What a fabulous weekend! We all gathered at Savio House on Friday night for social time together before the hard work began the next day.

Saturday morning came and we had lovely scrambled eggs for breakfast, yummy. And then we were told to sit down and make sure we were facing somebody. And then we had to introduce them to the rest of the group. It wasn't long before we got to know each other very well; we even learnt everyone's favourite animal! The weekend was filled with a huge variety of "getting to know you" activities where we sometimes had to be silly and sometimes were able to be slightly more normal. My favourite of these was by far when we were split into small groups and given some very amusing and different challenges, one being sand art, another tapping our hands on a table and dancing to a song and finally a shadow puppet dance. These were all great fun!

I arrived with the idea that World Youth Day would be a week of sun in a Madrid, a holiday, with afternoon tea with the Pope, but this idea was soon shattered as we were told that we may actually be sleeping out on a playground! But this did not put me off as we learnt more about other people's experiences of World Youth Day and realised the true immensity of it.

We then shared in our small groups our hopes and fears for our pilgrimage. Our fears were things such as, "what if I get lost and I can't speak Spanish", "will all my shoes fit in my bag", "I don't want to sleep outside because of all the bugs", "How will I afford it?" and "the plane might crash" . Then we came to our hopes for world youth day and these were amazing and inspiring, "I'm hoping to meet people who share my faith from all over the world", "It will be an opportunity for an amazing spiritual journey".

It was great to get to know the group over the weekend and I left the weekend feeling I belonged in the group, it really fun and I'm excited for the next one and World Youth Day!

Below is a video of our weekend: