Israel pilgrimge: sixteenth in series

Hello, everyone.

This post will cover the last day of visiting in the Holy Land.

We rolled out early as usual. The visits of the day were all in Bethlehem, near our hotel. The first visit was the Church of the Nativity of Our Lord, also known as the Church of St. Catherine Martyr.

As y'all can see, our group had matching ID lanyards in pale blue. These had our names, and on the back of the little name insert was the name of the tour company. In case it should be needed.

St. Catherine. Note the broken wheel which, being a way the Roman
 government tried to kill her, is an identifying item in her images.

The image of St. Catherine was in the Latin part of the church. (Remember, all the major shrines are shared.)

The Church of the Nativity was never fully destroyed during
 the centuries of conquest and ruin. A few of the original mosaics
 are conserved on the walls.

We passed through from the Latin part of the shrine to the Orthodox (Greek) part of the shrine. The line of pilgrims was beginning to build.

The Orthodox are very into ostrich eggs
 on their lamps.

One of the pilgrims from another group was talking to me. We discussed the significance of the ostrich eggs. I mentioned the eggs being a symbol of the Resurrection of Our Lord. He mentioned another beautiful image: the mother ostrich, he told me, is said to stay near her eggs while she is setting. Even when she gets up from the eggs to eat or drink, she keeps her eyes on the nest. Thus, the ostrich eggs remind us that God, like the ostrich hen, is always watching over us.

(We had time to talk, since our group was at the head of the line for the Latin access to the grotto of the Nativity, and we were a little bit early. The Armenians were still praying inside the grotto. And no, you can't just scooch in on another group's time!)

When we went down the steps into the actual place of the Nativity, we discovered that there were filmmakers there, and also a man was setting up for Mass. (Not Mass for our group. We wouldn't have all fit into this tiny space anyway.) I settled for respectfully looking in from the edge and taking a photo to remember with.

After this, we went to the Milk Grotto. Or possibly it's the Milky Grotto. The significance of this shrine is that traditionally it is the place where Joseph took Mary and Jesus to hide on their way out of town after the angel appeared to him in a dream and told him to get the Child and His mother out of their PDQ.

An altar inside the Milk Grotto. The images are the betrothal of Mary and Joseph,
the Annunciation, the birth of Jesus, the adoration of the shepherds, the
adoration of the magi, and possibly the Holy Family hiding out
in the Milk Grotto as they fled Bethlehem towards Egypt.

The stone of the Milk Grotto, another cave shrine, is white instead of dirty gray-black. Possibly it was never used for cooking. (Thus explaining why it was a safe place to hide for a day or so?)

An icon of Mary feeding the baby Jesus. 

There are a number of interesting images of various saints, and also an altar with reliquaries.

The Flight into Egypt. Someone had placed a bouquet
among the rocks at one side. Possibly this is a thing for
Christian brides?

The shrine is administrated by Franciscan nuns. They have, at the very deepest part of the cave, an adoration chapel. It is separated from the area the pilgrims visit by a glass window. (Franciscan nuns tend to be cloistered.) They have made the neighborly gesture to place a kneeler by the window for any pilgrims who wish to join them in adoration of Jesus in the Eucharist.

Taken from outside of the chapel. This is a very modern, yet very respectful, monstrance. I see the shape of His Sacred Heart in the metal at the center. But that could be just me.

We also visited the Church of the Shepherds' Field.

We had Mass in the Cave of the Shepherds.
Above the door there was a bee nest.

Above the cave was this angel. (?)

While walking the paths back toward the entrance, we saw a group of Korean (?) nuns, also on pilgrimage. There are people from all over the world who visit the holy sites.

View of the entrance to the Shepherds' Field from the shop across the street. The lines were beginning to build up. By the time we left this place there were crowds going in.

A view of the place we later ate lunch on this,
our last day in the Holy Land. It has nice views
of Bethlehem from those big windows. 

This picture was taken because it was an interesting building. Little did we know that later that day we would be in there!

The offices of the tour company, next to the door leading to the
restaurant where we ate lunch this last day,

When we stopped for lunch, we were in front of the offices of the tour company who were organizing our visit to the Holy Land. We didn't go in and bother them, though. We went into the door at the right and rode the elevator up to the Skyline cafe.












We returned to our hotel for dinner and a very short night.

I finally remembered to take a food picture at the hotel.

The salad bar at the Hotel St. Gabriel

We met in the lobby at 1 a.m. the next morning. We had to hitch a ride on another group's bus for part of the way to the Tel Aviv airport--something about our bus's engine belt coming off--but about half of the way there our bus caught up with us and we switched back over.

After waiting in the airport intake line--these folks are serious about security, for good reason--we had a few minutes before we had to be in the gate area. We took the moments to visit shops in the airport and also the facilities. Because airplane facilities are guaranteed to be more miserable to use than airport ones!

In the airport, departing, this nifty wireless device to summon aid for restroom problems. Cool!

And that was the final day of our visit to the Holy Land.

The next few posts will be catch up posts for various things on the home front.

Israel pilgrimage, arrival (edited)

Hello, everyone.

The pilgrimage to Israel was a group trip organized through our parish. The sales guy is a Christian from the area, and it was designed as a religious trip. We stayed together in hotels and rode together on a bus. We had our own bus driver and guide. The guide was very informative and pleasant to listen to. The driver was amazingly competent at backing that long bus into tiny spaces.

I have a new slogan for slopes and suchlike: "Slowly, slowly!" By which he meant calmly even the oldest of us would be able to walk the cobblestones up the hill to the church. And except one or two times someone was too tired to make the climb/descent and rested in the bus, we all did.

This post will be about our arrival in the land of Israel. (Also at this part the nation of Israel, but we also went in parts that are considered to be the property of the area called Palestine.)

It was a three-legged flight, first to Houston, then through the night to Frankfurt, then to Tel Aviv. The flight was mostly on Lufthansa. I am very impressed with how attentive the cabin crews are about keeping their passengers hydrated!

We lost about 8 hours of time while going east. This is usual for flying from the Americas to the Old World.

When we arrived, we sought out the gentleman in the baggage area with the sign for our group, gathered our bags, and went outside to the bus area. There are a LOT of buses. All of them have signs for their group. Ours had not gotten a slot in the row along the sidewalk, but they switched it and another bus around and got us on board and rolling. It was late afternoon local time. Also known as "rush hour" so there was traffic en route to our first hotel, in Nazareth.

This was the sign board in the lobby area. It was lighted, and I think that bit on the left is a time and temperature web gizmo. We were issued our keys and headed to our room.

They had the standard power-saving device we've seen in Europe. The electricity in the room only works when the guest is there to enjoy it. (Forget hanging something wet in the bathroom and going out for several hours, as the air doesn't circulate when you're gone.)

The opening to the nice-sized shower. It had a rain shower (default) and a hand shower. During our days in this hotel I learned to be very careful about placement of the hand shower while the water was running. The first morning, I set it wrong and accidentally made a monster sized puddle on the bathroom floor--the watered traveled along the glass wall to the opening at the top of the door and dribbled down to the tile floor. Oops!

One of the trips through the buffet that night. The salad bar was amazing! It had yogurt, beyaz panir (mild white cheese), hummus and olives twice a day. I admit it, there were two salad trips before the main one. This plate shows the roasted eggplant salad that I particularly liked, and also the cold dressed sweet potatoes and the tomato-cucumber-sweet pepper salad which were also good.

At this hotel, they had reserved tables together for each group staying there, with paper table tents, and they would move the reserved area around from one meal to the next while doing their floor planning. Some members of our group were somewhat rattled by this, so I will mention that it proved a good plan to arrive in the dining area and locate the tables before snagging the cup of coffee-milk and a plate of food to complicate walking around.

The hotel has a large pool area and outdoor bar, but we were too busy and, at the end of each day, too tired to explore them. The days were filled. And your blogger, being out of practice at keeping busy to a scheduled plan all day, was not up for partying into the small hours in the evenings.

Dinner was the end of the long day, which had begun on Monday early and finished on Tuesday evening.

This post was edited for spelling and to mention that the bus driver impressed everyone with his skill at handling the vehicle.

Reflections on Fatima

Hello, everyone.

As you may remember, we took a bus ride from Santarem to Fatima. In doing so, we lost track of a lovely Spanish couple that we'd met along the way--they elected to continue walking. But  the pilgrim trail is like that, in that you meet people and see them for a day or two, then lose track of them for a while, and sometimes see them again later. It all depends on whether your travel pace and theirs mesh again.

