Pisa

There is surprisingly more to Pisa than a leaning tower.

You can't even see the tower from the train station (which, by the way, is a wonderful to arrive in Pisa- the train from Florence is superbly short and cheap and totes worth it), and, if you happen to travel on the day after Pentecost, which is also the second Monday of the month, you'll find that many things are closed, such as the visitor's information center. You will, however, find a helpful sign telling you that buying knock-off products is illegal in Italy. Useful.

Christine and I had met a bookshop worker from Canada at the camping ground we were staying at and she had proposed the day trip out to see this city. Kelsey was great to hang out with, from talking to navigating to taking (or attempting to take) pictures of each of us holding up the tower. Together we explored the city. It was quite a worthy day.

We found this map of Pisa on the wall of a cafe

 and didn't really take it seriously, though it was the only map we had. We walked down the main street and looked for signs for the tower. On the way, we found a roman bathhouse, called Nero's Palace by the locals, I think.

We turned a corner, trying to figure our way around after being distracted by the bathhouse and I stopped and pointed. There it is, you know, just chilling in the background. The Leaning Tower of Pisa.

There are moments (be prepared for many of them from Rome) that are extraordinarily surreal. The Leaning Tower of Pisa does actually exist. I was there. Along with many other people.And to think that the people who live in this town have always had this in their backyard. They might drive to work in the morning and look in their rearview mirror (if, in fact, Italian drivers use this object in their cars, which often move quickly and with little adherence to traffic laws) and see the tower. It's normal for them. Life is weird.

One piece of advice, if I'm allowed to offer it, is that it is more difficult than you think to get a picture of yourself holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. First off, you have to find the best place to do it, and you'll end up standing alongside quite a few other people trying to do the same thing. You have to work out the kinks and the angles and how close you should be to the camera and where the person should standing holding the camera... it's a little bit of a nightmare. A worthy nightmare, in my opinion, but still a nightmare.

Though it often leads to hilarity.

You can climb the tower, but we opted for the church.

Dome not included.

 The cathedral floorplan is cruciform and there are side aisles with chapels and fancy things and on that long day in Pisa, I was quite honestly over looking at churches. I've seen this all. I mean, there are interesting things about this church, like all others. Like, the big fancy pulpit was actually put into storage after a fire in 1595 because people didn't really like it, but then recovered during renovations in 1926 and put back out. Just to put your life into perspective, construction on the cathedral began in 1093. That pulpit probably sat in the main nave for 400 years before getting put away. Also, there's a lamp beside the pulpit that hung in the exact same place as a lamp that Galileo reportedly saw swinging during mass and thought of the law of the pendulum.

Which shows how interesting the service was.

No, really, it's a nice building but being tired and slightly sick and hungry tends to wear on a person and it kinda knocks the inspiration out of you. So I took pictures for the team (Christine and Kelsey's cameras were both out of battery) and then we went to get lunch.

Then we saw a tower.

And decided to walk to it. It was farther than we thought. I loved walled cities. And, to conclude this stream of consciousness sentence, Galileo!

After we took pictures with the statue of Galileo (really far from the center of town),

we ventured over to a playground and brought out our inner child. Our inner children stuck around and sang Veggie Tales all the way back to the Leaning Tower.

You know, there's this legend that Galileo stood atop the Tower of Pisa and dropped two metal balls of different weights to prove to people that objects fall at the same rate, regardless of mass. It goes against the thoughts of the previous natural philosophers, but that didn't seem to bother Galileo. He also dropped a hammer and a feather to show that air resistance has an effect on objects like the feather, leading us to think that smaller objects fall more slowly. The Apollo astronauts repeated the experiment on the moon, just to prove that, in a vacuum, gravity acts the same on all objects.

I love places that have stories like that. I love that I've been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that place that we all pronounced as Pizza when we were kids and were slightly disappointed that there wasn't a huge tower of pizza in Italy. (In Italy's defense, there is wonderful pizza and pasta and budget-breaking wonderful food.) And even though I tramped back to the train station with tired feet, I loved my day in Pisa. After all, I had seen a tower, a church, an astronomer and a playground. What more could a person want in a day?

St. James Episcopal Church

So Sunday in Florence rolled around and I chickened out. I had asked a friend of mine who had recently spent some time in Florence where she would recommend going to church and she said the Duomo, at least once, just for the experience. She also mentioned an English speaking church that she liked. And I really really really really meant to go the Duomo again, but.. I have no will power when you promise me English at a service. St. James is actually known as the American Church in Florence. I was just beginning the homesickness we all knew was going to strike, so I could honestly not resist a chance to go to a church service I could have a chance at understanding.

I ended up walking across town and was still without a reliable method of judging time, so when the church bells started ringing at 10:30, I was convinced I was late for the service and I almost walked back to the campground. But then I realized that I could just sneak in anyway and that I could explain why I was late to these people BECAUSE THEY SPOKE ENGLISH and I kept on walking. It was a beautiful realization.

