florence!

hello friends and family. i arrived in florence this morning at about 7:30. i left dijon last night at 9:45, and spent the night in a 'couchette,' which apparently is french for 6 strangers sleeping together in a small closet.

i will write about my taize experience in a few days, i don't have the time to be faithful to it. in a few words, i realized that there is much that i will never be able to understand. and this is actually alright. also, i realized that there are non-intellectual ways of understanding things. i cried some. i spent a lot of time in silence, and i wrote a poem which i actually like. to be posted.

anyway, i must tell briefly of my adventure this morning. as the train pulled into florence, i heard a young woman speaking to another passenger, and she her accent and demeanor suggested to me that she was a fellow of the american genus, and probably of the collegiate species. i had the most recent issue of newsweek - a friend at taize had given it to me - and i offered it to her. we got to talking, and her name was emily and she was in florence to visit her friend sarah, here on a syracuse university program. they both go to oberlin, and they know my good friend nils's sister (also sarah). so that was a connection. but then it came out that i went to the u of r. emily is from binghamton, ny, and she knows both robert cavanaugh and becky hayes, friends and acquaintances of mine. i was in london with robert, in fact.

to make things only slightly more surreal, i didn't have a plan, and i had lost the information of the hostel where i would be staying, so i decided to walk with them to emily's hostel, hoping to find an internet cafe on the way where i could find again the confirmation from the hostel. we walked to this hostel, which was a hike up to a palatial villa. when we got there, she checked in, and i thought, i've got nothing to lose. so i asked if i had made a reservation. in fact, i had. two complete strangers had not only reconnected me to various friends back home, they had led me to my place of rest for the next two nights. mysterious ways.

i gotta go hang out with these cool girls now, i think we're going to see the david. more on taize next time. i swear. also, i would encourage anyone to make a reservation to spend some time there. silence...i've never been more crazy or more sane. paradox, a theme of the week.