I'm not one of the partisans of the "pilgrim family" idea that one sees from time to time on the net. It seems to me that every pilgrim, whether walking with a buddy or walking solo or even with a pilgrim-tour group, must make his or her own pilgrimage. The growth doesn't happen to a blob of people, it happens to each person individually. And expecting that people you just stumbled across on the first day or so will be your bosom buddies, happening to walk the same pace and stop at the same stops and rest at the same times, is unrealistic. Last year we crossed paths with the Texas Aggie student group a number of times, beginning on our very first night when we sat down to dinner in Roncesvalles. It was always a pleasure to say hello to them and catch up a little on things. That didn't mean that we were "supposed" to be with them all the time. It meant that we were fellow pilgrims on the trail. So, while I was saddened not to encounter the lovely Spaniards again, I accepted that they would be a day's travel behind us from then on because we'd combined 2 days' walk into one bus ride. It happens.

We got into Fatima a bit before noon and trekked along the main street until we found our hotel. It turned out to be on the far side of the Shrine grounds from the bus station. As it was before check-in time, they were kind enough to let us store the packs until the appropriate time and explore for a while.

There are many souvenir shops and stands in Fatima. This is reasonable, since many people come from all over to visit, and they want to bring back remembrances for their families and friends, and their own houses as well. We saw everything from tiny medals (not too much weight to get a handful and carry in a pack) to big statues, clothing, jewelry, rosaries, toys, and so on. It wasn't during one of the big Marian festivals, nor during the big anniversary months of the apparitions (May, a Marian month, and October, coincidentally also a Marian month) so the shops and restaurants were not packed to the gills with people. There were quite a few people in the Official Gift Shop, near the information office at the shrine, where we stopped after I had my credencial stamped. They don't have a setup where you can get a certificate for coming on the Camino Tejo or one of the other walking routes, but maybe in the future that will change.

We did eat the main meal of the day at the proper time, for a change, and had plates of good food for a reasonable price. That evening we went hunting for early dinner or tapas--tapas is often enough for us--but it was only 8 in the evening and either it wasn't late enough or Fatima restaurants keep different hours because the sidewalks were rolled up and put away. (For my non-American readers, this colloquialism means the restaurants and shops were closed and pretty much nobody was out and about.) I did manage to find a bowl of soup and after that we called it a day.

Prato de dia with squid. Very tasty!

A small correction to the earlier Fatima entry, posted from DH's Kindle with its never-sufficiently-cursed autocorrect feature that won't give up and let you keep the properly-spelled word you wanted: I said earlier that things are easier if you have some "little-known" Portuguese. The intended sentence said that things are easier if you have a little Portuguese. Quite a difference in meaning. Perhaps the Kindle autocorrect can be corrected. I had to retype things three times sometimes!

One of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, on the porch of the old church

 The old church, built a few decades after the apparitions, is a pretty building with a tall tower. There is a gilded crown at the top. There are curved porches on either side of the front entrance, which enclose the end of the plaza, and the porches have art of the Rosary under the roof of the walkway.

Statue on a hillside at Fatima. Pretty presentation of the Crucifixion in white stone.

 There are a number of things to visit at Fatima. We just hung around and rested, but we could have taken a sightseeing train to see various things like the Way of the Cross and so on. Also in easy bus reach is the monastery at Batalha, which is very historic.

The old church, which was closed for renovations or for prep for the youth day beginning the next day.

There were a lot of buses arriving with crowds of young people and pastors, chaperones, and whatnot other adults in tow. They were arriving in advance of a big youth festival that was going to start the next day. We missed the festivities, only because we went to the bus station in the afternoon to line up our ride to Tomar for the next day. It turned out that the next day was a Feria (holiday) and so there was a restricted schedule. The only two buses leaving were at 8 or so in the morning and around 5 in the afternoon.

The next morning we caught the early bus and rode a twisty, scenic road to Tomar, thus returning to the official path to Santiago.

Fatima

Hello, everyone.
We slept in today, until 0700! Then we looked up a place to stay in Fatima and ambled to the Santarem bus station. We got seats on the express bus--45 minute ride--and had a sip at the bus station cafe. Also some desperately needed Pringles. (We were still in salt deficit from the previous day's long walk.)

