An ciorcal de shaol na

The Barnyard has certainly been full of truly unique experiences since we arrived.

First, we’ll start with the chicks.  When we arrived, they had two new chicks all wet and freshly hatched in the incubator in their living room.  The next day, 11 more chicks were found all warm and fluffy, eagerly waiting to get out of their little plastic tunnel.  Fortunately for four of them, they got a mom, with a batch of chicks that had just hatched under a hen just that same day.  The others were put in a tall hen house with a heat light, and a large caged area for them to run around in the grass in.  It’s been interesting watching them grow up; their wings start to come in at about a week old, and they really get uglier and uglier with time.  I still think they’re absolutely adorable, but not the cute and fluffy puff balls they were when they were only a day old.

They also have about 6 geese.  I believe they’re only about 12 weeks old, but they’re HUGE!  They’re so sweet too, they’ll eat right out of your hand.  I know what you’re thinking… “but aren’t geese mean!?”… well, these geese are young, and haven’t started hissing at everything that moves yet.  Jon’s been working on fixing their little pond; its been a lot of work, but you can already tell that they love it.

Now for the ducks.  When we arrived, they had two white ducks that they had for their meet, and they have about 7-9 ducks (two of them males) that they have for eggs.  Two of the ducks were sitting on eggs in the duck house when we arrived.  One of them decided to lay on eggs in the garden, but frequently left the nest for periods too long for the eggs to survive, so she’s been a hassle.  We only just today finally put her in her own separate house with 8 new fresh eggs; here’s hoping she takes to them and sits there until they hatch.  We won’t be here to see that happen, but I have a good feeling about them.

The two ducks that they had for meat are no longer with us.  I never thought I would come to a point in my life where I would even eat duck (for those of you who don’t know, ducks are my absolute favorite animal, followed very closely by giraffes and penguins), but considering how often it was served to us in France, I’ve come to like it quite a bit.  I still feel a bit upset everytime I eat it though.  However, with these ducks, I got to see the wonderful life they were allowed to live.  Though I didn’t watch the actual killing of the ducks, and only shed a tear or two rather than balling my eyes out, I was able to help with the plucking of the ducks.  Its an interesting and frustrating process, depending on how grown in their pin feathers are.  I didn’t help butcher the ducks either, but I did watch.  I made a delicious sauce to cook them in, and we put them on the grill.  It was by far the best duck I have ever had in my entire life.  I feel like the extra love and care these little guys had while they were alive really made the difference; whether it was all in my head or not.

Now for the two ducks laying on eggs when we arrived.  Well, they hatched.  They were absolutely adorable.  I did manage to save one little duckling that had been kicked out of the nest.  He was in his egg, half hatched, and I thought for certain he just didn’t make it.  As I was talking with our host trying to figure out what may have happened, we saw his mouth open and realized that he was still with us!  We tried to give it back to the two moms, but either they didn’t want me anywhere near them or they didn’t want the duckling, because both tried to bite me.  So we put him in the chick house with the heat lamp and separated him off to keep him safe.  Then all we could do is cross our fingers; we weren’t sure if he was going to make it for the first day.  After that though, he perked up just fine, and we’ve named him Lucky, a name all the more fitting after you read the next bit.

If you didn’t notice the past tense in the previous paragraph, let me elaborate for you.  Two nights ago, we put the ducks to bed and their were 8 happy, healthy little ducklings.  The next morning when we let them out, there were only two ducklings.  6 of them somehow died the night before.  We scratched our heads and tried to figure out what might have happened.  In an effort to empty the house of both unhatched eggs and newly lost ducklings, we finally let the two moms and remaining ducklings out, after being told that it was time to do so.  We let them out on to the pond, attended to the remains in the house, and went out to watch them swim around with their moms.  We left for maybe five minutes, came back to take pictures, and the two happy healthy ducklings we saw swimming just minutes earlier were floating in the pond.  They were now dead too.  After some thinking and watching the other ducks, we decided that the main male duck (the second is pair off with another duck, and is very tame) probably killed the ducklings, because it was very apparent that he wanted to mate with the “now available” moms, and they wouldn’t so long as they had ducklings around.  Its a sad state of affairs… our first full day on our own (with one other helper, but still), and all the ducklings managed to die.  We felt like awesome house sitters, that’s for certain.

