I’m due at the U at 3:10PM so M and I head out the door a little after two. The boys and a babysitter are playing Wii upstairs. After a couple quick hugs we’re out the door. I remind M on the way over that she has to tell me on the phone about anything bad that happens while I’m gone, and she warns me that she will be pissed if I fly home early because one of the cats dies. We kiss, at the U circle driveway, and I roll my suitcase into the deserted student center a little past 2:30. I hit the bathroom, concerned I won’t find another clean one for ten days, and sit on a couch near the front door. A colleague passes a couple minutes later and informs me that the bus is picking us up outside the dorms, so I stand, grab my luggage (checking again for my passport and tickets) and walk outside.
A small crowd consisting mostly of nuns and relatives is gathered near the departing pilgrims. As none of my relatives are present, I sit on a bench next to the U President and small talk about football and jet lag. Word about the Badgers loss spreads through the crowd. I pet a dog visiting for the traditional blessing of the animals taking place later in the chapel. Two vans pull up, and in a couple minutes, we’re on our way from Milwaukee to O’Hare. Our driver gets in the wrong lane just over the Illinois line, causing us to get caught in massive and unnecessary traffic, but we’re both way early for our 7:30PM flight and in mellow pilgrim-mode, so nobody sweats the delay. The driver still apologizes up and down when she drops us off at the airport.
The Swiss Air check-in line is short, so we check-in and head to the security gates. However, right after we drop off our luggage a group of about twenty Indians block our path. The group is apparently (Ivan told me later) saying goodbye to a Hindu priest (are they priests in the Hindu religion?) before he jets back to his homeland. The priest appears about 80 years old and weighs around 100 pounds. He wears a white robe while his followers take turns bowing in front of him. Their kids play near the windows. A white woman in a robe videotapes the scene. We push through the gathering and hit the security gates. Just past the gates I realize the food court is back past the metal detectors, and I’m worried the plane food will suck, so I walk back out and buy an abysmal veggie wrap for seven bucks. Plus, I can’t take my water back through security, so I scarf down the veggie wrap without water and pass through security for the second time in thirty minutes. River and Bob, fellow pilgrims, are both on their second beers when I return. Gladys, who appears to want this to be THE MOST SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE EVER, tells me some pilgrims from another state have joined our party and demands I introduce myself. I make the rounds and return to my seat, where Ivan and I chat until departure.
I discover, upon boarding, that I’m in one of the middle seats of four in the center section. Thankfully the row in front of mine is empty, so River and I ditch our respective assigned seats and grab the empty spaces. I spread out, placing my backpack on the adjacent seat, and fire up the mp3 player. Walking past the duty free shops reminded me of Vic Chesnutt’s “Duty Free Shop”, so I put on “The Salesman and Bernadette” and listen to the first four or five songs. I experiment with the television in the seat in front of me and track the flight information (fascinating, they must use a GPS system or something), but I can’t get the sound to work correctly, so I watch “The Fantastic Four-Rise of the Silver Surfer” over Ivan’s shoulder in the next row while listening to music. I go through some Low, Oscar Robertson, and Eels until I settle on Stars of the Lid’s “Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid.” Within an hour, after decent airline pasta (the kind flight attendant searched me out after I moved seats), I’m sleeping. I wake ninety minutes before Zurich.
After our Zurich deplaning we use the bathrooms and encounter the weird, completely enclosed bathroom stalls you see in Europe. There is no space under the door; you’re totally sealed into the stall. The stalls would be particularly effective for hiding from zombies or avoiding U.S. senators’ cruising signals. River and I walk the Zurich airport gift shops. The shops sell Swiss t-shirts (red with white crosses, like on ambulances), and we try to figure out if the Swiss take Euros, cash, or something else. After a consultation with Bob we decide the Swiss use Swiss francs and we ditch the gift shops. Floor to ceiling glass windows line the airport. We check out the mountains in the distance and talk about how tight Europeans wear their jeans. School groups pass every few minutes. A man at a little portable table stamps our passports and, about sixty minutes late, we leave for Rome.
