Milan/Venice

Hello all! Happy Ash Wednesday! This morning starts the beginning of LENT, my favorite season! I, along with eight other girls, got up this morning and met a few of the seminarians we know in the lobby of the hotel to go to the first Station Church. There is a Station Church for every single day of Lent, so my goal is to go to Mass at that church every morning that I am here in Rome. This morning we went to Saint Sabina, which houses the first image of the crucifixion in the entire world. It was pretty amazing. The Pope has celebrated Ash Wednesday at St. Sabina since like the 500s or something ridiculous like that, but we didn't go to the Pope's Mass. You have to have tickets for that. We went to the English Mass, which is at 7 a.m. every morning. The English speakers are the lucky ones who got the earliest slot for Mass.

Well, this past weekend I headed off to meet Steph in Milan like I told you in my last blog. Unbeknownst to me, there is not very much to do in Milan, but that's alright, because it was still a great trip. I didn't get to see the Last Supper, they were booked for two weeks straight. So, that was a little depressing. I did get to see the Duomo, which is the third largest in the world, behind St. Peter's and one other, it was amazing. Other than that, I just wandered around and hung out with Steph and her roommates. We went to Venice on Saturday for Carnevale! That was really great. We got there and took a boat ride down the Grand Canal and ended up in St. Mark's Square. All of the costumes were outrageous. Steph and I split off from the group and went mask hunting. We both found some pretty cool ones. If you want to check out my photo album from Carnevale click HERE! After we found masks, we took a gondola ride which was unbelievably awesome. The guy wouldn't sing when I asked him to  because he said he only sung at night...I think that was the only disappointing thing about Venice. Overall, it was a great weekend.

I am staying in Rome this weekend, going to hit up several more Station Churches while I am here. My roommates and I have the whole weekend planned out, so I will blog sometime next week about my adventures.

If anyone is coming over for Easter, or knows anyone that is coming for Easter or anytime around such as Good Friday, etc. let me know and I can request tickets for all the Papal events. It's nice having connections in Rome :) Hope all is well at home! Keep me updated with what's going on in everyone's lives!

Ciao for now!

Allie