My sweet, sweet boyfriend has a serious problem with his memory. That boy has lived in Lima his whole life and yet only knows one way to get to work, school, his grandparent's house, etc. He frequently leaves his house without his cell phone or card access key for work. His memory is unbelievably fleeting. What's unusual, though, is that he can't remember how to get to the airport but he does remember what we were talking about "on that one day last year when I was in Nashville and we were eating at the Cheesecake Factory. You were eating pasta and drinking an iced tea and you were wearing your favorite dress and new wedges..." Seriously? Seriously?! You can remember what I was wearing on a random lunch date over a year ago, but you can't take an alternate route to your favorite sushi place? Oh, I love that boy.
As we were making plans for the Easter holidays he said, "On Friday, it's tradition for my family to go to different churches in Lima and look at the monuments they have set up for Easter." Sounded good enough to me, "How many churches do you go to?" I asked. He replied: "Sixteen."
"Sixteen! You've got to be kidding me! How long does it take to go to sixteen different churches?"
He continued to tell me it takes only a couple of hours, which made zero logical sense, but I went with it.
When the day finally arrived (its was actually Maundy Thursday, not Good Friday), we met his parents and went churches throughout Lima. Due to the language barrier and slight religious barrier (Baptists and Catholics are just slightly different) I'm not exactly sure why we were going, but I enjoyed it anyway. A few of the churches had actually set up a mock table of the Last Supper which I found to be particularly fitting and poignant. Others had simply decorated the altar with too many flowers, something I found interesting since over abundance is avoided during Lent.
I struggled to explain to his parents how Baptists celebrate Easter, again the language barrier was simply too much. Those conversations are often particularly difficult for me because I fear that the lack of pomp and circumstance in some Protestant denominations might come off as apathy to ceremony-loving Catholics.
Oh, and in case you're wondering: it was only seven churches, not sixteen...