Two hours later we emerge, somewhat exhausted (at this point I’m about eighteen hours removed from my front door), into the skuzzy Rome airport. The airport surfaces seem uniformly grime-covered. I don’t realize it yet, but I will later discover that in Rome, Zurich, and Chicago we will deplane in old, decrepit sections of the airports but depart in gleaming new sections. I would think cities would prefer the reverse, with travelers gaining positive first impressions of the cities in which they land, but I am wrong. I guess people spend more money when they’re departing; when they’re landing they want to get the hell out of the airport as soon as possible. The passport booth guy waves us through, decimating my trust of airport security, and we gather around a woman holding a “Franciscan Pilgrimage” sign. The woman, to whom from now on I will refer as “big nun”, or “BN”, states she will watch our luggage while we hit the bathroom. We run about a hundred yards to the nearest bathroom, following the retreat-leader priest (more on him in a minute), and return to our luggage. I’m happy to see no one stole my backpack, which I regret leaving behind the moment I hit the bathroom. Once everyone is together (about forty of us) the leaders take us outside, where grime also covers every available surface (including, it seems, palm trees), and we smell Italian air for the first time. I decide Rome smells like Gary, Indiana. We load our luggage under the bus and climb into our seats. I suppose this is the first time we really get a chance to see the entire pilgrim group as a whole, but we’re too exhausted and excited to speak much with strangers, and we settle in for the two hour plus ride to Assisi. Rome, however, at least near the airport, doesn’t just smell like Gary; the city looks like Gary as well. We pass factory after factory and encounter the first wave of ubiquitous Italian graffiti (including a funny string of “hot boys” tags along the highway, leading me to wonder if the Italian gay community has taken up graffiti as a hobby). The other female retreat leader, heretofore designated “little nun” or “LN” leads the bus in prayer. This feels very weird. I sleep a little more, once I realize we aren’t going to see much from the bus yet, and wake only when the priest (heretofore designated as “Priest”) interjects comments about the passing towns (e.g. “this one is known for pottery”) over the bus intercom. A horribly bright sun combines with my exhaustion, pissing me off, and I close the curtains and try to keep my eyes closed until we reach the flats below the mountains.
We arrive at Assisi in the early evening after a few harrowing twists and turns and a few small towns. The bus is too large for the Assisi streets, so we park in a lot underneath the city (Assisi is built into a mountainside), load the luggage into taxis the priest has hired to haul our things to the Casa, and ride an outdoor escalator to one of the town’s gates. LN tells us a peace march took place earlier in the day. Small knots of teenagers hang out on patios and church stairs as we enter the city for the first time. The streets are narrow, mostly covered in cobblestones, and we quick-walk towards the Casa (I’m not trying to sound cool when I call the rooming house “The Casa”. The space actually has “Casa” in its name). I can’t quite take it all in, especially as we pass through the common piazza, as I just want to hit the room and get some sleep. However, once we arrive at the Casa, the leaders give us all of fifteen minutes to brush our teeth and stash our luggage in our rooms before gathering the group for evening activities. River and I are sharing a room on the fourth floor. We could either take a small elevator up, but Priest warns us it stops if you have too much weight on it, and people are loading on luggage, or the stairs. We opt for the stairs. I get used to the stairs after a couple days, and I like the stairway’s white marble and cool darkness.
The room is small, two beds, very simple, a shower that’s more like a raised area in the corner of the bathroom. There is no TV or phone. The view from the window is gorgeous, but I’m deathly afraid of heights (more on that in a minute) and the window has a shutter but no screen. I can’t fathom allowing children into the room, and I literally crawl to the window to take a couple pictures.
River and I function pretty well (in my eyes, anyway, you’d have to ask him about his perspective) as roommates. He’s more of a late night, sleep late kind of guy, and I’m not, but we get along fine. We both spread our shit out everywhere and claim specific spaces (drawer for me, top of the wardrobe for him).
This seems to be as a good a time as any for a brief description of the group leaders. I’ll flesh out these sketches as the journal continues, but you should know a bit about the leaders at the start since I’ll refer to them a lot over the course of the ten days.