I was actually a good twenty minutes early to the service and so I poked around the church for a couple of minutes, unsure of where to be. I ended up walking up to the balcony, which looked like this:

Awesome stained glass window.

And this wonderful blessed pile of things and coat hangers.

I never, ever, ever thought that a pile of old things covered in fabric and stored away would make me feel better and slightly less homesick, but it did. Old things donated and over-used signal a church to me (come on, you know you've all wondered where those couches came from in your youth longue and how many decades they've been there). It was honestly, honestly like being home. I almost cried. Over a pile of junk. Travelling, as has been stated, does crazy things to a person.

The service itself was wonderful. There was a procession to a hymn in a real hymn book, and even though some of the things the Episcopaleans did (they brought the Bible out into the middle of the congregation to do the gospel reading! Whoa!) surprised me, it was still pretty familiar. They didn't ignore the fact that they were in Italy, though- the Gospel reading was read first in Italian and then in English.

It was Pentecost, you know, the day the Holy Spirit came down with tongues of fire and then people could speak in each other's languages? Man, I think about that story all the time. "Gee, I wonder what we're talking about." "Gosh, it'd be wonderful to know what I'm saying right now. Maybe I'll google it later." "Oh, for the love of all that is good and holy, I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON." Being an English-speaking community in an Italian city, the congregation of St. James is pretty used to the difficulties that communication across the language barrier can bring. So I found it interesting that the first story the priest told was about the best sermon he ever heard, going to a church in France.

He doesn't speak French.

Now, I've had this experience so many times it sent me running to the first English speaking church I could find. How in the world could the best sermon you heard be in a language you don't understand? Is this some preacher joke, like when they talk about finishing up early to we can all get to the K&W for lunch? Then he went on to talk about how the French priest had talked with such love and compassion, you could tell that he cared about each and every person listening to the sermon. It was amazing to the priest preaching to me in Florence how so much could be said without words, how many of the right things we want to hear coming out of the church could be communicated regardless of linguistics.

I want to hear a sermon like that.

So we all lined up to walk out the door and shake hands on the way out and I honestly can't tell you anything about the architecture of the building. They had a pretty organ? There were stained glass windows? Oh! Saving face! It was a hall church with an apse that enclosed the chancel! Yes! *does happy dance*

But I loved going to St. James. I loved shaking hands on the way out and having someone actually living in Florence recognize where North Carolina is. I loved signing in English (singing! So good!) and I don't care that I potentially missed out on the architecture of the building, since I got to understand the church.

Orsanmichele

I don't even remember what I set off looking for when I set off on our first afternoon in Florence. I was probably just trying to orient myself, looking for the cathedral and being able to place other buildings that I might want to visit. And, in an increasingly common turn of events that I hope I can turn into a metaphor for something significant rather than an embarrassing facet of my personality, I got distractedly lost. There was this big square building with statutes of saints, etc, outside. Add the sign and the beggar outside, and I knew I was right outside of a church. So I poked my head in. It happens.

The inside is also just a square building, but pretty well decorated. Then you look to the side and you notice this huge cage of gold and curly things. It's a tabernacle around a picture of Mary and Baby Jesus (yes, Baby Jesus gets two capital letters. Don't ask me why). On the left, there's an altar to St. Anne (the mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus, according to wikipedia [not attested to in the canoncial gospels, which is why most of us don't know what that is... I think {don't tell me all my friends secretly knew of St. Anne and never told me!}]). My parenthesis are getting ridiculous.

It's quiet and cool and nice. There was this guy walking around with a nametag, which made me think he was an official sort of person, but then he stopped to read the sign explaining the history of the building and this made me think that he just stopped in on his way back to work, which made me think even more of him. Then he stopped someone from taking a picture and blew that illusion. Still, as far as church guards go, he's one of the nicer ones I've met. And he did read the sign, which is more interest than most church guards I've seen.

The history of the church is actually pretty interesting. It started out as a granary, or a place to store and distribute grain, but then someone drew a picture of Mary on a pillar. People started to pay their respects to the new picture of Mary just as do for all the ones on the street corners, and, after a miracle happened, the number of devoted grew so large that they couldn't use the room as a granary anymore. They moved the grain upstairs and the chutes they used to distribute it to the ground floor can still be seen.

Eventually, the guilds in Florence turned the whole thing into a church (now with a museum on the second floor) and commissioned Florentine artists to design each guild's contribution to the church. The statues on the outside of the building drew me in. I didn't take pictures, but Wikipedia can show them to you better than me if you click here! Donatello gets to make another appearance in my blog, which is a total win.

