Ash Wednesday Mass at the Cathedral

Wednesday February 6, 2008 

Today was another normal day with classes and the such. After lunch and homework I went to the Internet café to call my grandma for her birthday. She answered and we talked for a couple minutes about all the snow, which Mother Nature gave her for her birthday (how lucky) and about Spain and life in general. It was good talking to her; there are some things that I miss about home and she is definitely one! After calling her I decided to call Aaron because I hadn’t talked to him in over two weeks because of unpreventable conversation cancellations. At first he didn’t have a clue who I was, but then he caught on and warmed up. It was kind of a surprise call, so I’m lucky that he even answered a call from such a strange foreign number! Later in the evening Allison and I decided that we were going to go to the Ash Wednesday service at the Cathedral. The mass was at 8pm and we left around 7:20 to walk to the church. On our way we ran into Josh, a classmate, and he decided that he wanted to come to the service with us as well. Both Allison and Josh aren’t Catholic so I had to break them into how a Catholic mass works. (Pretty “brave little toaster-esk” for your first Catholic mass to be on Ash Wednesday, in Spanish, and at the Cathedral in Spain.) We walked into the church and the lady security guard stopped us at the gate and told us that the church wasn’t open for tourists at this time. I explained to her that we were there for the 8pm mass. She looked surprised that A. I could speak Spanish and B. that her assumptions were incorrect. I was the winner of that Spanish conversation, probably for the first time since I’ve been here. Mass was really interesting with a similar structure as at home, the biggest difference being that mass was in Spanish. It was a little frustrating knowing the mass parts and responses in English, but not in Spanish. A bishop, as well as a bunch of other priests, celebrated the mass and it was a good experience as a Catholic and as a Spanish student. After mass we headed home for dinner and finished up homework.