Before I get started, I would like to once again relay how very difficult it is to blog while traveling the way we’re traveling. Nights when you know you have the time to blog, you usually just want to sleep, or spend time with the family you’re helping, since after all, that’s what this is all about. But, you can breathe at last. We are at our final destination already, after some changes in our plans, which I will elaborate below. They do have Internet, and we will be here for the next 20 days or so, so I should be able to fill you in on all of our adventures here in Ireland nearly as soon as they happen. But first, let me start by filling you in on our time spent in Germany…
I’m going to keep this bit relatively short, because I don’t have many good things to say about Germany. Well, let me rephrase that: I don’t have many good things to say about our farm in Germany. Germany itself is a beautiful country; very green, plenty of lakes where we were, clean, and just all around wonderful. I plan on giving it a second chance at some point in my future. The farm however was a bit more like slave labor than any of the other ones we’ve been to.
The day started at 6:30 in the morning, with our rather tiny breakfast (usually muesli or oatmeal), considering it’d be six hours of usually pretty hard work between that and lunch. They were the first commercial farm we worked on, so we expected more work and were prepared for that. We also expected that a farm that sells meats, milk and various other dairy things would keep their workers well-fed and full of energy. Oh the contrary. Lunch (and usually dinner) consisted of bread (tiny slices of it) with various things to spread on top: peanut butter, honey, butter, jam, sometimes cheese if we were lucky, and sometimes eggs if we were REALLY lucky. Not much at all. A few days go by and I can really feel that my body wasn’t getting what it needed, despite going to bed early to account for the early mornings. We were greatly looking forward to the weekends, since there were lakes around for swimming and canoeing, until we found out that despite what their profile said about working 5 days a week (the reason we decided to go there despite their early mornings), we would in fact be working 7. 7 days a week, basically 10 hours a day, on hardly any food, not nearly enough sleep, and never a “thank you” or a “well done” for the hard work we had finished I know that last bit makes us sound terribly needy or something, but it’s just proper etiquette, regardless of how small or large the task is. Nevermind the fact that it wasn’t terribly enjoying being with them, whenever we were awake enough to do so. They were nice enough people, if you could get them to actually talk. We weren’t connecting with them in the way that we had hoped, so absolutely nothing was making up for the roar in my stomach.
Well, we had pretty much had enough, and on the Wednesday before we were supposed to leave (we were originally going to leave the following Monday), we booked a flight (with RyanAir even, we were that desperate) for the following Friday, just two days later, and planned to tell them that things arose at home and that we were leaving early. No emergencies, I don’t like faking those, but it was really none of their business what we were “going home” for anyway. Well, before we had a chance to tell them, they practically ambushed us after we finished hauling some rather heavy doors to a dumpster, and we had the following conversation:
“You two don’t seem very happy here.”
“It’s not that we’re not happy, we’re just really tired. We’re not used to such early mornings and long days.”
(I’m going to skip the part about them asking us our expectations, and my unwillingness to mention that its hard to work on the very little food they provided us.)
“Well, our customers pay very high quality prices for our very high quality produce, and having you two around looking tired or unhappy isn’t good for business, so I would suggest either working with more energy, or finding another farm”
After that bit we informed them that we would be leaving Friday morning anyway for family business, and that the next day would be our last work day. Now, had the whole thing been “you guys don’t seem happy here, what can we do to help” I would have felt a little bad about leaving early, but considering the direction it did go, I didn’t care in the slightest that we were leaving early. On our last day we built them (from start to finish) a raised paved patio, so they could eat outside without the table wobbling, and even after working 12 hours on the thing, they hardly uttered a thank you.
On Friday morning I woke up with more energy than ever; I was soooo excited to get out of there. I was even more excited because instead of going to Holland like we had originally planned to do so (though we would have loved to have seen it, the host we had originally planned with gave us some really odd gut feelings after some rather condescending and demanding emails, so we opted to skip it), we were flying to Dublin, where we would be spending a few days with our friend Jenna, since she has an internship there! Getting out of Germany and seeing a close friend all in one day? I couldn’t have been happier. But I’ll fill you in on our travel day and our time with Jenna in my next post. Until then; Auf Wiedersehen!
Parlez Lentement. 