One of the appeals of this part of the journey for me was to come close to the village of Vráble in the Nitra district, where my grandmother was born in 1901. Although we did not pass through it we did pass within a few kilometers of it so I got to see the area and landscape my grandmother knew as a little girl. Neat!
Along the way we stopped first at the wooden church in Hronsek. It's about 300 years old. As it happens the caretaker was there so we got to go inside and look around and hear about the church; then we sang Non Nobis.
After that it was back on the bus with a stop at Banská Bystrica. We walked up to the Church of St. Mary which has an altar done by the famous sculptor Master Jan Pavol from Levoca. We sang The Glory of the Father and Non Nobis there. Afterward we had lunch ( a very nice central square, and it was a nice day) then we walked back to the bus with a stop to look at the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising. Alas there was not time to go IN the museum but the grounds were pretty neat.
From there we drove straight to Levoca. We checked into the Hotel Stela and had about 25 minutes to change into our formal gear and get over to St. James Church (right across the street, fortunately). We got a quick tour of the church and then had about 35 minutes of warmup. The priest had told us he would hold Mass until 7:15 p.m. (!) from 7 p.m. so we would have a better audience. We sang our concert at 6:45:
- Glory of the Father (split)
- Verbum Caro Factum Est (split)
- Aka Si Mi Krasna
- Vita de la Mia Vita
- Abendlied
- Du Ser Meg i Auga
- There Will Be Rest
- Let Me Fly
- I've Been In the Storm So Long (Sheryl solo)
- Battle of Jericho
- Praise to the Lord
I was really struck by how enthusiastically the congregation sang! They sang the Creed! It was pretty cool. I had planned on going to communion and had extricated myself from the last row of the choir (we were jammed in pretty tight) -- but when I saw there were a lot of other folks up in the loft area I assumed they would send a minister of communion up there so I just stayed there and waited... and nope, they did not, so I missed my chance. I was disappointed, but oh well.
During the last part of Mass it started to rain quite hard so we all got fairly wet just in the block or so between the church and the hotel. We all went upstairs to the hotel restaurant for dinner... which was really really slow. Like really slow. We were there for about 2 hours and it took forever to get served. The food was okay but not exciting.
The hotel was quite old and not very modern; they had an elevator but it was not much help since the hotel is on multiple levels. I wound up lugging all my stuff up two flights of stairs. There was no wifi in our room but apparently there was some access elsewhere.
1 comment:
To be fair regarding the service at dinner at the hotel in Levoca, there was only one server and one bus-person. They were both literally running to meet our needs. They worked very hard to serve all of us and deserve our appreciation for the exceptional effort that they put out.
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