Sunday Pilgrimage.

Anton, Mike and I decided to go to church. Vince gave us the directions last night to Xujiuhui Cathedral. We had to walk around 400m to get to the station then use to lines to reach Xujiuhui. The cathedral has a similar architecture to St. Augustine Church in CDO. We arrived around 11:20. We started travelling at around 9:40. So it was really a long way. When we arrived, the mass was finished. Their schedule was 6am,7:30am,10am and 6pm. We decided to stay and pray for a while. An old lady approached us and began asking questions and where we were from. She was one of the church caretakers. She began preaching about Jesus and how he died on the cross. We somehow understand some parts of it. It was nice to hear and also amazing to see that there is a church in China with quite a large congregation. After our short stop, we headed to McDo for lunch then toured the area. There were a number of high end malls that were quite big. It was raining from time to time so we had no choice but to stay inside the malls. After, we headed to IKEA. I think it's the biggest home furnishing store here. It's warehouse type and quite similar to Handyman Do-It centers. They had great choices and affordable prices. Vince recommended their meatballs but we didn't try it since we wanted to go home and rest our legs! On the walk back from the station to our dorm, we saw Jeff and Cat helping out Justin (Jeff's flatmate) buy a bike. Finally we got home and rested.

We then headed to the student life center to eat dinner at the same place where we over ordered dumplings before. This time, we were more careful and Edel,Dexter, Justin and Jeff were present so there were ten of us to finish all the food.

Tomorrow is the start of registration so it will be quite a busy day for us.

I guess it's nice that we have to go so far to hear God's Word. It makes the mass more hard-earned for us. We get the feeling that we really made an effort to go to church. It also made us thankful of the fact that the Gesu was so near from the dorm and a bit sad that we sometimes disregard the fact that God is so near us in our country yet we don't make much out of our blessing. Even the caretaker attested to the faith of Filipinos. It was really a tiring journey but we learned important values and more chinese words!