May 21--The Tale of the Cathedral of Burgos

Because we are in a bigger city (Burgos), we were able to go to real church today which is always fun :-) It was a pretty good meeting.  The Sunday School was especially super great, and of course we performed our prepared choir pieces which people LOVED, and we just about doubled the size of that small branch :-)

After church, we found out that we would be going to the GIANT cathedral in Burgos at 3:00 (a weird time but we would avoid the hoards of tour group that come through later, ,so I guess it made sense).  But church didn't start until 11:00 and ended at 1:00 which meant that after walking back to the hotel, we had limited time to nap and lunch before the cathedral.  Again, I felt bad going out to eat on Sunday, but honestly Spain doesn't make it super easy to buy ingredients to make a lunch that doesn't require a kitchen.  I also felt less guilty when we walked into the restaurant, and my favorite professor and his wife were there eating ;-) It was also nice that even though it wasn't EXACTLY American food, it was pretty close.  It was a burger place with fries and drinks, and it was just, yeah, a little taste of home :-) Plus, I think my professor is super cool, so it was fun having lunch with the two of them!

Let me now tell you the tale of the Cathedral of Burgos.  And no, this isn't a history lesson.  I just had a super funny experience in there that I will share.  To give you an idea of how big it is, it takes up four city blocks with its size.  It has a huge main church area with a chapel and altar and chorus and all that good stuff, and there are smaller room also called chapels which commemorate different saints and events.  They they is also a cloister which is HUGE which has two levels.  Part of the cathedral has been converted into a museum which leads into the crypt that then also includes the bottom half of the cloister, some more random rooms, and then a gift store to top it all off.  

So we get into the cathedral (and my professor gets a special badge so he can give us a tour without getting yelled by the paid tour guides), and we start looking at all this cool stuff: reliefs, stained glass, vaulted ceilings with beautiful windows, a retablo to the Virgin Anna who is apparently the mother of Mary.  Good stuff.

MEANWHILE....

I have decided on this trip to that it is better to have to go pee than to have a headache from not hydrating enough.

Well...an hour and a half into our professor-led tour, my water bottle is empty, and my bladder is FULL! I assume that the aseos (bathrooms) are nearby, right? 

WRONG.

To get to the bathroom, I need to run around the entire inner circular path of the cathedral (because there is only one direction of traffic), then through the cloister which is, like, BIG, through the museum, then through the bottom level of the cloister, into the crypt and out into the gift shop.  Of course, on my way out of the crypt, I realize I need to go through sliding glass doors which look mysteriously like an exit that I can't enter again.  SO, I have to run ALL THE WAY BACK.  Meanwhile, the rest of my group is calmly listening to my professor (I, of course, can see them because they are in the center part of the cathedral that I am frantically running around).  I wait patiently for a good three minutes to make sure the ticket guy will let me back in (he gives me a nod), and then I run BACK through both levels of the cloister, the museum, the crypt and out into the gift shop where I FINALLY find the bathrooms.

Amyways, the cathedral was great, but MAN was that some kind of little adventure I had while there :D



















Also, maybe somebody out there can answer this for me.  Why is EVERY female saint of the Catholic Church a martyr? Like, for real, I start reading their stories, and they ALL got killed.  

The day ended really well.  Some of the group was craving Chinese food--I was like, I don't think we're gonna find good Chinese food here--but amazingly, one of the girls who likes to look for food (but her Google Maps always fails her) actually found this ramen place that was SUPER good! It was another "semi" taste of home i.e. food that I really love and can appreciate and will SHOVEL into my mouth :)



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