I love this church's story. I love that the current building was made to be a place of commerce and that the faithful turned it into a holy place. So many of the buildings I see were built for the purpose of housing a church. It's wonderful to see one that grew into that duty. Even though it might now just be a stop for tired sightseers, to whom any cool quiet place out of the sun is a welcome respite, at one point in time, faithful people caused businessmen to change their plans. And I like seeing that.

Florence Duomo

The cathedral in Florence is huge.

One of my selling points for my proposal for this whole thing was that you simply can't get an idea of what being in these spaces is like from a book. My primary example of this was the size of most of these cathedrals- I can tell you that the building is 502 feet long (like a football field and a half), 124 feet wide, 295 feet wide at the transept (which is almost a football field- sorry, I have no other good conception of distance [silly marching band]) and 75 feet tall... in the nave of the cathedral. It's 375 to the top of the dome.

I just...

I can't...

Like, what even? 

It's just massive. It's impressively big. Which is part of the reason why it was begun in the first place.

The Duomo di Firenze (or the Cattedrale Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Mary of the Flower [the flower being the lily, the symbol of Florence]) was actually built after the cathedral in Pisa and a couple of other less-well-known cathedrals around the area. It was built with public funds and set up as a state church in a response to these churches. They started construction in 1296 and finished the nave about a hundred years later (there were plagues and things holding up the project) and the dome in 1436. They pulled out all the local artist stops, which, considering the local artists were people like Donatello, is pretty awesome. Though, I always feel obligated to point out this graph when I talk about Donatello. The end product was the largest dome in the world until modern times. It's even bigger than the dome in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and was, in fact, a model for domes after it.

It's an impressive building. The exterior is white, green and red marble (mostly white) and it's part of this complex including the baptistery across the way.

It dominates the view of the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo, about a mile and a half away. Climbing up the dome was the worst climb I've ever done, but the view from the top was absolutely gorgeous, so, still, my vote falls in with actually doing dome climbs.

I may have already used this one, but it's so pretty. Soooo preeetttyyyy.

At the same time, you know, with all the impressiveness, it didn't strike me as a particularly holy place. There's an excavation downstairs, which is cool, but right beside it is the gift shop. The gift shop. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think you should be selling things in a church. Outside the walls, in an ajoining building, sure. But actually in the church? Hmmm. Though, in the gift shop's defense, it is downstairs.

And see, the thing is, with these huge buildings, you have these side chapels (the top and arms of the cross, since it's normally laid out in a cruciform plan) and that's normally where mass is held. That huge nave? It's used for the bigger mass ceremonies, I presume like Christmas and Easter, but most of the time, it's only filled with tourists.

And I hate tourists.

Like, I really hate tourists in churches.

I mean, I realize that I act like one, but I generally acknowlege the purpose of the building, you know, as a place dedicated in name if not in practice for the worship of the God of the world's largest monotheistic religion, a gathering place for the faithful, a place of spiritual significance for people. But the person complaining loudly on their way out the door that they can't view a chapel because mass is about to be held in there or the group coming to a consensus that this visit was a waste of their time or the tourist with their camera who steps in front of a person praying in the pews to get a better picture of who knows which window Donatello designed, all these people are missing the point of the building.

Though if they were taking this picture I might be more understanding.

You know, maybe they're not. Maybe all these places I visit are just tourist traps now, designed to intimidate and remind people of the power of the bishops and the cardinals and the pope and the people associated with them. The Duomo has plenty of pictures and statues of the nobles who helped to fund its construction. And it does have a gift shop in its basement.

But I'm a bit opposed to this kind of cynicism. Because I remember that first moment of wonder as I stepped into the large, empty gothic nave.

And I like wonder.

Florence

On our first day in Florence, we were so entranced with the view from our campground that we didn't even leave the porch of the common area. I wrote and thought and in general enjoyed life and the cool air blowing off of the end of the Appenines in the distance.

On the second night in Florence, we walked over from our hostel to the Piazza Michelangelo to watch the sunset. There's a big copy of Michelangelo's David up there and so, along with what must have been half the tourist population of Florence, we watched the lovely sun sink into the bank of clouds just above the river. It was kinda crazy beautiful.

The next day, we spent time in the city, walking across that big famous bridge and finding our way to that one square, where we decided to meet up again. I headed over to the Duomo, climbed the dome unintentionally (the signs aren't particularly clear),

This: Unintentional.

This: The perk of unintentional excursions.

 got lost on my way back, found Santa Croce,

It's got a big tower, like the place I was looking for.

which was on my list to visit, and then proceeded to sit around for an hour listening to a man playing movies themes on guitar (The Godfather is popular over here) before another woman waiting on a friend informed me it was after 8. I was supposed to meet Christine at a quarter to six.

