Loyola Retreat!

Wow!  Another amazing weekend to document in the Spain Blog!  I had so much fun this weekend meeting new people and learning more about St. Ignatius as well as connecting with God in such an incredible place!  The mountains and green countryside reminds me of what Austria looks like!  Yes, I was biting the urge to sing "The Hills are Alive" all weekend!

At Loyola, we had the opportunity to do retreat things of course, but we also spent time going to St. Ignatius's House (well Castle), the Church he was baptized at, as well as the place he first started his ministry at!  At St. Ignatius's Castle, we were able to see the room he was born in as well as the room he was brought to after he had been injured in battle which is the same room that is now the chapel of Conversion because this is where he found his Faith and decided to live his life for God!

As I said before, this weekend gave me the chance to meet some truly incredible people!  There were SLU-Madrid kids on the retreat, but there were also some Marquette kids and some Spanish students from a different University who also came along on the trip.  My roommate for the weekend, Catherine, was one of the Marquette Students.  Actually, she isn't even a Marquette Student - she actually goes to Loyola but chose to go to Spain through Marquette's Program!  There you go Ron - LOYOLA represent!

On our way home from the Retreat, we visited St. Xavier's Castle which is one of the best kept castles I have been in thus far!  They just renovated it in 2006 and you can tell!  It was a very easy castle to self tour!

So here are some interesting things about Loyola, and the Retreat in General

1.  The nuns who took care of us all weekend are absolutely incredible!  I wish I could take them all home with me!  Seriously, Supper was absolutely delicious every night - on par with Nena's cooking!
2.  We had wine with every meal.  It is really surprising that Wine is so typical with meals here in Spain that we just got wine with our meals!  That would never happen in the US!
3.  Many of the locals only speak the Basque Language.  This would make traveling to Loyola very difficult if your only language is English - some of them at least know Spanish!  The Basque people are very proud of their culture and their language.  When Spain was having trouble with Terrorist groups who wanted to break away from Spain 20 years ago, the people were from this area.
4.  St. Ignatius wanted to be a valiant knight as was popular during the "Romantic" time in History - you know rescue the fair maiden sort of thing!  But in his adult life, St. Ignatius was injured in a battle in France and after the battle, his enemies brought him back to his family in Loyola where he stayed to recover.  While recovery he asked his sister-in-law for some romantic knight tales to read but all she had were 2 books - on of which was the book of the adventures of the saints (or something to that effect).  Anyway, it is because of these books that he began to search for God and ultimately had his conversion to go and be a knight for God! Thus the story of the great founder of the Jesuits's story really begins!
5. 6 hours on a bus going back home is about 2 hours too long and is about 5 minutes too short to be able to watch a movie on st. xavier, Up!, and Pride and Prejudice.  We literally pulled up to school with 2 minutes left in P and P.... It was a sad day for all the girls on the bus!