SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008

Rising at the late hour of 7AM, I was one of the first people up! I don’t blame any of those people for sleeping in - we had already had an exhausting week. I dragged myself through my morning routine, wanting to just join those others in another hour of sleep, but NO! This morning, I was on my way to a gathering of the US pilgrims! Most nations (I assume) have a gathering at some point during WYD, and the American National Gathering was held Saturday morning before the pilgrim walk. Starting at 8AM, there was a concert in the Domain, a section of the Botanical Gardens which are located on the beautiful Sydney Harbor, and then there was a Mass, said by Francis Cardinal George, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. *Matt Maher*, Steven Angrisano, and others were the cantors for the Mass, and I’m guessing there were probably about 8,000 people there - 8,000 Americans! In Sydney! Ahhh…it was like home. It made me miss the States!

The wonderful thing was, I had someone to share the experience with! But not an American…Mark, one of the guys who helps CYS with some of our retreats (just coming along for the day), had joined our pilgrim group for WYD and was staying at our house for the week, and a day or two earlier, he had told me he was interested in going to the American National Gathering with me, just to see what it was like - to see what the crazy Americans were all about! I wasn’t sure if he would get up to come, but when I knocked on his door, he assured me he would be ready in time to leave. I have to say I am SO thankful he came, because it would have been very sad to fly solo yet again. And I further have to say that the day spent with Mark ended up being one of my favorite and most prayerful experiences during the entire week! I think he really enjoyed it as well - he liked meeting so many Americans!

We sat with the Sisters of Life at the Mass - although there weren’t too many of them. Most of the young religious and seminarians were at the Cathedral Saturday morning for a Mass celebrated by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. I definitely would have chosen that over the Americans any day! So I only knew one of the Sisters there, but we sat by them for the Mass, and afterwards, I went to find the group from Indy, which wasn’t too hard, surprisingly! I introduced them to Mark, and he hit it off with Fr. Meyer especially. The reason? Mark is quite possibly going to entire the seminary next year, and Fr. Meyer, who loves vocations, was trying to convince him to come to the seminary in Indianapolis. As if that was even a possibility for an Australian! I suppose it is possible, but why?

So Mark and I tagged along with the ArchIndy group as they began their pilgrim walk. So now you may be wondering what the pilgrim walk is? Well every year, incorporated into the last two days of WYD is a pilgrimage to the final destination of the week: the place where they will have the Closing Mass on World Youth Day itself (yes, it’s a week long event, but one of the days IS actually designated *the* World Youth Day!). The last WYD in Germany included a pilgrimage of 25 km or something! In miles….something like 15. This WYD in Sydney had a pilgrimage walk of about 12km, so 7.5ish miles?

Let me tell you a bit about the layout of the city and the pilgrimage. I live in Clovelly, in the Eastern Suburbs - which are right on the coast. Just west of Clovelly, the next suburb over is Randwick, and this is where the final Mass, etc. was taking place - in Randwick Racecourse. This is normally a place of horse races, but it was shut down for a few months to prepare for the 500,000 people would stuff themselves in it to sleep and pray. So from our house, the Racecourse was a 20 minute walk. However, the official pilgrimage began in North Sydney, which is through the city and over the Harbor Bridge. The plan of the CYS group was the walk to Randwick, drop their bags, walk to Central Station (not a small trek) and then take a train to North Sydney, walk over the Harbor Bridge (an enticing feature of the walk!) and all the way back to Randwick. A big loop! However, because Mark and I went to the Mass, we were planning to walk from there to Central or North Sydney, wherever the group happened to be, and meet up with them in order to do the walk as a whole bunch!

However.

When Mark and I got finished with the Mass, we gave the group a call to find out where they were. Now, mind you, they were scheduled to start the pilgrim walk and walk over the bridge at 1pm. At 12noon, they were still at Randwick!! It would take at least an hour or two to walk to Central, and then get to North Sydney. Mark and I decided we would just go ahead without them and make it a pilgrimage of two because to wait for them would have taken forever.
So we walked with the Indianapolis group to Central and then split off from them - they continued walking towards Randwick (forget about crossing the bridge, they said!) and we caught a train to North Sydney to join the thousands of other pilgrims in crossing the Harbor on foot.

