Life at la Vecchia

I don't know that I could have come to a more peaceful and perfect place for the last three weeks. Atop our hill in Avolasca I am with my head as if in the clouds. Anywhere I look outside of my quaint apartment I see rolling green hills speckled with vineyards and other square plots of farmland that have been tilled or are ripe with their produce.

The most constant sound is the bi-hourly tolling of the belltower, and if you're in the right place you can hear the echo from the other hilltop village belltowers as well. Since we harvested the first round of grapes, the sound of the wine cooler is another constant outside of my kitchen window, reminding me of the intensive process that our delicately picked grapes are now undergoing to become the delicious Rebelot, Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Barbara wines that we enjoy at each meal.

Many hours of my days are spent on my own, doing some task such as picking tomatoes, basil, or zucchini. I have soooo much time to think and mull over my life so far and what is to come. Even when working in the vineyard picking grapes I have lots of time to think, sometimes I will engage in a conversation with Lisa, my German friend, but often even working with ten people around the Italian being spoken is so quickly I can't follow it and so I am more or less with my own thoughts anyway.

And while it sounds lonely (and yes sometimes it is) I'm completely 100% happy at every moment. I'd rather come WWOOF for my holidays in the future than go lye on a beach somewhere. I'm getting a tan, eating amazing food, and relaxing because I don't have any real responsibility. I simply wake up when I do in the morning, eventually someone in the family summons me to tell me what I'm doing for the day, and I work away. Often the work is physically challenging, to pick grapes you have to be bent over, you get all scratched up by the vines when you reach in for a bundle of grapes, spiders and wasps are abundant and happy to bite, and the Italian sunshine is beating down on you. If I had to do this work I might mind, but that I'm choosing to do it and am learning about the entire process through doing it I am completely happy to work long hours without pay.

The family that is hosting me is wonderful as well. Annime is originally from Belgium but she came to Italy over 20 years ago and never left. Roberto is originally from here and is the one who convinced Anime to stay. They have a big and diverse farm, bed and breakfast, and restaurant (only open on weekends). They farm grapes, apples, peaches, more apples, pears, and they have a garden which produces all the vegetables and herbs that Annime uses in the restaurant throughout the year.

September is the busy harvesting month here, so the restaurant has been closed and Annime spends most of her time preparing the pasta sauces, jams, herbs, desserts and vegetables that will be used while Roberto oversees the farm and the winemaking.

Winemaking is cool by the way. And it's also not nearly as glamorous as one would think. But I like it, it involves a whole detailed and calculating plan that revolves around more external circumstances than is nice for it to be executed properly. I've learned about the whole series of steps used to make most of the wines they do here. From how to cut, to getting the grapes off of the vines (with a nifty machine) to spending hours transferring the juice away from the peel so some special enzymes can do their work before we transfer the juice back in to mix with the peels again, deepening the color of the red wine. Its a fascinating process and there are so many little steps that can be done in so many minimally different ways that effect the final outcome of the wine. For example with most wine when we pour it into a new tank we pour into the top. But today with pinot noir we had to insert a tube into the bottom of the tank and it filled from there because its bad for the wine to be poured from the top because it gets too much air and bubbles, somehow effecting some of the chemical composition. It's such an art!

As I said, I am completely in love with my time here. I've become good buddies with Matteo (their 9 year old son) and over hot cocoa some days we teach each other Italian and English words that are useful. And we do yoga. Matteo loves yoga :)

Next Friday I take my last trip, to Interlaken, Switzerland, where I'll spend 24 hours before I go to Milan for a flight back to London on Saturday night. And in another 36 hours I'll find myself at Heathrow boarding a flight to bring me back to the US. I don't want this time to be coming to an end. I will absolutely cherish these last few days.

Thankfully I have an open invitation to come back and WWOOF here at La Vecchia Posta whenever I want. Maybe in my job hunt (to begin when I arrive back in the US) I'll find somewhere willing to let me abandon ship for a month to come back and find my solitude on the farm here in Italy. I hope :)

La Veccia Posta-My most recent home

So its has been a while since I've been able to send updates, that is in part because they keep me VERY busy here, also in part because they only have internet access on their computer for one hour per day...so my time online is spent making plans and sending a few important emails (this post being one of them!)

