WYD 2005: Day Two

I awoke at around 7am. It was cold and it seemed that everyone else in the train was still in dreamland so I slept again. When I woke up an hour later, my groupmates were already grooming themselves. After a while, breakfast was served. We had fruit juice, chocolate milk, cornetto, and sweetened wafer. We were now somewhere in southern Germany.

We prayed the Lauds at 9am. Since today is the feast of the Assumption, we sang the Salve Regina and other Marian hymns. After the Lauds I borrowed a guitar from the other cabin and sang pop songs with my groupmates to while away the time.

At 11am, we had concelebrated mass in the train. A makeshift altar was made inside one of the passenger cabins. The choir was in the next compartment and the concelebrating priests stood near the cabin where the altar was. Everyone else stayed in their respective cabins whole throughout the mass. I found out that there were at least five other Filipino priests traveling with us. The mass was said in Italian and the Scripture readings were assigned to Filipinos who could read Italian fluently.

Lunch was fagioli al’insalata con sedano, insalata di pasta, formaggio dolce, crostatina, fruit juice, softdrink, and water.

We arrived in Bonn, Germany a few minutes after 2pm. We went straight to the bus station to get a ride to our accommodation. At the bus station, two WYD volunteers approached us and told us that there was a special bus that would take us to our lodging house. We thanked them endlessly. An hour later we found ourselves inside the huge hall of the Josephinum school, where we were given our pilgrim backpacks and an orientation about the essentials (like where to get food, how to travel, etc.) of WYD.

From Josephinum we were brought to an elementary school, which would serve as our lodging house. We shared the school building with more than 150 delegates from Italy. There were no beds, everyone had to sleep on the floor. But we were prepared for that. Each of us brought our own sleeping bags. The only little discomfort was the toilet and the bathroom – there were only three for two hundred people!

Another slight problem was the lack of food for supper. There must have been an organizational problem since no food was served in our accommodation. But we did not sleep with empty stomachs tonight. Some volunteers went to a grocery store and bought hamburgers and cold drinks for the group.

I did not actually stay in the school during the WYD. I stayed with a host family in Bonn. I opted to stay with a host family because I needed access to a computer and the internet. Being the program director of the Filipino program of Vatican Radio, I needed the computer to edit the audio from the interviews that I and my staff would be conducting daily during the WYD. My host was the family of Luthar and Lucy Vollberg. I stayed in their home with three other pinoy delegates, namely, Ermie, Joyce, and Fr. Rene. They prepared a feast for us in their house. We had good food and a lot of good laughs. We slept around midnight.

Catholic Curiosity of the Day: Helicopters, NATO spyplanes, AWACS surveillance aircraft, frogmen, sniffer dogs and thousands of police will guard Pope Benedict XVI when he visits Germany for the World Youth Day celebrations.  But the German security chief said that the Pope would be more at risk from a crazed individual than a terrorist group.