After talking with our host, we decided that after finding a way to keep the two moms separated from the others at night, we would try to reintroduce Lucky to the moms and see if they take to him.  They definitely did, and now I’ve been keeping an eye on them like a hawk ever since.  I made the mistake of getting attached to my little Lucky, and now I just have to hope he makes it okay.  So far, everything seems to be fine.  I’d definitely cry if something happened to him though.  That’s certain.

I know I said no pictures until I get home, but I can’t post about such adorable things without sharing.

Holding Lucky for one of the last times! I didn’t want to put him with the mommy ducks because then I’d never be able to again!

But look how happy he looks with his two moms!  He’s so cute on the water!

And of course, I can’t help but post this picture, too.  While Jon was cleaning out the duck house today to build something to keep them separated, he found loads of baby mice!  They’re so cute!  We took them out of the house though, and released them into the field.  This one was my favorite because he was so tiny!

I mean, look how disproportionate his head and feet are to his body!  His eyes and ears are still closed too!  Too cute.

Oh right, Happy Birthday America! 235 years old! Enjoy the celebrations everybody, they definitely don’t do any here!

Beirlín, Baile Átha Cliath agus Jenna! Gach in aon lá amháin!

First, I know what you’re thinking if you’ve been paying attention to the language of my subjects; yes, they obviously speak English in Ireland, but I thought it would be more fitting if I kept with this theme until we got back to the states, and chose Gaelic instead.  It’s really different, but cool.  Anyway, on to the post!

So after getting on the train, figuring out how to buy our ticket, and sitting down for our hour-long train back to Berlin, I found myself looking out the window with this longing to come back to this beautiful country; on different terms.  It really is beautiful, so organized, and just generally adorable.  It was then that I decided that this awful HelpX experience wasn’t going to ruin my impression of the entire country, because that just isn’t fair.

When we arrived in Berlin, we searched for lockers to put our luggage in, ate some more breakfast, and set off to enjoy our few hours in Berlin before our flight that afternoon.  The area of Berlin we were in was really nice, even though we had no idea was we were looking at.  We just did a lot of walking, enjoying the clean streets, sausages, pretzels, free apples and the beautiful sun above our heads.

As we started to head back to the train station to catch our train to the airport, I started getting really anxious.  Every passing hour I’d look at my watch and exclaim “ONLY __ MORE HOURS UNTIL WE GET TO SEE JENNA!”  I’m sure Jon thought I was a complete dork, but I couldn’t help it.  5 months without seeing anyone I knew from home, of course I was excited.

Getting to the airport was interesting.  We forgot to validate our ticket before we got on the train, so we were freaking out trying to figure out what to do, since we had already sat down.  So Jon hopped off the train at one of the stops, bolted to a validation box, and managed to get them validated and back on the train before it set off again.  Naturally I was worried the whole time, but it worked out.

The Berlin-Schönefeld Airport is way out from the city center, and extremely small.  When we got off the train at the station, I thought we had mistakenly gone somewhere else.  It was a long walk to the airport, made even longer by the weight of my backpack, but the very clever and adorable Easy Jet ads along the way made it somewhat entertaining.  Once we got into the airport, we were surprised to find that we had to go to through security before we could even get to the check-in desk.  They had some handy system of tagging bags that had to be checked verses ones that didn’t.  Then we sat on the floor for about an hour until the RyanAir desk finally opened, since this airport is too small to have seating for such a thing.  We decided to pay the 40 euros to check our two walking sticks we acquired in the Czech Republic, checked ourselves in, and walked around the gift shop looking for some delicious German chocolate to bring to Jenna.

Almost an hour of more waiting and we were heading to our gate, only to find that there was a passport check as you leave the airport.  Uh oh… we heard bad things about Germans and their enforcing of Schengen rules, and thought we were in the clear one we got past the mandatory RyanAir passport check.  So as we walk up to the passport desk, two months over our visas, the gentleman behind the counter starts flipping through the pages in Jon’s passport.  We both got the heart-beat-in-your-throat sort of feeling, and could only hope for the best.  He waved Jon through, free of the “don’t return” stamp, and it was my turn.  He didn’t spend as much time with my passport, probably because it was obvious that we were together.  Whew.

The flight itself wasn’t awful.  2 hours long, not enough leg room, flight attendants constantly trying to sell you stuff, but we managed to squeeze in a nap.  Once we landed, got our Ireland stamp in our passport, we were just fine; out of Schengen and totally legal again.  It felt nice.

Since it was pretty cheap, we opted to just take a taxi to Jenna’s apartments.  The driver was a gentleman, really helpful, and nice to talk to.  When he dropped us off, it was only about a minute before I saw Jenna walking down the street, and then I felt great.  I couldn’t feel how heavy my backpack was, how bad my feet hurt, or how cold my arms were.  We went to her apartment for a while, talked, relaxed, and then set out to find a nice place for dinner.  We found a cozy bar/restaurant in the Temple Bar district, enjoyed some bangers and mash, fish and chips and a few pints.

Since quarters were cramped, we had to sleep on the floor in her apartment, but we stole the couch cushions from the living room and slept on those.  The next couple days were filled with rather touristy things: a duck bus tour of the city, completely with Viking hats and screaming and people on the streets, more fish and chips, eating lunch in the lawn of Christ Church Cathedral, seeing St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Guinness Brewery, Carrol’s Irish Store, the Dublin bus system, lots of walking, and rain.  Good thing we read all the guide books and know that going out in Ireland without an umbrella is like asking to get pushed into a swimming pool fully clothed.

It was a very nice weekend with Jenna that I absolutely needed.  I needed to sit and talk with someone in person from home, enjoy all the excitement of the city with someone other than Jon (not that he’s not wonderful, but since she had been there a few days, she sort of knew her way around), and talk about everything that’s going on at home.

Getting to our host in Ireland was fairly easy.  Two buses, and we were met by a very enthusiastic mother of three to bring us back to her home.  The place here is absolutely wonderful, by far my favorite place so far.  They have so much to do here, so many birds (ducks, geese, and hens; baby chicks and ducklings too!), and such a successful vegetable garden.  They live in an old stone house that they’ve fixed up themselves, at the bottom of a hillish mountain thing, with the Motty Stone at the top.  I’m not sure what it is exactly, other than a really big stone that you can climb up on for views of the surrounding mountains and the Irish Sea.  We’re staying in a rather well kept trailer just at the bottom of the hill, which is nice when you’re staying with a family of five; you have your own quiet space where you can be out of the way.  I love it here.

I’ll fill you in on all the unique experiences I’ve had since arriving to “The Barnyard” (a nickname they’ve given their home) at a later time, I feel this post is long enough.  Until next time… Bíodh lá iontach!

Auf Wiedersehen Sklavenarbeit!

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!

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!

Buona liberazione, Italia

Sorry (again) for the long absence.  Italy didn’t really change all that much after my last post, and to be honest, I was quite frustrated by a lot of what we experienced that I didn’t feel it was all that necessary to tell you about it.  Let me just sum things up by saying that all we were really told to do was prune the olive grove.  It seemed like everyone else had at least some say in what they were doing, or given the opportunity to relay their strong points, skills and experience.  Not us.  Compound this with the fact that our host made several attempts at avoiding to talk to us directly (IE: sending someone else to tell us something just minutes after she was in the same room with us), we frequently overheard her refer to us as “the Americans” in an unpleasant tone (despite the fact that she very well knew our names), and a few other things; we didn’t feel very welcome, and we were very much looking forward to leaving.

Too bad leaving required the Italian train system, which failed to work smoothly, again.

Getting from Rapolano to Siena and then to Florence was cake.  It went smoothly, we got on our first train for free, and they were roughly on time.  We felt we were off to a good start.  That is, until we got to Florence and the 8:30 train we were hoping to catch from Florence to Venice was sold out.  All classes.  Thankfully the automated ticket thing was wrong when it said that all trains were sold out, and we were able to buy tickets for the 11:30 high-speed to Venice.  Now, all of you are going to cringe when you find out what we did during our time in Florence, but we spent it in the most comfortable chairs we could find, trading off naps.  It just happened to be in a McDonalds.  The Florence train station didn’t have any lockers, so even if we happened to have had the energy to walk around and explore, we would have had to do so with all our bags with us.  Thankfully the McCafe had some delicious fresh squeezed blood orange juice, and the time passed relatively quickly.