We're staying at a hotel called Avenida de Fatima. It's nice, has WiFi, an actual tub in the bathroom, air conditioning and a desk. They also allowed us to store our packs when we got there early.

Fatima is well set up to support pilgrims' needs. There are many cafes, many places to stay, and numerous information offices. It helps if you can speak a little-known Portuguese. Or at least a good list of Spanish words. Today I really needed to tell the pharmacist that we needed gauze bandage and wrapping adhesive tape. We didn't have those words, though, and ended up with Compeed for DH's blisters on the bottom of the foot. (I had this kind last year, and I don't think the Compeed deals well with being walked on all day. But we'll see.)

We ate prato do dia for lunch: protein, veg, and starch. It's their version of the blue plate special. Mine was fried pork steak (think chicken fried steak without the gravy, only a tender luscious piece of pork) and his was squid. His squid was accompanied by wonderful poached cabbage. Mine had a rice-with-stuff dish. And the "spec appetizer" assortment included octopus salad and a pair of good crusty rolls. (Portugal has a custom of putting appetizers out on the table in hope you will eat them--it's a sales technique, and what you eat they add to your bill.)

 Plaza at Fatima. We are facing the old Basilica. They're doing some kind of renovations.

A slab of the Berlin wall.


I never thought I'd see the Berlin wall come down in my lifetime and certainly never expected to see a piece of it.

The weather may improve soon. Tomorrow is a scheduled rest day for us--today was not scheduled but it's been hard to track down food on the trail so we needed it--and we will skedaddle on the early bus to Tomar.

Miami, in part

Hello, everyone.

I saw a little bit of Miami while I was gone.

The apartment had a view of the Freedom Tower, where all the Cubans fleeing the Communist revolution went to get their papers. This building is lighted with red at night.

Miami's Freedom Tower, in the daylight

My hotel room had a view of a very old, very beautiful church, the Gesu.

Gesu is the rose colored plaster building caty-cornered from the parking lot.

Side altar: St. Joseph (see the flowering staff), with Eucharistic pelicans above in the blue bit

Main altar area. Note the beautifully carved picture under the Tabernacle.

As they had a Mass starting soon after the previous one, I couldn't go through the nave photographing every single thing.
There was a sculpture garden on the waterfront area. (This is the bay, not the open ocean.) I saw some amazing hanging plant arrangements on the porch of the art museum in the midst of the sculpture garden.

Some of the hanging plant sculptures

One of the tropical lizards that has expanded its range into Florida, hiding in the leaves. This was near Brickell Key.

The hospital that DGS was born in has two great big ponds in front. (Scenery? Runoff management?) There were a lot of water birds there: ducks, egrets, geese. I saw my first Ibis, hunting in the grass.

SIL captured this ibis for me with his phone

But the best photos of all look a lot like this one:

DGS

Concluding our Camino

Hello, everyone.

At this point, having gone over the Walk, the bus/train tour, and the visit to Madrid, it's time to run over our trip home at the end of our pilgrimage. (After that, I'm sure there will be ruminations. And considerations of future travel. And possibly we will go hiking in other places--day hiking, that is--and that will appear. And cooking, and crafts, and so on.)

Our plane reservation was for July 3. We checked out of our pension, having tossed all manner of little bits that were broken and just making our packs weigh more, and walked out the door onto Madrid's street for the last time. We thought. It was 6 in the morning. The sun wasn't up yet, but we could see some clouds building. In fact, it started raining just before we passed the government office buildings on the way to the bus station. I ducked into the nearby door of a bank and pulled the rain poncho out of the pack. It was hard to put it on by myself, but my sweetie hadn't noticed me steppign aside. (Love that taffeta swish in your ears!) About a block later he figured out that I wasn't right behind him. I got to see him start turning back to try and find me. So I called to him and we joined up again.

It was raining and it was dark and we were two dark clad poncho covered figures walking down the street, obviously carrying big things under our ponchos. The passing police cars didn't even look twice. Maybe they see a lot of tourists wandering the street at that time with backpacks? I don't know.

