Touring Assisi

Monday was an early day for us after a late night. I gave the devotional at 8:30am, with about 17 kids present, using the Proverbs lesson I have done a couple of times recently. The kids seemed to enjoy it and really got into picking their own proverb and commenting on it. Afterwards Dee handed out her homemade cookies, which most of the group really enjoyed, although a few said that it was too early for sweets -- clearly these folks are not American! 😉

 

After that, Dee did a few minutes of a dance class, taught by an American who lives in Italy with her husband. They both served missions in Rome a few years ago, and he is playing professional basketball here after a short career at BYU. After that we took the bus up to Assisi, which is nearby but up the hill. The bus leaves from the nearby church, which we can easily see from our hotel. This is the location where St. Francis died.

View from our hotel room window

The tiny chapel where St. Frances died

 

We got off the bus at the top of the town and took the Rick Steves audio tour on the way down. It worked pretty well, though they are very bad at giving directions along the way, so we got lost briefly a couple of times. Along the way, Dee bought a gift for her wonderful Aunt Frances, a devout Catholic, and she did a bit of window shopping along the way. The town and the views are absolutely gorgeous. Everything is so clean compare to Rome. They have a big church for the "poor Clares", an order of nuns who are followers of St. Francis. Our daughter Chiara has the same name, so we took some photos. We stopped for some lunch right nearby. Then we walked down to the main basilica, which is a different audio tour. We walked through the upper and lower basilicas briefly. By that point we were pretty tired and ready go back, so w walked down to a bus stop, having just missed the bus. Rather than wait 20 minutes more, we splurged and took a taxi back to our hotel, just about 10 minutes away. Here are some photos of our tour.

 

 

St. Clare's church

In front of the fountain in the main square downtown

View from outside the upper basilica

The main upper basilica

Downtown, an old Roman temple converted into a Catholic church

Inside the lower basilica

Inside the upper basilica

By the time we got back, we were both exhausted from not having slept much the night before, so we took a good nap for an hour. When we got up, we drove to a Conad market just around the corner to get some fruit for us and 24 bottles of water for our kids. The Italians really are accustomed to bottled water, which is expensive to buy here at the hotel, so we are hoping to score some points at our Tuesday morning devotional. 

At 6pm we had another tutor couple meeting, followed by dinner and a fun talent show. There were a few mediocre acts, but many of them were quite good. Jomar's singing was awesome! He really was the best act as far as I was concerned, though he came in a very close second in the voting to a rock guitar band.  Ugo danced with a bunch of girls in a country style group and brought the house down -- he is so good with these kids. At one point, while they were tallying the online vote, the crowd started singing together some fun Italian song with great gusto. Everyone (but us) knew all the words, and they were really having fun.

Ugo's dance group

The winning band

The whole audience singing together

I meant to mention that Dee and I have been doing some simultaneous translation for different people here. There is a self-reliance senior couple, the Carrolls, here from Frankfurt who speak no Italian, so I translated for them during Sacrament meeting. We also have two British gals from Malta, and we have each translated for them in various meetings, including our group meeting and morning devotionals. We are getting pretty comfortable with what formerly was a very difficult task. Kinda cool.