It was SO exciting to walk across the bridge. For only the second time in the history of the Sydney Harbor Bridge (opened in 1932) it was completely closed to traffic either direction so that the pilgrims of the world who had come to Sydney could walk across it, with their colors and flags and backpacks! I especially wanted to complete the walk because I still get a thrill every time I cross the Harbor Bridge (it’s just such a beautiful piece of architecture with a gorgeous view!), and to be able to walk across it - right down the middle where the cars normally drive - would be a once in a lifetime experience! And with thousands of other people at that! And, the weather was beautiful. God really was looking out for all of us with the sunshine and nice temperature!

So Mark and I walked across the bridge, and the reason I said that it was a very prayerful experience is that we made a decision before we began that we wouldn’t complain the whole walk. At this point, we were tired both physically and mentally, and walking such a long distance after such a crazy week was not exactly the easiest thing, but in just being positive, the experience was positive. Complaining the whole way would have only put a damper on it! So we struck a deal that if either of us complained, the other needed to call it out and we would both say a decade of the rosary. We got to Randwick with one decade of the 5 to go…so only 4 complaints! Before we entered the racecourse we went ahead and finished it off.

While we were still walking, I think we were very blessed in that we passed this construction site - a building in progress - and one of the workers must have been on his break because he was standing out on one of the platforms of the building waving at all the pilgrims walking past: and he was holding up a huge wooden cross. My guess is that he made it out of some scrap wood laying around the building site, but WOW. What a blessed site - it really touched me! I took quite a few pictures - those along with all the pictures from the week will be posted soon! (slowly but surely I’m getting this all caught up).

Mark and I stopped in Darling Harbor to eat some lunch, which consisted of the lot of junk I had stuffed in my backpack but not eaten throughout the week. Lots of chocolate and some chips, basically. Yummmmm.

It was actually quite warm, so I had taken off most of my layers until I was wearing only some colorful boxer shorts over tights, no socks with my tennis shoes, and a WYD baseball tee. O and an American flag cape and WYD bandana around my head. I looked like a superhero. At this point, I decided the only thing I needed to complete the outfit were some sunglasses - preferably aviators. For weeks I had been wanting to go buy some at Paddy’s Market, a huge market with cheap everything-under-the-sun, open every weekend in Chinatown. Well it just so happened that this day was Saturday, and the pilgrim walk took us right by Paddy’s! So with Mark’s permission (haha) we stopped in to search for some aviators. The only condition was they had to be under $7 because that was all the money I had on me, and he only had about 5 cents. True pilgrims!

We didn’t want to take up too much time from our pilgrimage, so I wanted to find these sunglasses quick and get back on the road. The first “sunnies” stall we found had some sunglasses that I really liked, and that were very good quality, and that were the right look, but they were $10! However, in the spirit of WYD, I decided to ask the man if he wouldn’t mind selling them to me for $7. He was very jovial, and before he gave me an answer, he said, “Where are you from?” I said Indiana, and he said, “Well, if I come to Indiana, I expect a deal from you!” I laughed and assured him he would get one (like he’s ever gonna come there and find me…but if he did, done!) He took pity on this poor American!

So with my new sunglasses and a surge of energy, Mark and I pressed on, traversing the city of Sydney surrounded by many others on the same route. When we finally made it to Randwick, we had to wait in a line at our gate to get our bag of food. Instead of packing 6 people’s dinner into one bag, they packed a bag of assorted food items for one person. Each person, on their way into the racecourse, picked up a bag and that was the food they got until they left after the Final Mass. They also had little soup stands throughout the place, but the lines were long and the prices were high. I’ll stick with my cold can of cuss-cuss and brownie bites, thanks. (it wasn’t gourmet, that’s for sure!)