The train from Florence to Venice was relatively comfortable, but packed.  Since I was the one who napped the least, I had a very hard time staying awake on the train, but Jon managed to pass out.  Fortunately for us, I managed to only doze; otherwise we would have missed our stop.  We got off the train, were assaulted by the Venetian heat, and set off for the ticket booth to buy our ticket to Vienna, Austria.

Well, let me preface this by saying that we weren’t in the lovely, ancient, sightseeing-worthy area of Venice.  We were at Venice Mestre, which is on the mainland, probably 15-20 kilometers away from any sort of canal.  Well, after asking for the next train to Vienna, we received two tickets for the 9:18 train that evening… over 8 hours away.

8 hours, in not-so-lovely “new” Venice.  Seriously?  After finding this out, we set out to see exactly what we had to work with, and found that the most Italian thing there was several Chinese restaurants and (as always) a halal place serving really lousy pizza.  Thankfully for us though, there was a lovely restaurant in the hotel across the street from the train station that offered free WIFI use with the purchase of a beverage.  We sat there for the majority of our 8 hour layover, and then moved to the hotel lobby when the place was closing to get ready for dinner.  I was grateful they didn’t kick us out.  While sitting there I managed to overhear the front desk clerk tell someone that the trains will be going on strike that evening at 9PM.  They seriously couldn’t wait until after our train left?  So, when we returned to the train station to wait out the last hour before our train, we were a little worried, but hopeful, that maybe we overheard him incorrectly, and were wondering exactly what an “Italian train strike” might be.

Well, after a ten minute wait at our platform, we saw another train for another destination pull in.  We saw this as a good sign, since a strike would surely mean all trains, not just the ones going to Vienna.  After about half an hour, our train finally arrived, we found our cabin, got comfortable, watched a movie, and passed out.  We couldn’t afford to pay for a sleeper cabin, but we were fortunate to not have anyone else in our cabin the entire duration of the journey… all 11 hours of it.  So far, Austrian trains are my favorite.  They’re comfortable, have places to plug in things that need charging, and their bathrooms are pretty clean.  All and all, not a bad train experience.  I woke up at about 7:30AM to the beautiful sights of the Austrian countryside.  I never had a mental picture of what Austria might look like before, so I was pleased to see how beautiful it was.

We arrived at the train station perfectly fine, got off the train and set off for the ticket counter.  The man at the desk spoke pretty broken English, but we managed to get two tickets from Vienna to Prague no problem.  We then stopped at a place in the station (just as comfortable, clean and convenient as their trains) to have some Wiener schnitzel and apple strudel and sat down to eat it and relax.  About half way through our schnitzel, as Jon was reading the train schedule, he realized that the train to Prague isn’t leaving from this station, and there isn’t a train to get from the station we were in to the station we needed to be in.  All this realization with only 30 minutes until our train leaves.  Well, some more reading led us to find that they have a metro system, and once we figured out where we needed to go, we got there with about 10 minutes to spare.  Same sort of train that we took to get to Vienna, only this time we didn’t have a cabin seat assignment.  We didn’t see any other sort of seats, so we just picked one and sat down.  Lucky for us, the 5 hour trip into Prague was made much shorter and more enjoyable by two brothers from New Zealand sitting in the cabin with us.  They told us that unless the train people kick us out of our seats to find new ones, we were welcome to stay with them.  We talked the whole way about a number of things, and only at the very end, as we were loading up our bags to get off the train, did we finally actually exchange names.  Funny how those sorts of things happen.

Getting from Prague to our host was fairly easy.  Czech is nothing like anything we’ve read before, so there was no guessing as to what the signs said.  Also, when the last train we took would make its stops, it would do so well before we could read the sign of our destination.  This was a little nerve wracking, since we didn’t really feel like getting off at the wrong stop or missing ours, but we managed okay.  After finding a payphone and calling our host, one of them was there within about 15 minutes or so to pick us up.  Finally.  Only about… 12 hours later than we had originally planned, but I guess it all worked out okay in the end.

Currently, I am sitting in a very comfortable bed in a hotel in Prague.  We’ve stopped here for the evening just after our two week farm stay, and head off to Germany tomorrow.  After all our sightseeing today/tonight, I’ll post again with an update on the time we spent in the Czech Republic.  Let me give you a little preface: great food, great company and real forests.  

Ulivi, yoga, sorgenti termali, pizza e la conversazione. Tutto bene in Italia.

Alright, now that I’ve properly vented about the atrocities of the Italian train system, I can tell you all about the lovely host we’re staying with.  The property is gigantic, she has a very successful veggie garden, a few (and by that I mean about 40) olive trees, and several houses.  It apparently used to be habited by monks many a year ago.  The host herself is a very wonderful, well versed and very well-traveled woman, I would guess in her 60s or 70s.  She has two sons that I am aware of, one who I will meet this weekend when he comes up from Naples (he spends his weekends here, but works there), and the other has been here with his wife and some others for a yoga seminar.  There are also four other HelpXers here, so it’s been considerably more social than our last host.  Not that her conversation was wonderful, but you have so many people to talk to here.

Our first day of work, we started with pruning olive trees.  If you know anything about olive trees, please don’t comment to tell me that I chose the wrong time to do this, because we know.  Basically, some of the trees (mainly the ones around the edges) have been a bit neglected for a year or two, and desperately need pruning.  Unfortunately, they’ve already started flowering, and once they start doing that, you can’t prune them any longer, for risk of preventing fruit (olives).  Well, it’s of a double edged sword though, because if we don’t prune them, they don’t fruit, but if we do prune them, the trees will go into shock and definitely won’t fruit.  I guess they’ve accepted the fact that they won’t be expecting many olives this season, and would rather prune them anyways rather than having loads of work next year.  I don’t blame them, but I must admit it’s quite grueling work.  Given the nature of the olive tree, the best branches make sort of an umbrella, so if you need to get to the base of the tree to cut out all the extra branches that are sprouting from the roots, you have a lot of bending over to do.

Last night they had an inauguration for a mosaic piece done for their big marble terrace, all a bunch of yoga business that I didn’t quite understand, but regardless it was beautifully done and made for a very enjoyable evening.  There were about forty or so people there, we met a nice soon to be med-school student from Ohio working at a B&B in a castle here in Rapolano, and enjoyed some songs by two of the people in the yoga seminars.  Wonderful voices, it was very lovely.

Yesterday started a bit more slowly, but with olive pruning again.  After that though, it very much turned into a lazy relaxing day for everyone.  The yoga seminar people and some helpers who wished to join did some meditation, another helper enjoyed a massage she won for figuring out the number of triangles and petals in the mosaic, and I just enjoyed the quiet.  Afterwards, a combination of us went to a natural hot spring, which was stinky with sulfur but very enjoyable, and then out for pizza.  It was really a very pleasant evening and I really needed it.  The day started with a bit of difficulty for me; I was tired for some reason, despite what I thought was enough sleep, and I wasn’t that enthusiastic about the work.  To be honest, I think I was feeling a bit homesick.  Enjoying some swimming, some pizza and some wonderful conversation really put me back into the swing of things, and I think I’ll be better for it today.  Unfortunately the yoga seminar people invited us to join in their yoga class this morning, but when my alarm went off I stretched out to release some tension in my back, and fell right back to sleep and missed it.  I’m a bit bummed, but alas, its not like I can’t do yoga by myself.

Also, a little side note: there are a lot of accents here at the moment, but a plentiful one is English.  I’ve begun thinking with a British accent.  Seems a bit silly, but I did start dreaming in French while we were in Nice, so I guess it’s not all that unheard of.  I hope I come home with a cool accent!

Treni italiani sono terribili.

Alright, now to update you on getting to Italy.  First, the one sentence summary.  Then I’ll explain.

In order to get from Spain to our host in Italy we took: one bus, two subways, one plane, two trains, sleeping in a train station, another train, sleeping outside a train station, and a car ride.

The Italian train system frustrated me before, when we visited Torino, but I never thought that I could feel so frustrated that all I could think about was going home.

The day started early, with a 7:20 AM bus from our host’s village to Madrid.  We were exhausted from being up late packing, and spent most of the trip dozing off.  When we arrived to the bus station we took two subways to get to the airport, had to pay an extra fine even though we had a boarding pass (oh well, just a euro), and proceeded to figure out the RyanAir process.  Which by the way, I’ll be taking RyanAir out of my Travel Resources page, because it is not as wonderful as we thought.  Went through checking our bags, the visa check, and proceeded to our gate, still with two hours to spare.  Not a big deal, but with recent events we thought security would be heightened, so we had the mindset of “better more time than no time.”  We got on our plane, got lucky with two bulkhead seats, and was annoyed by RyanAir flight attendants constantly trying to sell the passengers food, perfume, lottery tickets, those scam “energy bracelets” and all sorts of things.  So much for napping.

When we arrived in Pisa, we bought a train ticket from the airport to Florence, with the plan of getting off at Empoli.  We forgot to validate our ticket, so we almost got busted and fined for not doing so, but the train guy decided to show some mercy and validated it for us for 5 euros.  Not a wonderful start.  It was also then that we found out that the train wouldn’t be stopping anywhere, it just goes straight to Florence.  Okay… Not the end of the world, we’ll just take a train from Florence to Siena.

Unfortunately, all the trains from Florence to Siena were cancelled due to an electrical problem on the route.  So Jon stood in line for over an hour to ask some one for advice on how to get to our final destination, and after them assuring us that the train to Chiusi would get there in time to get on a train to Siena (and then get off on the stop for our host), we ran to the platform and hopped on the train.

Well, in order for us to make it to Chiusi in time for us to train towards Siena, the Italian train system would have to actually run on schedule.  We got there, only to find that we were in a nothing town, and had just missed the last train by 5 minutes.  We called our host, and after finding out that she wouldn’t be able to pick us up from the first train back home, we had to wait until 9:30ish the next morning until we could have some place comfortable to sleep.  After spending nine hours in the Chiusi train station, failing to get any sleep and freezing our butts off, we decided to hop on the first train anyway, with hopes of the station in Rapolano having a better place to sit.

Wrong again.  The station was tiny, but worse, the building was closed.  Now we had about four and a half hours, most of which we spent freezing, to wait outside until our host could pick us up.  I felt like I was going to be cold for the rest of my life.

I will, never ever ever again, use the Italian train system, unless I can start at the crack of dawn and hopefully avoid the chance of getting stuck some place after missing the last train.  I had a very poor first impression of Italy; its people, its transportation and its organization.  All that being said though, our host is wonderful, there are tons of people here, and we’ve had a good time since we arrived.  I’ll fill you in on that bit later though.

Madrid no es como el Sevilla

To all my readers out there, I know I’m overdue for a blog post.  If you read my last one, you know why it was difficult for me to post while we were in Spain; and if you didn’t… well go back and read it then silly!

So my last post while I was in Toledo, I updated you on the majority of what we did while we were in Spain.  Our day-to-day activities really didn’t change much.  There were always weeds that needed pulling, things to be fixed, and a horse to take care of, which of course, it being crazy and hating its stable, ran off while the three of us were in Toledo, so when we arrived back to where she lives we learned that the Spanish can be incredibly stupid sometimes.  First of all, the horse went into Almorox, the little tiny village, and when we asked the police if they had seen her horse, they just replied saying they had… Wouldn’t it have been smart to try and contain the horse?  All sorts of terrible things could happen with a horse on the loose.  It or someone else could have gotten very hurt.  Second, her neighbor who caught the horse and managed to keep it said that it followed a man on horseback who has many stables, and yet he didn’t even think to hold it there until surely someone would start asking about.  Silly Spaniards.

So, given the lack of stimulating events around us, we spent a lot of our time in heavy conversation with our host.  I also managed to read a lot, which was nice and relaxing.  I found that the Spain that I had fallen in love with many years ago as a child varies greatly from one region to another.  Madrid and Toledo are nothing like Sevilla; the people aren’t as nice, the food isn’t as good, and the atmosphere just isn’t the same.  We didn’t see much of Madrid, we merely used it as a means of traveling since it was a bit far away to spend our days off there, but I got enough of a vibe to sense that it was completely different.  Things our host had to say about the difference between central Spain and Andalucía confirmed my hunches too.

That being said, I can’t say we didn’t enjoy our time in Spain.  Our host made for wonderful company, wonderful conversation, and great food.  Oddly enough, a huge chunk of our conversations were frequently about the crazy variety of food we have in America, both the good exciting sort, and the kind you can’t pronounce all the ingredients in.  We managed to teach her Jon’s mom’s “kitchen sink” cookie recipe, which is basically just a standard oatmeal cookie that you throw whatever the heck you want into: chocolate, nuts, dried fruits, coconut, caramel, butterscotch, all sorts of things.  It took some converting and a bit of a struggle to find something that would work for the oats (they aren’t common in Spain of course), but they turned out pretty darn close.  She really enjoyed them too.

Oh, one negative: our time in Spain fully reconfirmed every hateful feeling I have towards insects, and merely strengthened my severely irrational fear of spiders.  I know this is something I’m going to have to deal with at every farm, but I just don’t like them.  Ick.

Here are just a few more pictures that I managed to take after the ones I uploaded already.  I’ll post something about getting to Italy in a day or two, and try and keep you better posted on the events happening here.  The property here is huge, and there are 4 other HelpXers working, so there is a lot of stuff to do, and a lot of socializing to enjoy.  A good change of pace I think.

Adios!

Toledo

An escalator that takes you into historic Toledo. How neat.

Max

Our side of the house

Knut! (Pronounced Kuh-Noot) He wouldn’t look at the camera :(

Tiki!

Her power source

The house

The stable

No puedo creer que me olvidé de mi español!

First of all, I’d like to apologize for the serious time-lapse between this post and my last.  Though the farm we’re staying at in Spain does have Internet, its tricky business and very expensive for our host, so we prefer to save it for important things, like banking, and telling our mothers we’re still alive. That being said, I have so much do update you on, while sitting in the Castilla la Mancha Public Library of Toledo.  They have free WIFI here, and our host had a doctor’s appointment here this afternoon, so we took the bus this morning from her village to town, and then we’ll ride back in the evening with here.  Decent plan, since Toledo is quite beautiful, but very small (at least the parts worth visiting), so that leaves ample time to catch up on things like emails, blogging, Facebook, and the news (which has proven quite active given recent occurrences!).

First, getting here.  Flight from Nice to Barcelona- relatively easy.  Jon had to check his tripod; a little odd considering its just a tripod, but I guess you can hide anything in those expandable legs… Getting from the airport in Barcelona to the train station- piece of cake.  Getting from Barcelona to Madrid…. well that was a little funny.  You see, we were traveling on Monday, the Monday after Easter to be exact, and seeing as it’s a bank holiday in a lot of European countries, the trains were full with families doing traveling for the holiday weekend.  This meant that all the tickets for Monday and Tuesday were sold out; that is, except first class.  After doing some quick mental calculations at the ticket counter, we bought two first class tickets on the high-speed train from Barcelona to Madrid, dinner included (yes!).  We figured we would have spent that in hotel costs staying in Barcelona for two nights until the trains were no longer full, and though seeing the city wouldn’t have been bad either, we had arrangements with our host and were excited to get there.  After a wonderful train experience to Madrid, about an hour of going from one metro tram to another to get to the bus station, and an hour and a half bus ride into the little village of Almorox, we met the smiling face of our first host; a very nice woman in her early fifties from Holland.

I don’t think its necessary to fill you in on all of the things we’ve done around her finca, but I’ll highlight the major things; we’ve prepared a patch to start a veggie garden, got rid of a whole bunch of these pesky poisonous (only if you eat them) plants, and put up an electric fence to get ready for the horse she was given by a close friend.  Yep, given.  Long story short, the horse has been traumatized by something in its past, and the family that owned it felt a little overwhelmed.  He’s a very sweet horse, but very nervous.  She also has three wonderful dogs, seven cats, and a plethora of insects I hope not to take to Italy with me.  The little village she lives near is nothing worth visiting, so we spend all of our time on the finca, which is fine.  She’s also a wonderful cook. I’ve finally done a little bit of souvenir shopping, so Brittany and Cristina, if you’re reading, you’re covered! :)  Some things in beautiful Toledo spoke your names to me.  I hope you like them.  :)

First Class!

Jon didn’t look so excited, but he was.

As was I :)

Yep. This was a hot towel! ITS BEEN YEARS SINCE I GOT ONE OF THESE!

Delish. I can now say I’ve tried bull.

AHHH!!! :D I miss this stuff!

The same chocolate. We received the eggs from our French host. Haha.

Middle of no where can be really pretty.

Sun in the picture. But I like it.

Spanish sun, fields of daisies, and spider webs.

Jon thought he was neat looking.

The house from the field of daisies.

Jon standing on a rock.

My feet standing on the same rock. And my camera strap. Ugh.

Rainy day, but MOUNTAIN!

Very purple.

Love these!

I had forgotten all about the wild poppies! So cute!

We took a picture of the map of Toledo because, as you can see, its easy to get lost.

Pretty church of some sort thats now part of the university.

And the top.

Imagine having these as your neighbors!

Old and the not so old.

He’s upset because I found the sign fitting.

Don Quixote!

View from the top of the Alcazar, where they have the public library!

Difficult to read, but its a map of Toledo with points-of-interest marked. Neat!

EDIT: Pictures flipped! Finally! Tenga un buen día!

Vous allez faire quoi pendant vos vacances?

Alright, enough about my Italian adventures.  I hope you enjoyed something a little out of our normal routine!

Since we got back from Torino, we got straight to seriously working on booking all of our farms for the second half of our trip.  We had been trying for weeks to just focus on Spain, but that was proving to be extremely difficult to plan.  While planning our first destination is obviously important, I felt it was equally as important to start looking in the other countries before they all book up too.  So I took over the emailing and started with the smallest countries with the fewest farms.  We had to change our plans slightly; originally we planned to see Switzerland, but after emailing all 3 possible farms, we decided to start looking at other countries too.  For the Switzerland slot I also emailed farms in Belgium (all 4 of them) and then several in Germany.  I also emailed all the possible farms in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands (3 and 5 respectively), and simply crossed my fingers that one of them would respond positively.  I had the support of my two friends at home, Jenna and Cristina, along the way, each of them insisting I keep my chin up, thoughts positive, and emails will come.  Believing them, I asked for good vibes, and went to bed feeling optimistic, several emails later.

The next morning we woke up to no replies, but given that we leave for class a little before nine o’clock, I decided this shouldn’t worry me.  When we got home from class though at one, we had 3 emails in our inbox.  One positive, two negative.  I was excited, we had officially booked our dates for the Netherlands!  Thankfully, this farm is only an hour away from Amsterdam, and the family has lived in the city for the majority of their lives.  Nothing like insider information on what to do and see!  That night, along side my homework, I continued to send emails to farms in Germany, and then started looking into Italy and Ireland.  After a long chat with my mom about my planning for the summer, planning for the fall semester, and getting updated on things at home, I went to bed feeling the same as I did the night before; optimistic.

The following morning went exactly the same as the previous.  Nothing when our alarm went off, but we had a positive reply from Germany (a farm between Berlin and Hamburg) waiting in our inbox when we got out of class!  Two farms officially confirmed, we were a third there.  Given that we hadn’t heard anything from the Czech Republic, and how badly Jon wanted to return, I insisted he call the farm there that looked the most promising, one just a little over an hour outside of Prague.  After buying the minimum amount of Skype credits allowed, and waiting 15 minutes for them to apply to his account, he nervously called the farm, fingers crossed that they spoke English well.  It was a quick conversation, but all positive.  She would send us an email confirming the dates, and we were booked.  All in a span of less than three full days, we had half of our farms booked.  Now thats what I call progress.

The next day we were able to confirm a farm just outside of Madrid in Spain, and today we finally confirmed a farm in the heart of Tuscany, Italy.  I am ecstatic that this has finally come together.  At this point, all the gaps are filled.  We still have Ireland to plan, but thats our last destination, and therefore doesn’t worry me as much.  Since we don’t have a ticket home to Florida yet, should Ireland prove to be impossible to book, we just go home early; not preferred of course, but definitely better than having a two week gap to try and fill on a limited budget.

Needless to say, I’m relieved.  At least I can stop stressing for now; you know, until I have to magically come up with all the money for this, despite the fact that the exchange rate from the USD to EUR has NOT been moving in our favor?

Okay, I’ll take the good as it comes, and worry about the rest when I need to.

Until next time, passer un bon week-end!