I hiked back up these stairs

They haunt my dreams.

 and found Christine at the campground (no, really, cellphones are wonderful things) and enjoyed talking to the people around the place. Campgrounds are a little different from any other place we've stayed. There's a lot more families in motor homes, a lot of people spending a long time enjoying the view rather than running on to see the next big thing. Florence is a city of the Renaissance. Painters, thinkers, scientists all came from or to here, beginning or continuing changes we still feel today. The science museum here is named after Galileo, who (I think) did some of his initial experiments with telescopes from here. And yet it is not a city that forces its history on you or demands that you fill up your itinerary or your evenings. I loved it.

On Sunday, I went to St. James Episcopal Church, the American church in Florence, because it was Pentecost and I desperately wanted someone who spoke in my own language. It was the beginning of week three and, if you hadn't heard, there's this rule of the threes- apparently, at three weeks and three months and three years, you get this crazy sadness or homesickness or something, Silly superstitions aside, I really needed to hear a Protestant church service in English. The only thing that could have done my heart more good would have been a Methodist hymn sing, but those are as hard to come by over here as Sundrop.

Sunday afternoon, Christine and I went exploring again, to attempt to find the museum that the real David's housed in to make a reservation. I gave Christine the map and we found our way to where we were supposed to be, stopping in this eerily deserted square first. After resting for a few moments, watching the pigeons attack the man on the horse, we decided to look around. It was a warmer day, so shorts and a tank top were called for. There was a children's hospital or maybe a museum that was confusing off to one side, and then a basilica on another. The basilica was having an all-day Pentecost prayer vigil, but I'm quiet and respectful and I figured sticking my head in wouldn't hurt anything. This little old lady stopped us just inside the door, though, pointing at our legs and our shoulders and lecturing us in Italian. We whispered that we were going and she kept on talking. I caught a glance of a ceiling like the one in Venice before we left.

I've never been thrown out of a church before. It's a new experience. God must really hate my knees. (PS, I definitely understand that I was inappropraitely dressed per cultural norms and that I should be more respectful when I enter another person's sanctuary and that my last comment is slightly uncalled for. Then again, I was just thrown out of a church. Go ahead and blame me.)

Still, wandering around and finding the museum closed (and closed on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. Sensical? No.) and wandering back was a good way to clear the air and remind myself of the beauty of this city. Maybe I loved resting here too much. There's definitely more to see than I saw, but I don't know that I'd trade one morning for another site to see and memorize for later description.

Our time in Florence ended with a surprise trip to Pisa, which was quite nice. It's wonderful to meet people and travel with them on their pre-planned adventures, and this was such an adventure as to merit its own post. On Tuesday, we took an afternoon train to Rome, piling once again onto a bus that careened along streets full of Italian drivers and motorcyclists, who like to think that they can drive anywhere they wish. This is partially true and totally frightening on a bus. On our way to our hostel, I was distracted by an old man whistling to himself and then a cheerful English speaking group singing together on the bus. Now, with the air full of people busy with their lives, it's easy to see how people got stuff done in the 16th century.

Can't get too comfortable with magic, afterall.

Basilica San Marco

Would you hate me if I didn't write a long blog post about St. Mark's? Because it didn't really do anything for me. I got lost and walked in the wrong end of the building because it's right by the Patrician's palace and that has a huge museum that I walked around in FOREVER before making it to the line and then I kinda sorta ducked under the ropes because no one was around to tell me where to go and I just figured I'd head in and they got the couple that came in before me because they had a backpack but I just had my purse so I slipped in with this tour group and then wandered around inside except there's not much to see because all the interesting stuff, even one of the side altars, cost money and I was spending entirely too much on my hostel to pay money for some other treasury that I didn't want to see and it was dark and big and gold, which I think fits the city- you know, pretty and rich, but you don't feel like you could live here- and they didn't even allow pictures inside, not to mention that the guards were super intimidating, and anyway, I needed to find the church that they had in the Last Crusade, because clearly I have a one track mind when it comes to things in Venice and that one track does not involve keeping up with the time so that my friend isn't stuck outside reading her book and waiting on me (man, are cellphones useful things) while it could, potentially be raining.
Also, the entrance to the church is on ramps because the city floods at high tide.

And there are pigeons.

Here, to make it up to you, I give you a string of picture of churches and a cute little girl holding pigeons, which is the thing to do in San Marco Piazza.

This is actually the side of San Marco.

Front of San Marco.

Indiana Jones Church! San Barnaba. 

See, isn't she precious? Wasn't it worth it for this?

I just can't help myself. I love this lion.

Also, gondoliers.

Venice

It's raining in Venice.

I can hear it quietly pounding away on the stones outside our window, often masked by the sounds of the restaurant next door or children running in the street, shouting in Italian before being shushed by the matronly figure in charge. The rain makes a good backdrop for the musical scene that every Italian sentence creates to my ears. I love listening to the rising and falling of phrases, comparing them to the crescendos and decrescendo, subito pianos and marcatos to which I have grown accustomed.

