Sunday 20 June

Written later...reflecting on the experience from Australia....

Gemma's birthday dawned, and I don't know whether I've ever seen quite as much of her birthday, apart from the original day 17 years ago! We had a lovely gathering at the Austrian Hospice on the previous night celebrating one of the Ecce Homo-ians birthdays. We sat in the garden under the fairy lights in the trees and soaked up the cool breeze, singing songs from various musicals including The Sound of Music.

This morning's mission was to go to Notre Dame for mass, as Ariel, one of our group, was going to concelebrate mass. Notre Dame is a huge basilica, it is where we first arrived in our taxi from the airport, and where the Pope stays when he is in town. So, a few of us walked together to 9am mass. The mass itself was quite beautiful, and again full of surprises. We were 'guests' at a wedding -an older couple, one of whom's daughter works in Gaza, were married in the middle of the mass. I was asked when we arrived if I'd do a reading, and accepted the honour. I truly wished I had been a little more dressed up: my travelling sandshoes and crumpled cotton didn't quite seem up to the occasion, but I read as well as I could and hoped that made up for it!

We had coffee on the coffee shop verandah, together with Jim and Loris from Berwick, who have been volunteering at Ecce Homo for the past three months. I collected some sugar packets marked with the Vatican logo, to give to my colleagues back home, who would no doubt benefit greatly from some particularly holy sugar (!) and then we went our separate ways for our 'sunday off'. Peggy and I hit Ben Yehuda street, lunch at a bagel shop, enjoying the music in the mall, and buying up big on Jewish paraphernalia. It was a lovely atmosphere: and gave us a break from the 'serious', and cut throat, shopping of the souq. The interesting thing we noted though was that in the space of about five minutes we saw about five people begging for money: and that is a sight that we haven't seen a lot in the old city. Yet another piece in the puzzle....