Memories of a daytrip in the city that I used to live in, before I moved.

When my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes was living in a temporary apartment in an odd part of town in the city that I used to live in and the pandemic was just letting up and many people were vaccinated, we were going to go do dinner with a group at a (Bulgarian) restaurant that he had gone to and was crowing about, so I went out very very early, to go to a (somewhat nearby) (local) (Marian) shrine that I had always heard about but had never got around to going to, ever.

The giftshop was closed, unfortunately, and one of the major churches was closed for wedding practice for some (Latino) family, where the bride was in the aisle doing something when I went up and saw the sign on the door.

In one section by a big outdoor devotional statue, too, many of the fundraising bricks with people’s names on them were from (presumably local) (Italians), going by their first and last names, though that version of the Virgin Mary was definitely not from their or their families's part of the world, it must have been something that they just did in order to honor the Virgin Mary however they could.

Also, at the back of the big outdoor shrine there was a(n entirely empty) small outdoor chapel tucked away with benches, and all around it were just tens and maybe hundreds of pinned photographs of people who’d been helped, and flowers and all of these flaming candles and like crutches and stuff like that, with so many candles alight and just no-one there at all, though you had all of the people's faces on the photographs.

. . .

(Later that night at dinner when everyone was saying how good the food was, my one [art school] colleague who wears [women's] clothes said that he had actually gone there with a friend very randomly when they were both really stoned and walking by and and he didn't even remember telling any other people about the restaurant at all, so the entire night he was really worried that the food wouldn't be any good at all, since he wasn't sure if it was. He said he felt very, very relieved, that the food was so good, given how much we said he had talked about it.)