Get us to the church on time

---

Sunday. A day of rest. But not when you're on a tight travel schedule. After a brief pit stop at the breakfast buffet (the highlights being cucumber lemonade and pumpkin pasta), Dean had us outside amongst the sights and smells of the city to go to the English mass at a nearby church! A taxi driver told us that the church was a short walk away. So off we went, obediently following the directions: straight through the first traffic lights and a right turn at the second set of lights. That plan was a spectacular fail. Hot, sweaty and bedraggled we found ourselves back at the hotel after jumping out of a cab that wanted to drive us around the city for a day. Our third attempt at finding a driver to take us succeeded. I think he took one look at us and thought we'd melt if we went back out there. The fare of 100 pesos was a good indication that the journey is really a walk away and he probably drove away thinking we were buffoons. Where we went wrong with the directions was that we took "turn right" too literally. It should have been "walk through the second lights and then veer off to the right down a dirt lane. Walk about 250 metres, past a shiny blue church, a construction site (or a housing estate, it's not entirely clear) and eventually you'll find the Redemptorist Mother of Perpetual Help church."

Arriving late, we managed to find a few seats amongst the packed congregation and fortunately right near a fan. Dean had talked this up and El and I were expecting a bit of a sing-a-long but maybe we had missed the best part. Sure, there was a very earnest male choir singing the hymns in the ballad style so favoured by Karaoke afficiandos, but there was an awful lot of standing up and sitting down. And a fair chunk involved listening to a very serious sermon. Kamahl would have been very impressed by the rendition of the Lord's Prayer, however.

The rest of the day involved a swim, a visit to the mega mall next door and dinner at a very smelly Korean restaurant.

---