We got to the bus station, repacked our ponchos and boarded the express bus to the airport. A little while later, we got off at the last terminal of the four. Oops. We should have gotten off at the first one. So we rode the inter-terminal bus back around and found our airline. There was already a line. (We later learned that during our weeks of no-television, the US government had decided to have an official sense of concern about people who might have disappeared and then reappeared and had US passports.) The lady handling pre-checks took our passports, had a conference with another security lady, and asked if we had our Camino passports. As happened, we did. (Crystallized effort in those little bits of cardboard. We were taking care of them!) We did our little dance of opening each other's pack and pulling out the document and handed them over to her and she had another conference with the other lady. Then she came back and stickered our packs as being pre-approved. We figured we were doing fine and had judged the length of line we'd be in right and all was cool. Then we realized that the line at the United Airlines desk was moving v-e-r-y slowly. Each and every passenger group was getting an interview at the desk. When we got up there, we realized that the poor reservation agents were having to reschedule everybody. (The prior day's storms in the eastern US had made a hash of their schedule. And apparently they had no functional contingency plan that didn't involve days on end of fooling around.) They conferred with us--forecast an arrival two days later than originally planned--and kept our original reservation in place while also making just-in-case reservations so we'd get home somehow. Somewhen.

We got coffee and roll. (As usual, we'd delayed eating anything until the morning was well started.)
We went through the assorted collection of security gates. At some point we were informed that because of flight delays, the airline would feed us lunch. So we reported to the lunch zone and had a sandwich and bocadillo and drink. (At least I think it was both sandwich and bocadillo. I remember thinking that it was basically two sandwiches.) We hung around for a while, got the lucky number for pat-downs, peeked out the window at approaching dark clouds, boarded the plane. Our 11 am departure had turned into about 3 pm but we figured we were still okay. Then we heard the roaring on the roof of the plane. Madrid was having a historic hailstorm.

From bus window

Piles of hail in drifts all over

And of course it all happened at the start of rush hour.

First the pilots had the mechanics come out and look the plane over. Then they got a spot in the departure line. Then we got into the line and were #2 when the pilot crew looked at their watches and schedules and cancelled the flight! >:-(

Apparently they'd been in the plane so long before getting in the air to come over the water, and been delayed so long at the gate from the storm, that they would exceed their regularoty maximum time on duty before the plane would be landing in the US. (Don't you think they could have figured that out before pulling back from the gate?) So we deplaned and followed an airline person to a bus and rode down the road to the Trypp by Windham, which was brand-new and quite nice.

A little sitting area, with a TV

Twin beds

There was a renta-a-comp in the lobby. We used it to email our family that we weren't going to be in on time and to look on the weather news and figure out what had happened to us.

The hall. With one of those electric
circuits you have to plug your key into.

A dryer and some toiletries on the sink

 (Dinner was cafeteria food, and one of the few not-very-good glasses of wine I had in Spain, but it was there. We'd learned a lot on our pilgrimage. We weren't sharing our room with 90 other people, which was something.)

Even fancy facilities and a real tub

At 5 am we all got back onto the bus and went back to the airport. Where the long-suffering reservation desk attendants had come in early to try and redo all of an entire planeload of passengers' reservations. Again.
We went through the security zones again. They opened the very last checkpoint really late for us (not for them, they were in early for their work day most likely--but it was only 10 minutes before our new, revised boarding time) and insisted on doing the patdowns all over again. I was so embarrassed when the poor young man had to put his (gloved) hands inside my hiking boots. They were nasty by now! I even apologized. And I was very glad that we'd checked our packs! Because they were opening and patting through everything in people's carry-on bags. All I had to carry on was my trusty Aggie bag, with our cameras, the Kindle, and not much else.

We got onto the plane again. Took off. Landed. Went to customer service right away in Dulles to try and get to Houston as soon as possible. (Also put the batteries back into the Blackberry and called home!) Got to Houston. Got stuck in Houston. Apparently the powers that be had only scheduled 2 flights to the Valley from Houston on July 4. With the little bitty planes that they've been using lately. We didn't get seats on either of them. So we had to spend yet another unscheduled night in a hotel. (And the one in Houston wasn't nearly as nice as the one in Madrid had been. To protect the guilty, I won't name it. I think I worked really hard on forgetting the name, in fact!) Woke up at 5 am in Houston and took the shuttle ride to the airport that another stranded passenger had asked for--they'd awakened early and left already, but we did have another little group with us in the van--spent our "meal vouchers" on food at the airport, and got onto a flight home. It was now July 5.