First is “Priest”, the head honcho, if you will, a Franciscan friar (I’m not even sure if I should call him “priest”, but “friar” doesn’t sound right) from New York. He is older, probably late sixties, but he’s got a lot of energy and a shock of white hair on his head. Priest is smart, obviously, and liberal to the point of heresy. Priest is not to be fucked with. I repeat, priest is not to be fucked with. Over the course of the trip (you’ll see) Priest displays both compassionate patience and near psychotic impatience. I like Priest. He has a thick NY accent and glasses, so I sometimes feel as if Woody Allen, converted to Catholicism after studying theology, is leading our retreat.
Big Nun, or “BN” is also intelligent, apparently a former editor at some Franciscan publishing house. BN is calm and straightforward, funny, and seemingly focused on keeping the group relaxed and grounded. She is the least likely group leader to spontaneously speak up. BN is almost as tall as me, large (hence the name) but not fat, and at moments somewhat distracted. She will leave the pilgrimage before we arrive in Rome for some obligations back in the states. BN will also never learn my name, referring to me as “Tom” for seven days in a row.
Little Nun, or “LN”, initially creeps me out but eventually grows on me. LN cries practically every time she speaks. She’ll start to speak about our next planned visit or whatever, and she’ll remember the last time she was there, and out of nowhere she’ll say something like “the last time I was there I was filled with God’s love…God is good!” She will slur the last half of a sentence of that nature because she’ll start to cry. This freaks me out. I want to leave the room as soon as the tears start. LN turns out to be decent and not completely insane, thankfully, and provides a necessarily counterpoint to priest’s occasional abrasive side. You can approach LN about anything and you know she’ll treat you well. LN also knows a little more about the historical sites than both priest and BN. LN probably studied harder. She seems the type.
We first gather in the small chapel for a prayer service. This surprises me, I must admit, and I’m exhausted and somewhat resentful. Priest seems to perceive our exhaustion, however, so after handing out the pilgrimage “book” and teaching us a prayer Francis used which will become a central theme of the pilgrimage (to the point where people will start singing the prayer out of nowhere to make others laugh), we’re ushered into the dining room for dinner. We from the U stick together, as it’s our first dinner, although everyone in our group (just below forty of us) seems pretty reasonable. LN asks who in the group is a vegetarian and I raise my hand. They bring me some cheese when everyone else goes through the meat course. We get bread, wine, water, etc. along with some pasta.
Sidebar…I sure as hell can’t complain about the pilgrimage food. The food staff went out of their way to make sure I was ok, from a vegetarian perspective, every day. Some of my colleagues quibbled about how much cheese I received, like I was going to overdose, but I appreciated the idea the cooks did what they could to accommodate my vegetarian request. I loved the dining room, too. We sat around perhaps ten long tables covered with white tablecloths, every time we ate at the Casa, and talked through meals.
Over the course of the ten days I think I ate with all thirty-seven of my colleagues at one point or the other, and I never felt too self-conscious. You have to remember I almost always eat while reading the paper, even at dinner with my kids, so I found this family-style, all conversation meal setup alien. We’d have to sing grace (I wouldn’t sing, of course, I can’t sing) and gather our cloth napkins ourselves. We also bussed our own tables and tried to help out the food staff where we could. Breakfast was a little different, more self-serve and informal. Oh, the dining room ceiling was covered with weird, Redon-like frescoes, too, supposedly of the family of the person who owned the house back in the middle ages.
After dinner the pilgrimage leaders lead us to the small classroom where I will later discover we meet most mornings before heading off to wherever we’re going for the day. Priest does most of the talking during the initial orientation. Priest says the word “toilet” about seven thousand times to make sure we know how to use European bathrooms. LN talks about bidets. Priest also explains how Euros work while LN changes our cash (nice of her to do so, by the way) into Euros. We find out we’re supposed to take the pilgrimage book just about everywhere, since it has all the readings and historical information, and Priest cautions us 1) to be on time, and 2) not to tell him how to run his pilgrimage. I like Priest pretty much immediately.
