Stayin Local

This past weekend I decided to take a break from the wonderfully exhausting routine of traveling each weekend. I decided to stay in Riva for the weekend and thought about going to Milan for a day. Instead, a few other people where also staying in Riva but were going hiking locally on Saturday and invited me to come along. Friday afternoon I relaxed around the Villa, not too much activity, caught up on some work but relaxed for the most part.

Saturday I had a leisurely morning before the hike. We headed to the train station at around noon to head to Lugano. From there we walked about half an hour to the base of the San Salvator Mountain where we began out hike. It was a great hike steep enough to enjoy some altitude but varying with some flat spots making a hike that was not a walk the park but was easy enough to be enjoyed. It took about three hours to get to one of the minor peaks, after we took a wrong turn to the rock climbers side of the mountain and returned back to the proper trail. We had lunch with a beautiful view overlooking the city of Lugano and it’s lake as well as endless mountains surrounding us.

After lunch, half of the group returned down the mountain while I joined the other half, who were hiking to the very top of the mountain. It only took us about half an hour to reach the top. There was a restaurant and a visitors center and a tram station which housed a tram that ran every half hour from the base to the pinnacle of the mountain. The view was indescribable.

There was a small church on the highest point, it was simple but still wondrous thanks to its unrivaled location. The roof of the church was flat, and there were stairs to the top. From there I could see over all the trees for an amazing 360 degree view. I’ll just let you look at the pictures, the view was too marvelous to describe.

We practically ran down the mountain and got on a train back to Riva. For the evening we enjoyed relaxing and some drinks. Sunday I went to Mass in the local church, there was a confirmation. The rest of the day was spent relaxing and doing a bit of work. Sorry this is such a short post but I really just enjoyed a relaxing weekend.

Bern & Zurich

Two weekends ago I did a little Switzerland tour spending Saturday in Bern and Sunday in Zurich. I must warn, there was not much on the itinerary, I didn’t plan this weekend, some friends handled the task. And since northern Switzerland was a hotbed for Protestantism during their revolution, there are few Catholic sites to behold, so even when I checked for those kind of sites I didn’t find much.

We arrived in Bern late Friday afternoon, hiked to our hostel to drop off our gear and then headed out into the city for a pre-dinner walk. We saw the parliament building as well as the old town. We just wandered for about an hour. Traveling in Switzerland is very expensive, we could not find a sit-down place with agreeable prices for dinner, so I ended going to a street side kabob vendor, which while still expensive did not break the bank and was very delicious.

The next day we returned to the old town in the morning where an open-air market was well underway. There was of course fresh produce, cheeses, and meats but there were also vendors selling fresh churros and crepes. There was also a large section with purses, bags, hats, scarfs and all other types of clothing as well as Swiss knives, movies, precious rocks and all sorts of other nick-knacks. The coolest part though may have been the over-sized chess set in the center square.

After a bit of walking we grabbed lunch, but I stopped to listen to a man playing the accordion in the street. He was playing classical music and he was amazing. I listened for about ten minutes and ended up buying one of his CD’s. Afterwards we picked up our stuff and got on a train to Zurich.

An hour later we arrived. Zurich looked very similar to burn, cobblestone streets winding through lanes of beautiful renaissance buildings. Cleanliness is rivaled only by Germans, but prices are rivaled by no-one, and not in a good way. We stopped to sit in a plaza right outside a McDonald’s. A Big Mac alone was 11.70 CHF, which is the Swiss Franc, and it’s exchange rate is 1.06 Dollars to a Franc.  We walked the old town, grabbed dinner at a gourmet burger place.

Sunday I left the group sleeping in and headed to Mass. Zurich is close to Germany and its Catholicism is similar in that it has been unfortunately effected by much unapproved non-sense so Mass was a struggle. After Mass I hauled to the train station and barely caught the earliest possible train out and back home, but not before one of my favorite rides of all time.

Switzerland is a country so beautiful I could never write well enough to do it the slightest justice, but let me give you a glimpse at one of my favorite images of Switzerland. Northern-most Switzerland is comparatively flat to the majority of the country which is completely mountainous. There is a train track that runs from Zurich in the north, through the country splitting it in two, down passed Riva San Vitale to the boarder town of Chiasso all the way to Milan.

As the train enters the mountainous majority of the country moving southward it enters into a valley, and follows this valley all the way to the southern boarder. As the mountains rise the valley narrows and for a while becomes like a ravine, above are snow covered peaks, beside are countless little waterfalls draining water from the mountains into the river flowing through the ravine below. This scene carries on for nearly two hours, changing some, lakes appear and disappear, quaint picturesque towns with sheep and cows grazing, stone churches, all nestled in this sleepy narrow causeway.

Anytime I go north I take this route or at least part of it, and every time it is an amazing ride.

The Eternal City

A few weeks ago was my first visit to the Eternal City, more commonly known as Rome. My professor allowed me to skip a day of class because my cousin was ordained to the deaconate in St. Peter’s Basilica on a Thursday morning. I went down Wednesday after class and met my family at a vigil holy hour in one of the gloriously cliché magnificent churches of Rome. That evening I went to dinner with my mom and spent time with my aunt, uncle and cousins for the evening.

The next day we got up early for the ordination in St. Peter’s at the Altar of the Chair. There were about forty men from the North American College in Rome ordained to the deaconate that day. Afterwards there was a reception at the college itself. I stayed for that but had to get on a train to return home for a midterm exam the next day.

After my midterm on Friday in Riva I got on the train again, and back to Rome in order to spend the rest of the weekend with my family. Friday night we just relaxed in the apartment except for a short outing to the Pantheon and a few other churches.

