After the Wayanad trip, we started working on the project diligently. We were almost done with the implementation and were integrating the modules. There were 4 days left for the demo.
“On the whole, the project is working okay.”, Myra said after doing the first round of testing.
“Let’s do a few rounds of testing. We should follow a schedule for testing the project. Let’s aim to finish testing by tomorrow. We can simultaneously fix the bugs found during testing”, Swati said.
Arjun and I started creating a schedule in an excel sheet.
“By the way, what are the plans for Christmas? It’s in 2 days and we have a holiday.”, Anusha asked. Rishi and she were making suggestions to the schedule.
“There’s a famous church in Mysore, I don’t remember the name of it. It is one of the tallest churches in Asia. Let’s go to it”, I suggested. Having read books like “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown, I was a fan of churches and their architecture.
“But it’ll be busy on Christmas”, Rishi said.
“Maybe we can go after the morning prayer. I am sure they’ll not close the church very soon on Christmas day”, I insisted.
Everybody agreed to the plan.
“Let’s also ask our college friends. They can join us if interested”, Myra suggested. We sent an email to our college friends and resumed testing our project.
The next day was also spent testing the project and fixing the bugs. The documentation was also ready. We had officially finished the project. We zipped our project files and uploaded them to Google Drive just to make sure we don’t lose any data.
*
On Dec 25th, around 16 of us gathered at the main gate of the campus.
“Merry Christmas”, we all greeted each other.
We then boarded the local bus to CBS (Central Bus Station), Mysore.
We hired several autos to “St. Philomena’s Church”. The church was a few minutes away from the bus station.
We got into the auto and were all cramped up. Myra, Swati, Anusha, and I adjusted behind while Arjun sat with the driver.
“So Priya, tell me about this church”, Myra asked.
“It’s a Catholic church. It is one of the tallest churches in Asia and also the second-largest in the continent. Its inspired by a famous church in Europe.”, I said.
“Is the place busy today?”, Arjun asked the driver in broken Kannada.
“Very busy, you should wait for your turn. You can buy candles outside”, the driver spoke in Telugu which surprised us.
“Most of Kannadigas can speak Telugu”, he said.
Soon, he stopped in front of the Church. All our friends from college started getting down the autos.
“How tall”, someone exclaimed.
A tall building was in front of us. It had a gothic-style architecture and some patterns in white etched on its surface. We had to strain our necks to look at the cross which was in red color. It indeed was an architectural marvel and looked like a European church. We walked towards it fascinated.
There were many people surrounding it. We walked towards the entrance when we saw a large group of people headed in a direction. We followed them and saw a white statue of St. Joseph holding baby Jesus and the statue read “Spouse of blessed Virgin Mary”.
We then walked around the church and came across a white statue of a woman. The statue read “St.Philomena, Virgin & Martyr”. “Sad but beautiful”, I said.
We then walked towards the church gate’s entrance and bought some candles. On entering the magnificent church, we were surprised to see that the floor plan resembled a cross. The altar that lay in front of us was high, enormous, and was shaped like a cone. Large statues of Jesus and angels adorned the hall. There were flowers all over the altar and we were spellbound by the Christmas decoration.
We were in a queue to reach the altar and looked around the hall. The large hall was full of benches and could seat more than 500 people. There were stained glass windows depicting scenes from the birth of Christ, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension of Christ. It was a spectacular church.
In a few minutes, we reached the altar and lighted candles. On our way back, we sat on the benches and were taking in our surroundings. A few people passing us wished us “Merry Christmas” and we wished them back.
We came out of the church and walked around the church once again, admiring it. We then stepped out of the church and headed back to the campus to have the Christmas special lunch in the Fiesta food court.
On our way back, I was reliving my moments in the church and remained silent throughout our journey. It was such an honor to visit the church on Christmas Day….
-- To be continued
This post is a part of the Blogchatter A2Z Challenge.
Reading your posts gives you the feeling of working together as so much fun! It is as if you are regularly on the move enjoying places of interest and working in between:) Well, with time the situation will change. Hence the need to savour each moment...
ReplyDeleteThank you :) . Our training at Infosys, Mysore was full of meeting new people, exploring nearby places and spending quality time with friends. However, this fun time lasted for only 6 months and life became quite hectic after that.
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