us wait a day. Our agreement had been that we only received the keys after we paid. Our Mishawaka bank was suddenly suspicious and we had to call and tell them where we were.

We spent the evening strolling the famous “Rambla,” the wonderfully colorful walk from the city center to the harbor, and ended up in a Catalan restaurant which, to my delight and Jeanne’s horror, turns out to specialize in cured meats and sausages.

For tonight , I just got tickets for a Czech orchestra concert in the concert hall, so today it’s Gaudi and Janacek—and the sun is just starting come out after an early morning shower. Time for morning prayers. Today as our Prayer book has it as the "Feast of the Visit of the BVM to Elizabeth,' which calls for at least the first half of the "Hail Mary."