But we were home.

Madrid Food

Hello, everyone.

As you can see from the title, I am combining the Food subject with the Madrid series. I can do that, because since we had several days to explore the old part of Madrid, we ate new food there, too. :-)

We walked around the the area of our hostel--I think the floor we stayed on was an allied hostel managed by Hotel Marlasca--we smelled the most wonderful smell coming from an open window at a corner. What was that?!? Yum! We had already gone past, so we tracked that corner down later and discovered Casa del Abuelo. Which actually has two locations, covering two sides of this tiny intersection.

And the wonderful, delicious, garlicky smell? Gambon al ajillo. We went in. We watched the old man making it, right by the open window, on the small gas stove. We bought a couple plates of it and enjoyed it immensely. And we decided to figure it out when we got home. Even though our stove is electric, not gas, and we would be guessing on the lovely seasoning that he added. (The garlic mixture.) I'll save further detail on that one for a future cooking report, because I don't have a picture to show y'all.

We also tried tapa with "eels" which were tasty. We found them again in the Mercado San Miguel and discovered to our surprise that the gulas aren't actually tiny eels. They're specially prepared pieces of a larger fish. The stand selling them at the Mercado had a whole explanatory sign bragging about how they only use the highest quality cod for their gulas.

I do have pictures of some of the yummies (totally a word!) at Mercado San Miguel. First, the reason it's called that:

I didn't get a lot of photos in this church, because that was the day I'd zipped off the bottom half of my pant legs. I don't feel comfortable just waltzing into a church in shorts like that, resembling somebody on the way to a picnic. It feels disrespectful. But about a block or so later we encountered a large pavilion-style modern building in a stone plaza. It bore the title Mercado de San Miguel.

I supposed you could call it a tourist attraction. It might be more correct to call it a "food court" that had been added to the ancient plaza area, all glass and decorated with awnings to keep the sun off. Inside it we found lovely glasses of gazpacho--perfect for walking on a warm day--and lots of other booths with good food. We tried the mixed olives plate (I love olives dressed simply with olive oil!) from the olive both and a glass from the wine booth. Met nice tourists from the US, of all places, to share our olives with. On another visit we tried the fresh cheese tapas (there was a cheese tapa booth) and that was lovely also.  I want to go back to Madrid some day and eat all of these at least once:

While strolling Madrid,  I also tried the summer wine punch Tinto de Verano. It is lovely, red and cool with some fruit to it. It is lighter than straight-up wine. In some bars, you ask for that and they give you another wine based punch (Sangria?) that isn't so light, but it's all right too.

I will have more on Madrid tomorrow (museums, I think.) And my sweetie has hinted that he might do a guest post, as we two have serious disagreements about the famous painting "Guernica."

And on to Madrid

Hello, everyone.

We enjoyed our night in Salamanca very much. It would be neat to go there again someday. Final Salamanca pictures:

This was the music stand in the choir of the church. All the choir members gathered around it. The wood in the background is the carved seating for the choir. All of this is at the back of the church. The big cathedrals all had these, some in the middle and some at the very back.

This is one of the old music books. They all had to share the one, so it was really, really big.

We got on the express bus to Madrid for our final stop in Spain--this time for several days. There are huge tunnels going into Madrid. I didn't realize there were that many steep hills surrounding the city area. After the tunnels, we rode for a while longer before we got to the bus station. Then we started walking toward the center of the city. It didn't take as long as we expected, even though we were on midday sidewalks the whole way. We wore our hats to keep the sun off.

We thought this building looked neat.

Oh boy! Hams.

We stayed in Madrid the remaining days until our departure from Spain. I will break the pictures up between multiple posts, as we saw several museums and other neat things. We stayed at a pension in the old city area--but very close to the Plaza del Sol. There is a subway (metro) station there that is rounded and made of glass pieces and looked to me like nothing so much as a giant queen ant. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have been carrying a camera when we were near it!
I will do more Madrid pictures in my next post. After that, I might take a break to talk about food before concluding the Madrid series.