Despite exhaustion I miss my family too much to sleep, so Ivan and I walk to the Assisi Piazza in search of phones on which we can use our (university supplied, thank you very much) phone cards. The piazza is somewhat crowded, due to the earlier peace march, but we find two open phones and spend twenty minutes figuring out how to work our phone cards. Apparently the Italian “country code” has changed, and the connections move slowly, but once we get used to the pattern the phones routinely work. I leave a couple messages until I get a hold of my family. I talk with the kids, eat some gelato with Ivan, return to the Casa, chat a little with River in our small room, and try to catch some sleep. I don’t fall asleep immediately. River and I take turns snoring, I think, while the other stays awake.
A small crowd consisting mostly of nuns and relatives is gathered near the departing pilgrims. As none of my relatives are present, I sit on a bench next to the U President and small talk about football and jet lag. Word about the Badgers loss spreads through the crowd. I pet a dog visiting for the traditional blessing of the animals taking place later in the chapel. Two vans pull up, and in a couple minutes, we’re on our way from Milwaukee to O’Hare. Our driver gets in the wrong lane just over the Illinois line, causing us to get caught in massive and unnecessary traffic, but we’re both way early for our 7:30PM flight and in mellow pilgrim-mode, so nobody sweats the delay. The driver still apologizes up and down when she drops us off at the airport.
The Swiss Air check-in line is short, so we check-in and head to the security gates. However, right after we drop off our luggage a group of about twenty Indians block our path. The group is apparently (Ivan told me later) saying goodbye to a Hindu priest (are they priests in the Hindu religion?) before he jets back to his homeland. The priest appears about 80 years old and weighs around 100 pounds. He wears a white robe while his followers take turns bowing in front of him. Their kids play near the windows. A white woman in a robe videotapes the scene. We push through the gathering and hit the security gates. Just past the gates I realize the food court is back past the metal detectors, and I’m worried the plane food will suck, so I walk back out and buy an abysmal veggie wrap for seven bucks. Plus, I can’t take my water back through security, so I scarf down the veggie wrap without water and pass through security for the second time in thirty minutes. River and Bob, fellow pilgrims, are both on their second beers when I return. Gladys, who appears to want this to be THE MOST SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE EVER, tells me some pilgrims from another state have joined our party and demands I introduce myself. I make the rounds and return to my seat, where Ivan and I chat until departure.
I discover, upon boarding, that I’m in one of the middle seats of four in the center section. Thankfully the row in front of mine is empty, so River and I ditch our respective assigned seats and grab the empty spaces. I spread out, placing my backpack on the adjacent seat, and fire up the mp3 player. Walking past the duty free shops reminded me of Vic Chesnutt’s “Duty Free Shop”, so I put on “The Salesman and Bernadette” and listen to the first four or five songs. I experiment with the television in the seat in front of me and track the flight information (fascinating, they must use a GPS system or something), but I can’t get the sound to work correctly, so I watch “The Fantastic Four-Rise of the Silver Surfer” over Ivan’s shoulder in the next row while listening to music. I go through some Low, Oscar Robertson, and Eels until I settle on Stars of the Lid’s “Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid.” Within an hour, after decent airline pasta (the kind flight attendant searched me out after I moved seats), I’m sleeping. I wake ninety minutes before Zurich.
After our Zurich deplaning we use the bathrooms and encounter the weird, completely enclosed bathroom stalls you see in Europe. There is no space under the door; you’re totally sealed into the stall. The stalls would be particularly effective for hiding from zombies or avoiding U.S. senators’ cruising signals. River and I walk the Zurich airport gift shops. The shops sell Swiss t-shirts (red with white crosses, like on ambulances), and we try to figure out if the Swiss take Euros, cash, or something else. After a consultation with Bob we decide the Swiss use Swiss francs and we ditch the gift shops. Floor to ceiling glass windows line the airport. We check out the mountains in the distance and talk about how tight Europeans wear their jeans. School groups pass every few minutes. A man at a little portable table stamps our passports and, about sixty minutes late, we leave for Rome.
