It’s Sunday and you know what we do on Sundays. Go to Jehovah’s house. Except as we walked home from the gelato spot after an endless supply of Sangria, some in our group asked for the Zoom info (just in case). And Stacy & I were glad to have the option.
But when someone asked if anyone wanted to share a taxi - we jumped at the chance. Literally because the original departure time gave us 15 minutes to get ready. But we found someone else who was moving about our speed and we rode in our Tesla taxi to the Kingdom Hall. Yes - many of the taxis are Teslas here given Madrid’s strict emissions requirements within the city center.
We arrived in time to join this joyful congregation for the opening song. The Kingdom Hall (which hosts 12 different congregations with languages including English, Sign Language, Romanian and Portuguese) was actually a triple complex with two KH in one building (we went to the one downstairs) and I didn’t even notice the one in the adjoining building until we were departing.
And of course, the congregation was a melting pot of friends from all over the world. We met ones from the Philippines, Cameroon, Nigeria, even Cincinnati and Houston. We stayed so long after the meeting hugging and taking pictures that the brothers had to flicker the lights (a few times) to get us to get out of the way of the incoming Sign Language congregation. And then the love fest continued with the friends coming in - it felt like a circuit assembly.
Since most of us skipped breakfast to get there, we were all in search for food. So we took the subway back to a familiar plaza in the historic area not far from our hotel and we scouted out a spot. We knew we had found some good options when we saw so many lines out the door. One sister and I opted for a stand-up only spot that had some amazing fried codfish. Stacy & the rest of our group chose the sit down place just across the way so we joined them there.
The location, the weather, the music, the vibe was a moment we all relished. And we promised to try to recreate the vibe of that moment in a couple hundred or thousands of years from now. When time, money and street hustlers will no longer be an obstacle.
And even though we were all looking forward to a siesta, we had spotted a few things en route to the restaurant that we wanted to revisit. I didn’t see anything that special for me - as I’m trying to be prudent given my luggage limitations. Besides Stacy got a tip from a brother at the congregation meeting about a men’s clothing store with suits that only cost 40 euros so we might be in trouble anyway.
We met a sweet sister Anna from Ukraine on the jam packed subway
We finally made it back to the hotel around 4:30pm with very little energy to make plans to do anything else - but it was a beautiful day to have no plans and look how that turned out!
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