The rain on the canal is a sight to see as well, each drop adding to the volume of water passing underneath bridges, supporting boats, docks, the city itself. I've heard that it's much prettier to take pictures of the gondoliers when there aren't deformed spheres of water falling from the sky, when the light from the sun can pass around the semi-crystalized lattices of water to reflect off the colors of the buildings, the small waves in the water, the paint on the boats. But this is more than likely the Venice I'll know, slipping with every step as I try to find a few of the many places of interest on the maps.

It's frustrating to know that this place, known for its beauty in the sunlight, is going to pass by me in the rain, while I'm still under the fog of a cold and distracted by the next steps on our journey. I need to play catch up, typing up stories from buildings now far distant, but my attention is caught by the sounds outside my window, as it has been for the past two weeks. In short, this city, with its many churches, canals, buildings, shops, stories, people, will become a footnote on the journey of my summer, more than likely the place where I'll complain that the internet was sketchy and the weather was worse.

But quietly, internally, I'll remember the walk in the cold rain that started in the afternoon, jumping over the quickly growing puddles to slide on the stones of the wayward streets of a city that will, for these years of my life anyway, remain a mystery to me. I'll remember the alleys that deadend in a canal, the open space that leads to the river and a view of the other islands surrounding this place, this city on stilts above the Po river, feeding Italy with the water flowing beneath houses and homes.

Ah, Venice.

[Edit: It was actually quite nice the next day and we went to St. Mark's Square and I saw the basilica and then I found the church that they used in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and I took quite a few pictures which will soon be on Facebook. And then it rained again. The end.]

Vienna to Venice

I'm a little saddened to think that trains will have less magic for me after this trip.

After all, I've spent a substantial amount of time jumping from city to city on trains, watching the countryside sweep by as I sit stationary, doing my best to be more philosophical about the whole ordeal than thinking of Chocolate Frogs, Dementors and Scabbers. I've even spent the night on a train, in the rather cramped space of the middle bunk in a 6 bunk sleeper. I think I would slept better in a seat.

I just couldn't get to sleep, first watching Austria slip by, then staring intently overhead to watch the first stars come out. I was convinced I was going to see wonderful stars this night, since trains clearly travel through the country, where there are no city lights to block out the nightsky. I got frustrated with my space and the late setting sun and so eventually I quit straining and rolled over, ready to let my eyes rest for an extended period of time.

Something woke me up hours later. It was much darker in the cabin- maybe they had dimmed the lights in the hall. I rolled onto my back because the arm I had been sleeping on was tingling, asleep, and opened my eyes to look around.

Holy. Everything.

You could see the Milky Way. There were so many stars. I lay back and stared at the wonder of it all, unsure of my bearings in an unfamiliar slice of the sky. Have you ever seen it, a darkened sky on a clear night, with no human light to drown out what must be the divine light reaching us from so far away? Do you know what our galaxy looks like from our home, the permanent cloud in the sky that so many legends have been told about? Have you ever seen so many stars that the sky doesn't become a simple connect the dots but instead offers you shading, a billion brilliant lights twinkling more spectacularly than any photograph or word can capture? Have you seen it?

I remember each and every time I've seen a sky like this. Twice, before I could point out a single full constellation, I lay underneath a sky like this. Once, I stood outside a huge telescope, pointing a smaller optical instrument at the newly risen Juptier, looking at its cloud bands and moons. You could see the galaxy rising up like steam from Sagittarius and even though I laughed at the teapot idea then, I sat amazed at the stories that had been told about these dots in the black above us.

Once, I lay on a mountain side with some of the best people I've ever met, watching shooting stars fly against the black. This is one of my favorite memories, one I hide away and glance at only when the real stars begin to compare to the ones I saw on that night. Even though it was summer, we lay under blankets to guard against the cold of a sunless sky, and prayed. I prayed for the brokeness I'd seen in people, in lives, in all these problems around us, staring into a sky so untouched by it all. I can believe it, you know, when I'm looking at the stars, that there's something bigger than all the things that tie us to this tiny little planet. It's awesome and awful, to look and think of these objects so distant from us, yet powerful enough to remind us nightly of their existence. They're a beautiful, beautiful reminder of the things in the universe that we can't own, can't touch, can't steal, can't ruin. We can only block them out, forget to be reminded, stop our children from seeing the grandeur of the sky they've inherited.

I used to think knowing the constellation stories would ruin the sky for me. If I knew the pictures others had seen, I would lose the ability to see my own stories up there. But as I lay on the train and watch the sky change as we rounded a corner, I picked out the Bigger Dipper and then the rest of Ursa Major, then  Ursa Minor, then Draco. I waited for the sky to turn again to better see Lyra or Aquilla or Cygnus.

