Christmas Vacation - The Diary of Two Lost Girls

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

It's definitely been awhile since I've had time to sit down and write a blog. But here I am on the day after Christmas, mentally reviewing our trip thus far. I guess I should catch you up since the last time I wrote.

So last I left off it was Single Day. If you want to know I had a fantastic Single day. For those of you that don't know, Single Day is a holiday I made up to celebrate the fact that I have officially been single for a year. My fantastic team indulged my whims as I continually danced to the song "Single Ladies" by Beyonce, as well as providing me with cake, and a flower, and earrings. Oh and I stayed up until midnight the night before to toast to Single Day with hot chocolate and KitKat bars. Needless to say it was a great day!

After that the team and I just focused on finishing out the year. We had a great finish, it wasn't as busy as the rest of the year was. We got to do some new things like run a youth group parish mission, which was four nights of evening sessions for a group of teenagers. That was So fun, we really had a good time with those kids. We also got to run another retreat in Limavady, in Derry. It was our first weekend retreat and we had kids aged eight to seventeen! That pretty much closed out our year as far as ministry was concerned.

We topped it all of with the cherry that was december retreat, a mix of Youth2000 and doin' our own NET thing. Youth2000 is another youth retreat organization that focuses on creating a community. NET focuses more on planting seeds. Both very essential to growing a youth catholic community in Ireland. I hope someday that Youth2000 and NET work very closely together. Great things are already happening!!

That brings me to Christmas vacation. Ironically I had four traditional Thanksgiving dinners, and no traditional Christmas.

The Two Lost Girls

Enter Anna Madden. This is beautiful girl that I've gotten to travel around Italy with. As stated in the title, this is the diary of two lost girls. I thought about making it into a miniseries, but that might be a little redundant. Needless to say the Holy Spirit has really been working with us this trip, and we have found absolutely nothing wanting. For the most part. That's not to say we haven't had... shall we say, interesting... experiences. But thats just how it goes. No major crisis' and we always seem to end up with exactly what we need, when we need it.

So, to start at the beginning. Anna and I drove with some of the other NET members at 3:30 in the morning of the 18th to Dublin airport, and caught a plane (that we almost missed!) out to Venice, Italy. First official adventure was reading the departure sign wrong and having to sprint from one end of the airport in Dublin to the other with big packs on so that we could make our flight. But we said a little prayer and got there with about 3 minutes to spare.

Yep... That's me. In Venice.
Dreams are coming true here people! 

We got to Venice, caught a bus out to the island, and water bus (yes they have those they are both bizarre and wonderful, but what else would you expect from a city built on... well, water.) to Campo San Marco. Or something like that. In english its Saint Marks square. Our Hostel/Hotel was about 2 minute walk from there. It was magical. We spent the next two days blissfully lost walking all around the corners of this beautiful Island. We were able to attend Mass in one of the many beautiful Basilica's one night, and got our first experience of Mass in Italian. Being Catholic is awesome. Even though its not your language you can tell by the inflection of the words where you are in the Mass. Truly universal.

The Harpsichord

We had  a great time in Venice. We ate a lot of bread and cheese, that we mostly bought fresh from shops and we had real Italian pizza! the first night we were there, we walked out into our square that our hotel opens up into and there was a free exhibition right next door on Antonio Vivaldi, we got to take cool pictures of his harpsichords and all kinds of cool things like that. But I think the thing we might have enjoyed most was just getting lost. Walking around enjoying the atmosphere, experiencing Italy watching all the people, seeing all the masks and all the new things. It. was. awesome.

This concluded our first 3 blissful days of vacation and being lost. Truly a blessing, and an adventure!!

Well I had better go. Maybe this will turn into a miniseries after all. I hope to recount each city with a little bit of detail. I will try and write on the next couple of cities soon!!

All our love!!
Annie and Anna

What a great winged lion!