Welt Jugend Tag: Chapter 1
How do I even begin to describe the two weeks of my life in which I visited Germany on pilgrimage? I suppose I could begin by talking about Juventutem, the traditional Latin Mass group that I went with. Our goal was to spend the first week on retreat experiencing this way of celebrating the Mass on a daily basis, while also receiving catechetic lectures so that we could stand as a witness in Cologne during the second week. We were also preparing ourselves to act as representatives during the second week of all people who love and attend the Latin Mass, to show our support to our new Holy Father, Benedict.
For Andrew and I, the journey started very early( 2 am to precise) on the morning of Monday the eighth of August, when we both awoke to get ready to head to the airport. We had both done all of our last minute packing the night before, and also gone through our packing lists umpteen million times, so neither of us had gotten much sleep. Which was fine, as we were all hyped and ready to go, and the furthest thing from our mind was making sure we got a healthy amount of sleep. We would regret that fact in the next 24 hours.
The first flight on our itinerary was a short little jaunt from Bellingham International to Seattle- Tacoma International. This was by and far the best flight, as it was at a height which allowed Andrew and I to be able to look down and pick out places we recognized along the way. Also, our flight took off just as the day was beginning to dawn and so we had the opportunity to watch the sun rise up behind a silhouetted mountain range and shed its glorious beams on a land covered in fog out of which you could see little hills and knolls poking up like islands in the middle of an ocean of cloud. It was truly an amazing sight.
The rest of our flights progressed in a very uneventful way, which is the way most people are generally hopeful for. But after about nine hours of this, one starts to crave some variety. Short of blowing up the engines, what can one do? Not much. Also, added to the mundane of everything was the fact that Andrew and I couldn’t get a seat together on the flight from Seattle to Detroit, and there were always people up and moving around which prevented me from going up to talk to him.
The flight from Detroit to Frankfurt was much better, and even started on a slightly comical note. We got into Detroit with just enough time to get off of the airplane and get in line to board our connection. By this point we had given up trying to ask for seats together and planned on just taking some seats together after the flight was most of the way boarded. After boarding , we walked to our respective assigned seats, and I found that I was sharing my group of seats with two young black boys. I was just about to start stowing my bags when the mother of the boys, who was sitting in the row in front of us, asked to switch seats with me so she could be with her kids. I agreed, and we made the switch. I had just taken my seat in the middle, when Andrew came back and joined me as the flight was most of the way boarded and the seat next to me was free. We both got settled in, very pleased with how things had worked out, and started talking. I forget what we were talking about, but something sparked the girl in the seat in front of us to ask us if we were going to WYD. We said yes, and then she asked us if we were going with Juventutem, to which we also replied with an affirmative. It ended up being Elisabeth, a girl that we had planned on meeting up with before we boarded our flight.
Then to our surprise, some people came up and informed Elisabeth that she was in their assigned seats, which prompted her to pull our her boarding pass and reexamine it. It turns out that Andrew had taken her seat, which was right next to the one I had switched the mother for. We were trying to figure whether Andrew would move back up to his seat, or whether Elisabeth would try and find another seat, when the lady to my right in our row of three graciously offered to give her seat to Elisabeth so that we could all sit together. And so we finally got ourselves all settled in our seats and departed on our last and longest flight.
The rest of this leg was spent mostly talking, writing, watching movies, and anything else we could find to keep us busy and help kill time. None of us really slept on the flight, except for maybe little fifteen minute power naps which don’t really count, so we were all pretty well exhausted when we arrived in Frankfurt after nine hours in the air. The entire journey with connections was only seventeen hours long, but it was eight o’clock in the morning one day later when we arrived and so our internal clocks were pretty well screwed up.
After having gone through customs and collection our luggage, we started looking for the representatives who were supposed to be meeting us. We found them relatively quickly, and then they took us to spot in the airport that had been temporarily set up as an information point for all youth arriving for WYD. And that’s when we found out that we were the first flight of Juventutem people to arrive that day, and that we would be waiting for the others to arrive before we headed down to the FSSP( Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter) seminary in Wigratzbad. This wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the fact that the last flight wouldn’t be arriving for another six hours. We walked around the airport a lot in that six hours in an attempt to try and stay awake. It was really hard, but the end of the six hours finally came and we set off by bus to our destination for the night.
Five hours after having left the airport we arrived in Wigratzbad, looking like the living dead, but very happy to be at our destination. We then went and ravenously ate the dinner that had been prepared for us, as it was the first real meal that we had had besides the stuff they tried to pass off as food on the airplane. After dinner we were shown to our accommodations for the night which consisted of long tents for about forty people set up on a field of moderately long grass. Which was damp. And the tents condensated on the inside and dripped on ones forehead at irregular intervals. But we were all so exhausted by this point that we fell right to sleep, which ended our first day in Germany.
The next morning, I awoke and opted not to use the showering facilities that had been erected for us due to the fact that all of the other guys were busily trying to do the same. A hot shower sure would have felt good about then as I had woken to find myself in a very damp sleeping bag, and my clothes were all cold and damp as well. Ah well, such was the start of getting into a pilgrim mindset. I dressed and then we headed back up to the seminary for breakfast, which consisted of bread, jam, and coffee or tea. We soon came to appreciate this simple repast as it was the way we broke fast for the remainder of our two weeks in Germany.
Now despite all of the planning that was done, or rather that I thought was done, we found that most of everyone was running around with only a partial idea of what was going on. Luckily for Andrew and I, we stumbled across some of the other Americans discussing with one of the priests what they were to do if they wanted to go on the St. George’s walk, which is what Andrew and I had been planning on doing. We dropped in on the conversation and made it known that we, too, wished to go on the walk. We were then told that we needed to get our luggage on the bus that was to take us all to Ottobeuren for mass at the cathedral there, and were we would meet up with the group that was doing the walk. The bus was going to be leaving in ten minutes and we had left our luggage down at the camp. Thankfully Gregory, the man who was in charge of all of the English speakers, offered to drive us down there so we could get it and make the bus. This little drive amazed me with how conservative my driving appeared compared to a Europeans. It was loads of fun, and we were back with our luggage in the time it takes to down a stein of beer.
And so we were on our way to our first week of adventures.