For thousands of years, people have seen these stars. People from every culture have told stories about the things they see in the sky above them, the stars being so constant a company of companions as to become ordinary. For thousands more, a sky like this will hide behind our clouds of light, blocking us from this universal sharing. We'll forget. And we'll be quite surprised when we see it again. Amazed. Awed.

And so, in a way, the nighttime sky, this plethora of stars against the black, is like the Church. The real Church, the functioning Body of Christ that the early followers of Jesus heard about from a converted Jew named Paul. For many years, there were stories told, dots connected among the truths we knew. Learning continued, and other people saw the dots connected in a different way, but the tradition of the learning grew and the studying continued. Then we allowed it to become clouded by the things we've created, and so we've blocked out the things that might be shared by all, the good and wonderful things that remind us of our place in all the bigness that is out there. And it amazes us when we see it again, when we see the Church actually working among the churches.

But it doesn't much matter which stories you learned from the sky. I don't think any one grouping of stars is any more correct than another. It's all we've got, really, the ways we reflect ourselves in the black. And I don't feel so afraid anymore about knowing more about the stories people told. I knew where I was going in the sky as I found my familiar constellations, but I was still left to wonder about the many more hiding amist the black. There's so many things left to learn, so many stories to tell, to teach, to share.

The Church in the Sky.

Peterskirche

You get to learn the dates of many feasts of the Catholic Church when you visit places in Europe. For example, our first day looking around Vienna happened to coincide with the 40th day after Easter, the day of the Ascension. Many of the shops were closed, though the churches were open, but there's only a select few of us that think that churches are interesting enough to make up an entire day's occupation. We're the same group of people who will go google the stories of the saints when we learn to whom each altar in the church is dedicated.

Ooo ooo, I know this one! St. John of Nepomuk! I don't even have to look up how to spell Nepomuk anymore!

But a whole day of trying to find something to do in a city in another country where they don't speak English, where you can't figure out why nothing is open and where you are having extraordinary difficulty deciding what to do for lunch and/or dinner (you're not quite sure what time it is either) on top of travelling to so many different places can do something crazy to a person. You can become quite unreasonably angry with your friend and leave her on the metro back to the hostel while you hop the next train back into the city to sulk.

It was in this rather disquieted state of mind that I magically found my way to St. Peter's Church or Peterskirche in German. I had walked by this church before the last time I was in Vienna, I was sure, and even though I had determined earlier that day that I was going to focus on Stephansdom while I was in Vienna, the bells were ringing the evening mass as I walked by and I figured it couldn't hurt me to go to church. I would just sit down somewhere and write mean things otherwise.

Peterskirche is not a big church. It's baroque and it's impressive with its decoration, but it had already quite filled up by the time I walked in. I had to sit in a chair beside the raised pews with no kneeling rail. This mean that during mass, when I generally play a game of monkey-see, monkey-do with the knowledgable people around me, I couldn't imitate their kneeling. It was still good though, to listen to the congregation chant their way through mass and to contemplate things as I looked around the room, wondering what in the world the sermon could be about.

The confessional booths were open and I had never seen one of these things in action before. The ones in Peterskirche were also new to me because they had these little side nooks that you kneeled at and then whispered yours sins to the priest. Man, I want more privacy than that. If I have to say everything I've done wrong since my last confession, I don't want any chance of that mess getting around (that's what she said... and now I would have even longer of a list). But the booths are distant enough from the main nave, I guess, taking up some wall space in some of the side altars, so I just watched as a mini-priest in the making, a proud middle school boy, made his way over to the booth early on in the service to get those sins off his chest before taking communion. A little line formed, mostly men, though the boy's mother also went over to the booth (is it allowed to go both ways? I feel like moms should be able to get some information from the priest. They're all in cahoots anyway). It's a character study, watching their faces change as they approach confession and after they leave it. And hey, body language was the only thing that was making sense to me at the time.

After mass, the church cleared out but I couldn't bring myself to leave. I mean, I didn't particularly want to look around, because I was still mad and sad and stuff, but the people who stayed to pray had me glued to my seat. OK, this is kinda a lie and this is where I make my decision. Sometimes you just get tired of secularizing everything.

I believe in God. I believe God does mighty and wonderful things in the world today, sometimes through the Church and sometimes not. I believe God hears me when I pray and I believe that He doesn't judge me on the way that my prayers get to Him, so even though I feel a little insolent doing it in one of these fancy churches with enough decorations on the ceiling to scare anyone away from staring intensely at it, I will stare intensely at the ceiling because that's the easiest way for me to focus my attention on the task at hand, and I have found that I can pray for the hour and a half between mass and the evening organ concert and barely notice my butt going numb from the tiny wooden pew that I absconded post-mass.

