Birthday Cake

So walking over to the unexplored part of the old city was a great decision! I toured an 18th century Franciscan cathedral and monastery and ended up being there right during mass as well. After that I went down to a more residential area and found a lovely and quiet little park where I sat for some time before I decided to return to civilization. After some debate I decided to go ahead and buy my bus ticket so I wouldn´t have to worry about it today, so I made the long walk up to the bus station and got my passage to Madrid and then found an internet cafe that looked like it would have better Skype capabilities than the place I´ve been frequenting the past week. After I returned to the main plaza my Nebraskan friend and I went to get dinner and then icecream.
When I first got the idea to share a Santiago cake with the incoming pilgrims there were a few considerations I took but many more that I didn´t. For one, I at least knew enough to make a sign that said "Congratulations" in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Korean, Portugese, Czech, and Romanian. (In order to do that I used to Google translate and also plotted a Madrid Metro route from the bus station to the church for tomorrow.) What I didn´t think about was that in the heat of the late morning, one of the last things a pilgrims wants is an extremely thirst-inducing sweet. Those who rejected my offer, if it wasn´t because they were already thirsty or diabetic, seemed to regard me as a beggar even though I was offering a gift rather than requesting money, so I edited my sign to say "Free!" in English and Spanish. Eventually I got rid of it all, and I think the Koreans were most excited and touched to see their own characters instead of the Latin characters that all of the western languages use. One Mexican student from Madrid gave me a big (and shirtless) bear hug when he found out it´s my birthday and his Swedish friend followed suit. About time for another shower now, haha!
I also got to meet four women from Ohio, one of whom is actually a fellow aspiring albergue host(ess). She´s been in Spain for a few years now and is working through the legal hoops required to open a place in Santiago, so I got her contact information and hope it will be a fruitful meeting (it certainly wasn´t random).
We and Nebraska had lunch and then I headed over to the "quick" internet place to video chat with the parents and girlfriend but soon found that the connection was only good enough to maintain about 20 or 30 seconds of conversation before it had to reconnect. Sometimes that took less than a second, but other times it took longer than the last bit of conversation so after an hour we finally called it quits. I went ahead and paid and returned to the closer and cheaper and more reliable internet place in the old city to update this blog. Tonight I´ll have dinner one last time with Nebraska (at the falafel place, of course) and then head over to the bus station and (hopefully) sleep my way to Madrid.
I hope you will all pray for my meeting with the bishop, because I honestly have no idea what to expect. I know he loves the Lord and has a very big heart for his country, but I don´t know how long we´ll meet or even what exactly I should talk to him about that I haven´t already emailed him. But the Holy Spirit will lead us, so I´m not worried, and I´m excited to see how the Spanish Epicopal church worships.
I may not get a chance to update until Monday when I get to D.C., so until next time, God bless!