I wake up because the Belgium girl decides she needs to wake up everyone a whole hour before we need to be at the morning church service a mere ten minutes walk away.. I try to be a good sport..but Lourdes has not been the rest I had hoped it would be...i have some instant coffee to make it through...
.. a little before 7am our gite man comes to takes us a backway to the church. Our goal is the 'primitive chapel' in the middle of the three-tiers Lourdes grotto church..it's a mass in french and they give communion.... lots of nuns and older peeps are there....apparently some previous pilgrims had their hair on their arms stand on end in this chapel, because of it's special energy... perhaps it's too early and my body is not responsive..but i check and the hairs on my arm are flat...After the service, our guide then shows us the small reliquary to the right of the chapel that houses St Bernadette's bones... our Belgium woman has been talking a lot in french she now makes the Italian translate to German anything she deems important enough that I should know.. he followers her orders dutifully, we all kind of do, it's the path of least resistance..she does have interesting things to say when I am allowed to hear...for instance in the days of old, pilgrims would not leave a holy sites until they had seen a miracle.. I imagined a lot of places filled with waiting pilgrims..but it was the age of superstition and magical thinking so perhaps it was not too hard for them to get their wish? At least that is the story I tell myself... our guide takes us out of the chapel and he says is walking us out the route that Bernadette used to take when she went down to the grotto..it's now paved walk way, so the feel is gone a bit from what it must have been like when it was still forest and natural... he goes and hugs a tree along the route and we follow suite.. I rest my cheek against the tree as I hug it.. and to my surprise it feels great, I am not sure if this was a Bernadette ritual, she used to practice?.. I could not fathom our guide, a devote catholic, doing this on a whim.....then back for breakfast..the young french woman never surfaces, she's finished pilgrimage and is sleeping in..i can not imagine that this too will be me in maybe another month and half... at breakfast again the Belgium woman dominates with french and gives us a hard time when speak german amongst ourselves but neither the Italian nor I speak french..... the Italian does get to sneak in his story a bit..
he's done the Camino from different starting points three times now and wants to do a long journey mostly via foot around the world like a peace pilgrim.. he actually heads a small organization in Germany, where he lives, that has projects in Romania with people who survive in garbage dumps..., orphans..young people sick with illnesses that they cant get treatment for in Romania like cancer and lupus , encephalitis children that did not get the necessary surgery as small children and live with painful pressure in the brain from water build up.....he had a little book he showed with some of the projects..then I saw a page with a group of Tibetan nuns... and I though I recognized one of them! Yes, indeed, it was the abbess of the nunnery bellow Kopan in Nepal, where I had stayed for a while..he had hosted them for a ten day trip to Germany and had fundraised money to build a well for them.. he also had photos of him being blessed by the Dalai Lama, it seems the Dalai Lama always spots him in the crowd and comes to him to talk to him briefly...i have seen the Dalai Lama single out people like that when I have gone to teachings in India...perhaps my Italian friend has a special karmic connection with him?.. at the end my friend had me write in his book we take a photo together... in the book he has people write their messages of peace... ..then around ten I go to train station.. I found out I have one hr to kill so I dink on my lap top...homeless guy tries to speak to me in french.. peeps seem to know him... he smells bad though..i try to be accepting..but realize it is hard... he teases me because I said I dont speak french but do seem to understand some of the things he says... I seem to have moments of lucidity, when it comes to french, where I seem to understand a bit..but then it goes away again...
The train ride back to Pau, I arrive by noon ...using my tourist map and guessing at the crappy map in my french guide book I find my way out of town...i am a bit pleased with myself..because I do find the markings for my trail again...i stop for lunch ..and stop again at mc donalds..its quite happening there..i spend an hour not really doing anything constructive on the internet...i take my sweet time because I only have ten or less km's to walk today.....shoulders and hip still hurt but it's good short day...though tired..
Once in Lescar, in a park, I have to walk through, man with dog is there.. the dog walks ahead and is quite assertively curious..not really the scary aggressive I felt I had been dealing with...still I test my new dog-biscuits on him...since I want to see my own and the dogs reactions.. .. I try to feed him instead of worrying about him... it felt like a with success, he liked my treat.. and I liked how my own and his behavior changed upon my giving it to him..i have new found confidence again with loose dogs.....
the town has a tourist office, they have the key and I pay for the gite there.. I am the only one.. my credentials are trashed from wet days in my money belt I also dont think there is enough space in them for spain,...so, i new credentials here..... I go into the church.. I meet a Freddy from west indias
...Guadalupe?
Outside with his wife..they are taking photos of a Camino map and they seem excited to meet a pilgrim actually walking it... Freddy insists on a photo with me... they are a really friendly couple.. they seem to be traveling with a personal driver who was also their tour guide..they were impressed with my long journey... I then go find the gite at other end of town, I do my laundry and the place has a dryer.! In fact the Gite is .large, nice, clean,and has new furnishings.. I look in the gite comment book where pilgrims leave their thoughts.. and I see a note from the girl from the swiss couple again, they had been here two days before me..she too seemed to like the dryer.. funny how I still feel a connection..even if I just saw their writing in a book... I think once you hung out a few times with pilgrims..your thoughts are stay with them and you wonder how they are doing .. Then I went and got groceries.. my eyes bigger than my stomach.. I make too much food...salad and pasta..
I would have the place all to myself... nice... at ten pm I woke up hearing weird noises..i could not tell where it was coming from? But decided it was not inside the Gite... I went back to sleep and forgot about it till the next day...
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