Because sometimes, God needs to hear it. God needs to hear my confusions and my frustrations as much as He needs to hear my joys and my praises. God needs to hear my confessions and my failings as much as He needs to remind me of my blessings and my suceedings. God needs to hear when I am worried about the Church and He needs to hear what I have to say in praise of the Church. And I couldn't think of a better place to do this than the one I currently inhabited. It also doesn't hurt to send up a prayer or two for people you may or may not have left on metro trains, even though we're both capable adults and the metro stop is stupid close to the hostel. You know, just in case.

Then I let myself get distracted by the room. I'm getting to like the stories churches tell. I like recognizing the altars (St. John of Nepomuk, St. Barbara, St. Michael, St. Anthony).

I like looking at the different ways people choose to portray Biblical figures.

OK, so I don't really know who this is, but isn't that the coolest effect ever?!

 Of course, there's always people in the room. It's impossible not to be slightly miffed by the tourists that forget that you're in a church, that click two photos of the interior and talk too loudly to the people around them before moving on, but this can be countered if, say, a caring husband leaves his pregnant wife waiting patiently at the pews while he goes to fetch a priest to talk about a christening ceremony for the little not-yet-born human that will soon occupy all of their time. Then you can watch as one of the other priests, quicker at changing, comes over to talk to the pregnant wife like they're old family friends and watch the way she reacts, all comfort and smiles and quietly told stories, respectful but happy in the space she's in. You can sit back as the husband comes back, priest in tow, completely focused on getting back to his wife, smiling at her as he approaches. This little scene can give you a good bit of encouragement for the Church, if a place like this, so full of shiny things that they're willing to give you a printed guide at the door to help you sort it out, can still be bothered to do the simple care of a congregation. It can make you smile as you go back to your prayers.

I thumbed through the pamphlet on the objects in the room as I waited the extra half hour for the organ concert to start. The free concert, by the way, was something kinda crazy beautiful. They had singers as well, and they did Ave Maria, which I had done with my youth choir back home and dearly loved and my heart soared for a song I understood. All in all, it was beautiful. But before I got distracted by that, I was distracted by the top paragraph on the back of the pamphlet. "Before leaving, do look again at the painting aboce the main altar.

This work of art (by M. Altomonte) portrays the healing of the lame man by St. Peter and St. John at the Beautiful Gate in Jerusalem. Before you leave the church you might pray for the unity of all Christians. St. Peter's has worked for this goal since 400 AD."

See, the Ascention is when Christ left us all to deal with each other, you know, Love one another as I have loved you, etc. 400 years later, this church began its work trying to make that kind of unity true. It's all good, though. I can't think of a better place to celebrate the beginning of the churches' time together.

Stephansdom

St. Stephen's Cathedral is that church in Vienna. It's the metro stop you get off at when you want to go into the old city and mostly everything fans out from the square in front of the cathedral.

Kinda intimidating, actually.

I had three people tell me to go there, one by name because you simply have to visit Stephansdom if you're visiting churches in Vienna, one because the outside was amazing, even though it's partially (perpetually) under construction and one because they have these colored filters in front of the windows so when the sun comes in, it looks like a laser show in a gothic cathedral. All of these seem like valid reasons to check out the building.

There are so many churches in Vienna. There's Maria vom Siege, Our Lady of Victory, right down the road from my hostel. There's Peterskirche, but more on that later. There's the big church in Karlzplatz. There are dozens of other churches not big enough to be landmarks on a map, but they're still around, quietly awaiting the patronage of churchgoers and tourists alike. There are even churches without impressive buildings. I think there's a Korean church also down the road from my hostel, marked with a cross sticking out into the street and there's the English Speaking United Methodist Church in Vienna that has very detailed directions on its website because it's easy to miss. I almost feel bad for spending a whole week here and only really looking at two churches.

So if there are so many options for going to church, why is Stephansdom the church in Vienna? The audioguide says it's a symbol for Vienna and a symbol for Austria. It's also quick to point out Mozart's involvement in the church (he was married there, christened two of his children there and his funeral service was held there). And I have to say, it is a pretty church. The outside is adorned by what must be thousands of stone curls along with the traditional gargoyles and scenes from the life of Christ.

These are just the curls on the tower. You should see the rest of it. 

 Inside is also beautiful, light show notwithstanding. There's your regular slew of statues of patron saints, Mary and the apostles, and of course, Jesus himself. The stained glass windows behind the main altar are impressive, along with the organ(s).

Organ win.

Besides all that, the south tower contains the second largest bell in the world which you can (pay money to) ride the elevator up and see. It also gives you a pretty good view of Vienna.

I first went to Stephansdom on Ascention Day. Note to everyone- Catholic holidays, like Ascention Day, are bank holidays in Austria so most of the shops are closed, with the exception of the souvenir shops. The museums were open, I guess, but besides that, there's not much else to do besides go look at churches.

