February 20, 2011

Last night and this morning were freezing! I think it's interesting how one day can be the hottest I have experienced here and sunny and then the next day is the coldest and rainy. This morning Ellie and I walked to Mass about a mile away. Ellie is in the church's choir. The mass out here is conducted a bit differently than it is back home. First of all I feel like at home we do a lot of standing during the mass, but here it is a lot of kneeling so I constantly had to watch what everyone else was doing. Second of all they dont raise their hands palm up at all when we do three times, so I mustve looked really intersesting when I raised my arms up. And just about every single person in their had two kids each and child room to keep them entertained in, so it was very loud. To top the noise off a large amount of adults were talking the entire time too! Me already struggling with poor hearing was about to go crazy on the talking people because I could hardly even hear the priest when he was raising his voice in a microphone. There also wasn't that part in mass where you all hold hands and recite the prayer. What shocked me the most was that there wasn't any wine during communion for the people, only the priest got it. After mass we walked to Ellie's cousin's house, the ones that hosted Mina, and we got there dog and walked back to our house grabbed our two dogs and went down to the beach. I found a sea shell, sea glass, a piece of a crab shell, a bright green, and red rock, and many other beautiful rocks. The rocks on this beach are mainly solid black, there are quite a few solid white ones, and some black with white lines on them. But to my surprise there are a lot of rocks with Micah in them. After the long walk and beach time with the dogs we put them back and walked up back to Ellie's cousin house where they were having a going away party for one of her cousins, Laurna. Laurna is I think twenty two and she is going back to college in Vienna, she was just visiting home for her break for a couple of weeks. The dinner was chicken curry with white rice and desert was brownies with ice cream, it was delicious.  But I am very tired tonight from all of our walking.