Saturday we got up early and returned to St. Peter’s for eight o’clock private-ish Mass at the altar where are buried the bones of Pope Saint Gregory the Great. A beautiful Mass, I think the only Novus Ordo totally in Latin that I have ever attended. Afterwards we went to a coffee shop and enjoyed cappuccinos, pastries and some wonderful company.

Next we did some walking, I saw the Coliseum, the Circus Maximus and once again, many churches. Hung out at our apartment  and in the evening we went to St. Peter’s Square for what we thought was evening prayer but was actually the opening of the Extraordinary Synod after which we went back for dinner with family and friends.

The next day, as some of the family left the remaining family and I went to the Pontifical North American College and wandered the city for the morning before going to the Pope’s Angelus address even though we didn’t really understand anything accept for the Angelus itself.  Afterwards we went to lunch on the way to Mass at St. Mary Major. After Mass we went and saw the image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and got a pizza for dinner at a little eatery, one of the few open on Sunday.

 After that I was back to the train station and off to Riva after a relaxing and happy weekend.

Melk & Vienna

 One of the top rated places to visit in Austria is the Benedictine Abbey in Melk. It is a gorgeous abbey founded nearly one thousand years ago. At its zenith it was home to seventy monks, a place of visit for Austrian royalty, and a center for diplomatic affairs in northern Austria. Now it is home to thirty monks, an ecclesiastical treasury, and a middle and high school for children of the surrounding countryside. It still supplies fifteen priests to it’s subsidiary parishes in the rejoin. Melk is a charming town, still very small and as we walked up cobblestone streets we enjoyed the beautiful view of the picturesque homes over which stood the gloriously dominating figure of the abbey.

 

We arrived at the perfect time to join a guided tour. The tour took us through the “secular side” of the monastery, where the Austrian royal family used to live when visiting. It is now a gallery filled with the treasures of the monastery, beautiful vestments, reliquaries and relics of the Cross of Christ and of St. John the Baptist among others. We also saw the beautiful library of the abbey which is still active today.  The tour was about an hour long and ended just in time for us to join the monks in prayer at noon which they do publicly in their gorgeous chapel, which is really more like a basilica inside of the monastery compound. After prayer and a walk around the church we went back to the train station for the one hour ride to Vienna.

Once we got to Vienna we checked into our hostel, it was the hostel with the finest location but was not very clean, my first time in a real collegiate backpacker dirty but cheap hostel. I had not done much planning for Vienna so I spent about an hour or so looking over some of the things we wanted to see in the city. For dinner we took the metro across the city to Leopoldauer Alm, a restaurant serving up huge portions of local food.

Chris and I dug into one of the group meals they offered. The challenge, if we could finish the meal, we got a free bottle of wine! We did not finish the meal, we did not get any free wine. But on the way home we were able to give our hefty leftovers to some homeless men we came across while on the way home.

The next day great perseverance paid off! The Fraternity of St. Peter was offering Mass in the Kapuzinerkirche, translated Capuchin Church at 8am. Finally I found where the internet said Mass was held, and it was actually offered at the time advertised! It was a lovely twenty-minute walk to the church I made both days in Vienna. After Mass I returned to the hostel and Chris and I headed out for the day.

We walked around the “museum quarter” as well as the  gardens once reserved for Austrian nobility before going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of the top museums in Austria, full of classical art as well as a beautiful collection of royal treasures. We spent probably two hours in the museum it was truly wonderful.

Afterwards we grabbed a braut in front of the Rathaus followed by visiting the “Vigil Church”, essentially a cathedral for the northern part of the city. It was in the process of being cleaned and renovated but the steeples which had recently been finished were beautifully white. My favorite feature unique to churches in this eastern part of Europe, at least as far as I have seen is, is the stylized roofing made with different colored shingles in geometrical patterns, this church as well at St. Stephen’s, the Cathedral in Vienna, are wonderful examples of this uniquely beautiful roofing style.

After touring the church we headed into the city center via the subway planning to see St. Stephen’s. Once we arrived we found that the tickets we were hoping to buy were no longer available that day so we planned to come back to following morning to get a holistic experience of the cathedral. We wandered around a bit before heading home for the evening.

The next day I got up and went to Mass with the FSSP once again then we headed to the city center and breakfast at a café just around the corner from the cathedral.  Afterwards we bought our tickets and climbed up the cathedral steeple. From the top we took in the stunning view of the cathedral roof and city center just below, to the Vigil church and royal palace out in the distance along with the whole of Vienna.

Next we went to the Cathedral treasury housed in the choir loft of the cathedral. We saw chalices and art, but the most unique thing about the Cathedral treasury, once we had reached the end, we proceeded up a spiral staircase into a room, this room had large wooden and glass cabinets filled with relics of unimaginable number. Countless relics large and small, from the most famous saints, even the twelve apostles, to the most obscure and unknown.

There was even an altar containing skulls of eight different saints. After this overwhelming display we left the cathedral for a while. Chris wanted to purchase a lederhosen for his coming trip to Oktoberfest, so I waited while he tried them on in a tiny little shop filled with traditional Austrian dirndls, lederhosen, hats and more. Once he had the perfect pair we went back to the Cathedral for a tour of the catacombs.  Below the church are buried both cardinals and royalty along with many canons of the cathedral. In addition there are nearly 40,000 bodies buried under the church, from when there was still a graveyard, and from the outbreak of the black plague, since their were too many people dying to be buried they just put the bodies in piles in the catacombs. You can still see many of the bones today and  they have all been disinfected so no risk of catching the plague while on tour.

After the tour we got on the subway and headed back to our place to pick up our bags and we were on our way to Prague.