Ascension Day is the day, forty days after Easter, when Christ left the disciples again and ascended into heaven. The two Sundays from that is Pentecost, the giving of the Holy Spirit to the first Christians and the birth of the Church but I guess on Ascension Day, we focus on the things that have left us, rather than the things that were given us.  You could smell the melting wax from hundreds of candles the second you stepped into the cathedral. And that was beautiful enough in itself- through the crowds of people with their cameras out, focused on capturing the colors on that wall or the picture above that altar, you could see a few making their way slowly to the side altar to offer a prayer before they lit a candle, sending lost spirits up and away.

But then there were these tours going around everywhere and all these little interactive information posts that cost 2 euros to operate and people jostling people outside the metal screen that separated the narthex from the nave and I think I bought an audiogiude just for the chance to step away from them all. I sat in the nave for a few minutes, then walked around, listening to the story of the baptisimal font in St. Catherine's chapel, the Madonna whose colors have been turned black by the smoke of ages of devotional candles lit beside it, the old organ and the new organ, the destruction of the cathedral during a fire in World War II and the beginning of the ever contintuing construction after the war.

I sat in front of the chancel and high altar for a few minutes, watching a family that had come in pray. Then an older man walked right up into the chancel, past the altar table and up behind the choir, where a screen, part of the colorshow, separated us from the altarpiece and statues. This distracted one of the young men in the family from his prayers and he watched the lady who had come in with the man as she told him, I assume, that she didn't think he was supposed to go up there. He waved her off and eventually she walked up into the chancel too, causing the young man in the pew to look around concernedly. Within a few moments, he sat back in relief as one of the staff members of the cathedral shooed the tourists out of the chancel, answering their protests by insisting, "It's for the priests!" as he shut the chancel rail. The old man threw his hands up in the air in frustration, then gestured to the chancel rail that had been left open. The staff member just shook his head and said again, "For the priests!"

The audioguide takes you around the nave of the church, with a brief stop outside one of the side chapels. Stephansdom is a hall church, with two rows of columns separating the nave from the side aisles with equal celilings. You can sit in front of one of the altars in the nave and listen to the guide as it points out where the organ used to be and where the choir used to stand. The master builder put a carving of himself into the wall under where the organ stood, supporting the weight of the instrument.

It's right close to the entrance to the crypt, which I had planned on visitng, before the staff started to set up for a service later that evening. With all the people still inside, I figured I'd do them a favor and get out of the way, knowing that it can't be easy to maintain a functioning church when people are just standing around, gawking at everything. A loud crowd of teenagers passed by as I stood to go and staff member walked by and said, "Quiet! You are in church!"

Even on Sunday morning I think the staff could have issued the same warning. I was going to go to the English speaking church, but then again, how often do you get to go to church in a cathedral? And besides, I'll get to hear English every Sunday soon enough. So I walked in and I bypassed all the people standing around and gawking and walked into the main nave, talking a seat near the transept. Eventually the seats around me filled and more and more people walked into the nave, filling in the pews, the chairs they had sat out in addition to the pews and finally standing in the middle of the transept. I watched the families walk around, the new parents strolling around their babies, the youth in suits shaking hands with everyone, the older couples shuffling down the aisles, taking a seat whenever someone younger hopped up to let them have a place. It was a pretty vibrant congregation, full of well-to-do people who knew each other and greeted one another by name.

The nave was so full a member of the staff had to get people to move from the middle of the transept so the acolytes and priests could process in. I thought it was funny- we had all hopped up at the sound of this little bell announcing the beginning of the service but people hadn't thought to look around for the entrance of the clergy. I found out partway through the service that it was Confirmation Sunday (or something like that- there might be another rite I'm missing, the whole not being catholic thing) so many of the people filling the transept were family members watching their young relatives being ushered into the life of the church. Their concern was focused on anything other than the ceremonial procedures of the service.

It always amazes me how wired these old buildings can be. There were TV screens for people in the back so they could see what was going on in the service and there were microphones for the musicians, priests and anyone who came up to the lecturn, which was a surprisingly large number of lay members. The service started out with the organ filling the room, as I expected, but the rest of the music was provided by 1) a monk on the accordian accompianying 2) the music leader on guitar showing 3)two oboes, a flute, a clarinet, 4) a tambourine player and 5) four female vocalists on mics. Plus the head priest dude. They always have to sing into their microphone, though, so I guess it's expected that you have to be more than tone-deaf to lead a service.

An hour and a half later, the band played its last song, the priests processed out and the organist played a short postlude after the confirmands posed for pictures. It felt like a pretty standard service, albeit in German and with the weird standing and kneeling and crossing yourself that I swear I'm going to master before I leave the continent. People stayed around in the nave even after the organist finished, talking to each other and taking pictures with their families.

I, however, fought my way through the flood of tourists waiting on the other side of the metal bars that separated the holy from the secular and strode into the sunlight outside of the cathedral.