Yeah, I think one of the most annoying things about the trip, though is that — so Sunday morning, I said like, “Hey, on Sunday morning, I want to go to mass”, but I didn’t want to go alone because, the university is paying for us to have phone plans, but when the phone plan renewed, everyone’s got screwed up so they’d like no longer could — actually use their phone plan, so that was really sucky, right? And because I didn’t have a phone plan I was completely dependent on like, I need to stay with [friend] because [friend] is the only one with the working phone. Like if I get lost I can’t do anything I can’t access my Google Maps and also to get into our Airbnb you had to make a phone call, which I could not do without a working phone plan. I mean, my phone worked on the Wi-Fi but you had to be like in in the building for the Wi-Fi to work.
So, I got up at 8:30 and I like had to make the decision, do I wake up [friend]? Because [friend] was very much not – she was not awake. She had been up late the night before like all of us and unlike me, she was actually sleeping. I had naturally woken up at 6:20 in the morning because of nightmares and, I couldn’t really sleep at all after that so I just sat up and I talked to my friend.
But I ended up getting to go to mass at the Duomo which was really cool. Going to mass at the Duomo is weird. Because like at a lot of churches, like the ones in Spain — they like closed the church down for mass, right? So like the tourists can’t come in, but in the Duomo in Italy they don’t, like they have tours going on at the same time as mass. So it was really weird, like I felt like I was in this little fish bowl being watched as I was one of the mass parishioners. But like, hey, it worked, I got to do what I wanted to do and everyone else got to hang around the city center.
The only somewhat unfortunate thing is, is that we had like, decided on this place as our meeting location, and when I get out there, there’s a free Palestine protest. Now, I am not going to say what I think about that whole thing, and because I don’t want to talk like politics on here, but like, let’s say that I just don’t want to stand in the middle of a protest regardless of whether I agree with it. I just like – in a foreign country, foreign country without a working phone, like that seems like a really terrible idea, right? So, I decided to go to McDonald’s just two minutes away, wait out for the meeting time and then, go back and stand there. And we planned for mass to be an hour and fifteen long and I gave them a 15 minute grace period to get there. They had like a fifteen-minute time window and mass was 45 minutes. So I was at McDonald’s for a pretty long time, but I had been looking for the specific candy and McDonald’s had a McFlurry of said candy, so I got that and that made my life a little bit more joyous and then I like didn’t have to spend money on gelato later.