Once inside the racecourse, Mark and I stood just inside the gate staring at the mass of humanity before us - it was chaos in that racecourse! All these little sections of sleeping bags and tents and bags and people, and little aisles to walk around the whole place - to get from one side to the other could have taken an hour! Winding through the paths was insane. I actually was feeling a bit claustrophobic!

It took Mark and I quite some time to figure out where our group was, and only after calling someone did we finally figure out which letter and number section we were in. I can’t tell you how many letters or numbers they used, but we were in J, and we weren’t even in the back, so it’s possible they used over half the alphabet, plus then # 1 - 6 at least! And within each section like that there were many little sections that weren’t labeled at all! With everything strewn everywhere, it was all so confusing. We arrived around 4pm, so most of the pilgrims were already there, but because of the delay the rest of our group had getting OUT of Randwick to actually do the walk, they didn’t arrive until around 5pm, and let me tell you, they didn’t get there a moment too soon. Just as Mark and I began to settle into the section that was “bagged out” and guarded by a few trusty group members, “WYD staff” were telling us we had to take over our section or we would lose it to a huge group of Filipinos who needed somewhere to go…which means we needed to lay out everyone’s sleeping bags and take up as much room as we thought we would need for our whole group to sleep, because any space we didn’t need would be claimed. AH! It was so stressful. We got out as many sleeping bags as we could find and laid out as much stuff as we could, and when we were done, it was like a swarm of bees descending as the other groups took every inch they could get!

I will say that the only nice thing about this period of the day was that Matt Maher was on stage playing - so good to hear him again! And lucky us, we were right underneath a big screen, so we could see pretty well…on that at least. Too bad we were SO far from the stage!

Once we finally had a minute to breath, I just plopped down - I was SO exhausted. After eating some of the food they had provided, I began to get ready to head over to the VIP section (still had more VIP tickets!) to get a seat for the Evening Vigil. This Evening Vigil was a time of prayer and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament with the Holy Father, and I think there were some performances and things. Jovina was one of the emcees! She looked SO pretty, standing there in front of hundreds of thousands of people! I took a picture of her from where I was standing, but the thing was, even in the VIP section I was so far away she turned out as a faceless figure on my camera!

Picking a few chairs and sitting there shivering, waiting for the Vigil to begin and end so I could go back and go to sleep, I don’t remember much of the rest of the night. I was so incredibly tired that I didn’t actually hear much of what was being said or see much of what was going on during the Vigil. Desperately fighting to stay awake, I only vaguely even remember adoration! It was freezing outside as well, and we were holding candles - mine was dripping wax everywhere, so I was holding it so the wax wouldn’t drip on my clothes. However, even holding a candle I dozed off a bit and dropped it! I freaked out a bit and was so glad the grass didn’t catch on fire - can you imagine the headlines? “Fatigued American drops candle, Randwick alight” AH!

I felt so sad that I couldn’t stay awake and alert for one of the most special and important parts of the week! I heard it was a beautiful evening, but I couldn’t tell you from experience. After the Vigil was over, we made our way back to our pod, and I decided I might have better luck with a toilet in the VIP section than in the normal section, so I waited in line for quite a while, and just before reaching the front, the message was being passed back that the trailer with 6 toilets in it was flooded, and only 1 was working anymore. Can I honestly say that I have never seen bathrooms in such a state as I did at WYD! The conditions are less than sanitary - so much that I was tempted to hold it the whole time! It was a true adventure to use a restroom along with 400,000 other people. A massive operation indeed.

After that shenanigans I headed straight back to our section and I crawled right into my sleeping bag and went to sleep. Well tried anyway. That was how I tried to fight the cold - we were SO cold! It took a long time but I think I finally drifted to sleep - although the light from the screen was on all night, and there were even performances for some time after the vigil as well. One band from Washington DC was playing and everyone had gotten up and was dancing, but I just couldn’t move! I was too cold and tired and I was beginning to feel very ill. I only remembered this later when someone else mentioned it, by around 2AM some crazy pilgrims were running through the racecourse beating drums and screaming “WAKE UP PILGRIMS!!” Why? We may never know…It didn't really work on me!