Oh no!

L'ordinateur, est mort!

It's official, my computer is no longer... :(. Fortunately, there's an all night computer lab just upstairs of me! How fantastic.

I have to say, put a whole bunch of young, interested Anglicans together in the same room for a eucharist and they sound really, really good! Add in twenty Religious and it's incerdible! I've never seen high Anglicans look so Pentecostal before :p, but it was quite exciting. We had two worship services today, and tomorrow we'll be joining the monks and nuns for everning prayer. While here, they'll of course continue to pray the daily office. They're an amazing group serving as the chaplaincy team, and at least one is from Canada! They can sing like no group I've ever heard and their joy is evident and infectious.

Today's training was pretty basic. We were told where the information desk is and were told how to lift heavy things... apparently you're NOT supposed to lift with your knees! Keep that in mind. :).

Tomorrow morning I head off to Canterbury Cathedral for mass. I saw the inside for the first time ever today! If I'm to get there on time though, I should probably be off!

I'll talk to you all soon. Hope all's well.

Blessings,
Nick.

Day the Second!

Hi everyone :)

Well, today was day two of training. About ten of us started off with an informal American BCP service, for Morning Prayer. I enjoyed it quite a bit! Then again, I don’t remember a Morning Prayer service I ever really disliked. I’m getting to see all sorts of opinions in regards to worship, but there are so many Anglo-Catholics of whatever political persuasion here, it’s fantastic! Part of me still enjoys the earnestness of the churches I knew growing up, but the high liturgies are so exciting :).

Well, the rest of today was spent going over the programme, learning the campus, learning to use the walkie-talkies, speaking about cross-cultural differences, and tackling the infamous “dealing with difficult bishops”. They were all exciting, but the walkie-talkies especially were really neat! They even have the ear buds :p. Just kidding. The rest, I’m sure will come into quite good use I’m sure. What I found especially interesting was trying to pinpoint those ever so subtle differences between Canada and the States that everyone seems to try to deny, not to mention the bigger ones!

Things here will be getting interesting soon. I’m starting to learn my way around campus and into town, which is somewhat of a hike, but it’s a great town. The marketplace will be going up relatively soon too I believe. Jen Otto, youth coordinator extraordinaire, that means the mitres will be going on sale soon <=:)! My quest to pick up an accent is slowly developing, but I try to hide it. Hopefully when I get back home it’ll be perfected to a tee!

Anyways, hope everyone is quite well. Have a super Friday!

Best,

Nick.

Nick is alive!... and awake at 3:00am

Where to start? This one could take a while...

Well, in super fast mode, I left home sometime Monday after supper. I got to the airport at 7:45 to be told that my flight was delayed and would be leaving at midnight. Splendid (see I’m already picking up British vocabulary and wit!). That was alright though.

Through the magical time zone differences, I ended up in London at about 11:00 Tuesday morning. At least I hope it was Tuesday. I’m already mixed up with my days... I then proceeded to meet up with three of the other stewards, one from North Carolina/Maine/Florida, another from Virginia/Brazil and another from London/Canterbury. I feel so uni-diocesan-like here! Anyways, we walked around London for a bit, I tried REAL fish and chips, which is quite delicious! (But greasy, oh so greasy...) We then took the train to Canterbury here, where we were eventually greeted by a great gathering of stewards at one of the campus bars.

The next day (yesterday) I got up to a real English breakfast. Apparently deep fried crispy toast is pretty popular here, as are pork rinds – I must say, I kind of sense the early stages of a heart attack coming on, but one that’s well worth it, of course. Try everything once, eh? We had a nice jaunt into town after that where I saw... yes, Canterbury Cathedral!!! Woo hoo! It’s massive, and I haven’t seen inside it yet because they were holding graduation ceremonies, but it was exquisite from the outside (all except the Starbucks in the outer gate – no one was pleased about that one).

In the afternoon I received my high visibility jacket, which is really a high visibility vest, but still looks pretty darn cool! We also got to hear what we’d be covering this week in the training sessions. More on that as we go through it. We also got to meet some of the staff. We ended yesterday night with evening prayer led by our one and only Bishop Ralph Spence!

In short, this place is just about heaven. Prayer beads and religious symbols abound! We’ve even found two religious drinks already, one’s called a Bishop’s Finger, and the other one has a crosier on it! Brilliant. The town of Canterbury itself is quite old, and I swear, England, looks EXACTLY as you’d expect it to! At least this portion of it does, as well as the train trail from London. Jet lag is hitting me in the absolute strangest way. I’m wide awake by 9:00pm Montreal time, which is 2:00am England time...

Alright, computer problems. Forgive my tardy updating, but I’ve had a series of delays. I arrived here and my wireless card was all bent out of shape, which turned out to be somewhat of a blessing in disguise. Once I could croon and woo my computer into actually turning on (which takes a lot these days, I tried for one hour, gave up and then tried again for 15 minutes when I got up at 2:30 am) I had to take my wireless card out in order to stop a huge blue menacing and utterly inescapable error screen from popping up. That’s been coming up off and on for about two years now. I think that’s solved, though, and tomorrow I plan to get an Ethernet cable from the front desk. If you’re reading this, it probably worked! Hopefully things will become more regular now. Alright, more later!

Blessings all.

*UPDATE* - Success! I have access! Not wireless, but it'll do :).