Neexistuje nic, jako je vaření klobásy na táborák.

Alright, it’s getting a little annoying starting every post with “sorry for the long absence”, but I’ve been learning on this trip that expecting every farm to have a large enough Internet data plan to host all of the blogging, Facebook and emailing we do is asking a lot.  But most of all I would like to apologize for promising you a second post the evening I was in Prague and not delivering.  The night was very interesting, to say the least, but I’ll fill you in on that when I get to it.

So I left off with us arriving in the Czech Republic.  We were picked up at the train station and brought back to the farm to find the people there very warm and welcoming.  The family who lived there was one Englishman, his Czech wife, and there two girls, 8 and 3.  There was another HelpX couple there was well from France, so we got to practice a little bit of all that French we learned!  We ended up being the resident translators for some things, which was a bit fun.

The day we arrived also happened to be Jon’s 23^rd birthday, and though he didn’t get to enjoy a draft in a pub in Prague like he had hoped, they did have a few beers that night, as well as a cake!  Coincidentally, they had been shooting for a magazine feature for their English Chocolate Cake recipe, so she had to bake two of them that day.  What luck!  We sang “Happy Birthday” and devoured the cake, or at least a good bit of it.  Delicious.

We spent two week on their farm, and since I would drowned you in all the little details, I’ll sum up what they had on their property, the bulk of our work, as well as the highlights of our experiences with the family.

The home they lived in was over 400 years old, and for about 2/3rds of it, unlivable.  They had just received an industrial sized band saw and planer thickness-er to us to make the entire upstairs of the home (currently all rafters) a livable space.  They have a lot of work ahead of them, but they plan to have it livable (not finished though) by Christmas.  Unfortunately, they spent the whole two weeks we were there waiting for the dust extraction system to make the job possible, so we weren’t able to help him put any of the large timbers through the saws to help him out.  Hopefully another HelpX-er or WOOFer will be joining them soon so he can finally get started!

This was definitely our first animal farm.  When we got there they had 5 goats (one of them a baby that spent its time in the back garden with us; I was quite fond of him), 4 mini-pigs, 4 mini-piglets, 4 rabbits, 3 chickens, 5(?) geese, 2 goslings, a very lovably Rottweiler named Sally and a cat whose name I never caught.  When we left, they had sold two of the goats, one of the piglets had died, someone they sold a rabbit to brought one back, and they acquired ten young chickens.  They required quite a bit of work, buy the twice daily goat milking blessed us with homemade goat cheese.  Yum!

For the majority of our stay we were adding on to an existing fence in the back garden.  They had just received 10 new chickens, and had to build up the fence high enough so that the chickens couldn’t get out, and the fox couldn’t get in.  It was a bit more difficult that it should have been because the existing fence wasn’t made very well.  The posts were random distances apart, which made finding wood long enough and cutting things to size a little time consuming.  We did however finish it on our second to last work day.

Almost every day (that it didn’t rain) we helped to water there rather beautiful and successful veggie garden.  I had my first radish (yum), and one evening we even had enough things harvested from the garden to make a salad from it (aside from the dressing).  Watering took a while, but fortunately for them they have a little spring that feeds a creek right by the garden, so you can fill up water in buckets right there.  The water also happened to have little tiny flecks of what looked like gold and silver.  We’re almost certain that’s what they were, but the amounts were so small that it would cost considerably more to get it out than you would make back with it.  On one of our work days we put in post for an electric fence on the property boundary, again for the foxes, wild boar and deer.  That job was particularly frustrating because the ground had a lot of clay in it, and there were a lot of very vicious biting flies.

As for our time off and the time spent with the family, it was very enjoyable.  The food was wonderful (though they eat a lot of fried food in this area of Europe, so I can’t say it was all as healthy as our salads), the conversation was great, and the atmosphere was very friendly.  I did however have to adjust to using an outdoor toilet for the first time, which was different to say the least.  Jon and I (Jon more than me) came to understand how awful stingy nettle is, and how it grows pretty much exactly where you don’t want it to.  We went on walks into the forests around their home and enjoyed being surrounded by real trees.  We learned a new word for rain boots, wellies, a new French card game that we plan on trying to find or create, and then turn it into a drinking game (it would be so much fun), we cooked sausages over the fire and had traditional Czech foods like langoše and enjoyed homemade breads and cake daily.  It was truly wonderful.

I’ll save our time spent in Prague for my next post, just to keep things from getting too long!

Bonne St-Valentin!

I don’t really have a whole lot to say about today, as it was fairly laid back.   But alas, its Valentine’s Day, and I felt I couldn’t go through my day without at least wishing everyone who reads this a lovely day.

Today is also Olesya’s birthday, and she brought a tarte aux fruits for us to enjoy during our coffee break today.  C’est magnifique!

After class, I had to go buy a new charger for my laptop, which was frustrating, but alas.  Basically, the SmartCharge charger I had failed to perform within its given voltage range, and the transformer box thingy exploded.  Okay, not like, shards of plastic and electrical fire sort of explosion, but one of the circuits did break and the thing melted.  Chinese piece of crap.  Ugh.  So after picking one, opening the box, and realizing that it might not actually have an adapter for my laptop, we rushed home to try it just to find out that it sort of did.  When I say sort of, I mean it charges, but it doesn’t have the same… “hook” the other one did.  The old one wouldn’t fall out if the wind blew, this one probably would.  But alas, we have it all set up, and I just have to refrain from using the laptop while its charging… Sounds way too complicated and annoying for something I’m going to have to replace when I get back to the states anyway, but alas.  So, my future travelers, if you have an extra charger for whatever reason, bring it just in case.  Always check the maximum input voltages on your electronics; just because you have something that converts the plug type doesn’t mean your US electronic device won’t explode when you plug it into the 240 volts they use in Europe.  Now, my charger was “supposedly” good up to 240, but whatever, done venting about that.

I also had to spend a little more money on a new coat.  Now, I have a rather nice, black wool peacoat that I just love, but here in Nice, its really been sort of a pain in the rear.  The weather here is sort of frustrating.  In the shade, its too cold to go without the coat, but when in the sun, its too strong to wear it, but then the wind is too strong to go without it, you follow?  Basically, I needed a coat that wasn’t as warm as the one I have, because the only other thing I have, and brought with me, are light cardigan sort of sweaters, which do nothing when the sun goes down.  Now, I only came to this conclusion after consulting Nice’s Wikitravel page to find out that the temperature is only going to go up about 5-10 degrees during our three months here.  Not much at all.  So we went shopping again.  I was quite successful, and its even sort of semi-water-impermeable.  I would not call it a rain coat… but water does bead on the surface should I find myself umbrella-less in a light drizzle.  Pretty sure I’d be soaked in a downpour though.  So there’s travel tip number two for the day: bring a coat that can work in a wide range of temperatures, and that can be easily layered with a sweater for more warmth.

Okay, sort of a ramble-y post.  My apologies.

Bonne St-Valentin!