Two hours later we emerge, somewhat exhausted (at this point I’m about eighteen hours removed from my front door), into the skuzzy Rome airport. The airport surfaces seem uniformly grime-covered. I don’t realize it yet, but I will later discover that in Rome, Zurich, and Chicago we will deplane in old, decrepit sections of the airports but depart in gleaming new sections. I would think cities would prefer the reverse, with travelers gaining positive first impressions of the cities in which they land, but I am wrong. I guess people spend more money when they’re departing; when they’re landing they want to get the hell out of the airport as soon as possible. The passport booth guy waves us through, decimating my trust of airport security, and we gather around a woman holding a “Franciscan Pilgrimage” sign. The woman, to whom from now on I will refer as “big nun”, or “BN”, states she will watch our luggage while we hit the bathroom. We run about a hundred yards to the nearest bathroom, following the retreat-leader priest (more on him in a minute), and return to our luggage. I’m happy to see no one stole my backpack, which I regret leaving behind the moment I hit the bathroom. Once everyone is together (about forty of us) the leaders take us outside, where grime also covers every available surface (including, it seems, palm trees), and we smell Italian air for the first time. I decide Rome smells like Gary, Indiana. We load our luggage under the bus and climb into our seats. I suppose this is the first time we really get a chance to see the entire pilgrim group as a whole, but we’re too exhausted and excited to speak much with strangers, and we settle in for the two hour plus ride to Assisi. Rome, however, at least near the airport, doesn’t just smell like Gary; the city looks like Gary as well. We pass factory after factory and encounter the first wave of ubiquitous Italian graffiti (including a funny string of “hot boys” tags along the highway, leading me to wonder if the Italian gay community has taken up graffiti as a hobby). The other female retreat leader, heretofore designated “little nun” or “LN” leads the bus in prayer. This feels very weird. I sleep a little more, once I realize we aren’t going to see much from the bus yet, and wake only when the priest (heretofore designated as “Priest”) interjects comments about the passing towns (e.g. “this one is known for pottery”) over the bus intercom. A horribly bright sun combines with my exhaustion, pissing me off, and I close the curtains and try to keep my eyes closed until we reach the flats below the mountains.
We arrive at Assisi in the early evening after a few harrowing twists and turns and a few small towns. The bus is too large for the Assisi streets, so we park in a lot underneath the city (Assisi is built into a mountainside), load the luggage into taxis the priest has hired to haul our things to the Casa, and ride an outdoor escalator to one of the town’s gates. LN tells us a peace march took place earlier in the day. Small knots of teenagers hang out on patios and church stairs as we enter the city for the first time. The streets are narrow, mostly covered in cobblestones, and we quick-walk towards the Casa (I’m not trying to sound cool when I call the rooming house “The Casa”. The space actually has “Casa” in its name). I can’t quite take it all in, especially as we pass through the common piazza, as I just want to hit the room and get some sleep. However, once we arrive at the Casa, the leaders give us all of fifteen minutes to brush our teeth and stash our luggage in our rooms before gathering the group for evening activities. River and I are sharing a room on the fourth floor. We could either take a small elevator up, but Priest warns us it stops if you have too much weight on it, and people are loading on luggage, or the stairs. We opt for the stairs. I get used to the stairs after a couple days, and I like the stairway’s white marble and cool darkness.
The room is small, two beds, very simple, a shower that’s more like a raised area in the corner of the bathroom. There is no TV or phone. The view from the window is gorgeous, but I’m deathly afraid of heights (more on that in a minute) and the window has a shutter but no screen. I can’t fathom allowing children into the room, and I literally crawl to the window to take a couple pictures.
River and I function pretty well (in my eyes, anyway, you’d have to ask him about his perspective) as roommates. He’s more of a late night, sleep late kind of guy, and I’m not, but we get along fine. We both spread our shit out everywhere and claim specific spaces (drawer for me, top of the wardrobe for him).
This seems to be as a good a time as any for a brief description of the group leaders. I’ll flesh out these sketches as the journal continues, but you should know a bit about the leaders at the start since I’ll refer to them a lot over the course of the ten days.
First is “Priest”, the head honcho, if you will, a Franciscan friar (I’m not even sure if I should call him “priest”, but “friar” doesn’t sound right) from New York. He is older, probably late sixties, but he’s got a lot of energy and a shock of white hair on his head. Priest is smart, obviously, and liberal to the point of heresy. Priest is not to be fucked with. I repeat, priest is not to be fucked with. Over the course of the trip (you’ll see) Priest displays both compassionate patience and near psychotic impatience. I like Priest. He has a thick NY accent and glasses, so I sometimes feel as if Woody Allen, converted to Catholicism after studying theology, is leading our retreat.
Big Nun, or “BN” is also intelligent, apparently a former editor at some Franciscan publishing house. BN is calm and straightforward, funny, and seemingly focused on keeping the group relaxed and grounded. She is the least likely group leader to spontaneously speak up. BN is almost as tall as me, large (hence the name) but not fat, and at moments somewhat distracted. She will leave the pilgrimage before we arrive in Rome for some obligations back in the states. BN will also never learn my name, referring to me as “Tom” for seven days in a row.
Little Nun, or “LN”, initially creeps me out but eventually grows on me. LN cries practically every time she speaks. She’ll start to speak about our next planned visit or whatever, and she’ll remember the last time she was there, and out of nowhere she’ll say something like “the last time I was there I was filled with God’s love…God is good!” She will slur the last half of a sentence of that nature because she’ll start to cry. This freaks me out. I want to leave the room as soon as the tears start. LN turns out to be decent and not completely insane, thankfully, and provides a necessarily counterpoint to priest’s occasional abrasive side. You can approach LN about anything and you know she’ll treat you well. LN also knows a little more about the historical sites than both priest and BN. LN probably studied harder. She seems the type.
We first gather in the small chapel for a prayer service. This surprises me, I must admit, and I’m exhausted and somewhat resentful. Priest seems to perceive our exhaustion, however, so after handing out the pilgrimage “book” and teaching us a prayer Francis used which will become a central theme of the pilgrimage (to the point where people will start singing the prayer out of nowhere to make others laugh), we’re ushered into the dining room for dinner. We from the U stick together, as it’s our first dinner, although everyone in our group (just below forty of us) seems pretty reasonable. LN asks who in the group is a vegetarian and I raise my hand. They bring me some cheese when everyone else goes through the meat course. We get bread, wine, water, etc. along with some pasta.
Sidebar…I sure as hell can’t complain about the pilgrimage food. The food staff went out of their way to make sure I was ok, from a vegetarian perspective, every day. Some of my colleagues quibbled about how much cheese I received, like I was going to overdose, but I appreciated the idea the cooks did what they could to accommodate my vegetarian request. I loved the dining room, too. We sat around perhaps ten long tables covered with white tablecloths, every time we ate at the Casa, and talked through meals.
Over the course of the ten days I think I ate with all thirty-seven of my colleagues at one point or the other, and I never felt too self-conscious. You have to remember I almost always eat while reading the paper, even at dinner with my kids, so I found this family-style, all conversation meal setup alien. We’d have to sing grace (I wouldn’t sing, of course, I can’t sing) and gather our cloth napkins ourselves. We also bussed our own tables and tried to help out the food staff where we could. Breakfast was a little different, more self-serve and informal. Oh, the dining room ceiling was covered with weird, Redon-like frescoes, too, supposedly of the family of the person who owned the house back in the middle ages.
After dinner the pilgrimage leaders lead us to the small classroom where I will later discover we meet most mornings before heading off to wherever we’re going for the day. Priest does most of the talking during the initial orientation. Priest says the word “toilet” about seven thousand times to make sure we know how to use European bathrooms. LN talks about bidets. Priest also explains how Euros work while LN changes our cash (nice of her to do so, by the way) into Euros. We find out we’re supposed to take the pilgrimage book just about everywhere, since it has all the readings and historical information, and Priest cautions us 1) to be on time, and 2) not to tell him how to run his pilgrimage. I like Priest pretty much immediately.
Despite exhaustion I miss my family too much to sleep, so Ivan and I walk to the Assisi Piazza in search of phones on which we can use our (university supplied, thank you very much) phone cards. The piazza is somewhat crowded, due to the earlier peace march, but we find two open phones and spend twenty minutes figuring out how to work our phone cards. Apparently the Italian “country code” has changed, and the connections move slowly, but once we get used to the pattern the phones routinely work. I leave a couple messages until I get a hold of my family. I talk with the kids, eat some gelato with Ivan, return to the Casa, chat a little with River in our small room, and try to catch some sleep. I don’t fall asleep immediately. River and I take turns snoring, I think, while the other stays awake.
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