400 People

Tuesday afternoon, after Daniel and I finished yet another window and we were "off" for the day, we decided to go on a bike ride; he, Roman and I. It ended up being quite a trip, totaling altogether about 21 km of pavement, dirt, mud (it rained that morning), lots of rocks, hills, bigger hills (we were riding in the White Carpathian range), and one really steep descent. I'm not joking about it being steep; we couldn't even ride down it, but that was also because it just happened to be a hiking trail (not accommodating bikes very well). We accidentally took the wrong path and didn't figure that out until it was too late to turn back. We slid our way down, over rocks and around trees (usually), with many a slip and slide, held onto our bikes as best we could and generally just tried to find the best way to take a bike over a trail that is purely for hiking. I think each one of us fell at least one time, but we couldn't do much except to just keep pushing ahead and down; actually it was more like holding back and skiing, except that there wasn't any snow. I really wish I had taken a camera with me.

Wednesday - another window. We also worked more on cleaning out the "book store" room.

Today - yet another window, but now we are finished with five out of the seven! We also found out today that we will be scraping paint off of a couple doorframes as well. This will probably be easier since there aren't so many small surfaces as there are in the windows. I'll try and remember to take a picture of our work so far. More work was done in the "book store". We took a couple of the bookshelves upstairs and put them up in what we call the "first office". We also hauled some of the books up there to go on them once all the working stops and the dust settles.


Roman and I went and rode bikes this evening just for fun. When we arrived back in the city we saw a big procession of people; I'm talking somewhere in the number of 400. I'm not sure what it was all about (and neither does anybody I've asked), but it seemed to be just about the whole Catholic church observing some kind of holy day or ceremony. We were just right by our church, since this was all happening in the square, so I ran and got my camera to take some pictures. It sure is a strange feeling to have almost every other person out of a crowd of 400 either stare at you or give you a hard look.

Roman, who was standing next to me all this time, was able to kind of wrap up what my thoughts were as I looked at all this going on: "...a lot of lost, confused people."