La Veccia Posta is located in a very, very small village. I think there are maybe 12 different families that live here. But it is not a lonlely village as from its hilltop perch one can see about 10 other villages of roughly the same size adorning various hilltops. It feels like classic Italy here. None of the locals speak English, old folks sit on benches and cast you glances with raised eyebrows when they can't place where you belong, and the countryside is endless.

It is absolutely beautiful. A complete escape from suburban life. I think this is the best place for me to finish a whirlwind of a trip before I go back to my whirlwind life (well, my whirlwind of establishing a life as I have no home, job, or stuff to go back to!)

Laundry swings from lines as you walk down the street and you can stop at any peach tree if you're hungry for a snack. There is a beautiful silence that overwhelmes this part of the world, except when a tractor pulls by with its harvest for the day or the hilltop churches from all the towns chime to let the townspeople know how far away the lunch hour is.

Everything is really beautiful, quaint, and wonderful. But the work is hard. I've now been here for 5 days and we spend at least 8 hours each day doing some type of work for the farm. I've now become a skilled picker of apples, grapes, peaches, cucumbers, basil, zucchini, and tomatoes. I think I diced about 10 pounds of apples today to make a pie. I've learned to make green tomatoe jelly (strange but delicious) and I've come down with and gotten over a horrible stomach flu (probably from the fact that all of the food is from the farm, so it has lots more bacteria than I am accustomed to).

I have lots of time to think here, not because I am alone but because most conversations that happen around me are in Italian. But I am slowly, ever so slowly, able to understand bits of the language. My limited Spanish has helped me some with the vocabulary and I find that if I really pay attention I can get a grasp of the subjects that they are talking about. It's tough, but it's exactly what I was hoping for.

On my second day here I secretly baked traditional chocolate chip cookies because I found out that it is my host mom, Annemie's, birthday. Though she caught me in the act of baking, she and the entire family (and everyone who comes to help on this farm, daily there are new random people that do this or that around the farm) loved them! Of course they had always heard about these cookies and they have purchased those ones from the store that are hard and not at all like home made ones. So I think I got in with them by that little effort right away. Reminder though, they do not use cups, tablespoons, or teaspoons for measurement here. Without acecss to converters, I just kind of guessed at the amounts of things I was putting in and after about an hour of adding more of this or that (oh and they dont have brown sugar either) I actually managed some decent cookies! I was very proud.

Tonight we have the true birthday celebration, with lots of food (that we prepared the last two days), someone is bringing an accordian, I've set up my travelling tent for the kids, and I am very excited that my (seemingly) coworker and friend Lisa is coming for the party. She WWOOF'd here a year ago from Germany and found a boyfriend and has stayed for over a year now. Im so happy to have her as she's the only person near my age, and one of the few people that speak English.

Overall I am very happy. I am working on getting used to the quiet, solitude, and hard work but overall I think it's exactly what I was hoping for. I'm starting to make plans for my return to London at the end of the month from where I then fly home! I still dont know that Im ready to go back to life in the States, but I do know that I have 2.5 more weeks to enjoy myself here. And that I will do!

Updates will probably be infrequent, but I'll do my best!!

Goodbye to Villa Sampaguita

My last few days at Villa Sampaguita were wonderfully relaxing, somewhat busy, but overall fantastic. Life there is ideallic, every morning I would rise from bed around 7:30 to go downstairs for a breakfast of freshly picked fruit, some tea, and home made bread and jam. Then we'd gather ourselves together as Tim layed out the days work (with our important 3 hour afternoon nap and relaxing time planned in) before we'd head out the door to get to work.

During my 5 days at Villa Sampaguita I got to:

-Clear an old vineyard of the poles that held the vines (hard work!)

-Build a greenhouse

-Construct the doors of the greenhouse and the doorframes from old scrap wood (it was like a big geometry puzzle game)

-Load and unload a few truckloads of 'fertilizer' from the neighboring horse stables

-Drink lots of delicious wine and enjoy as much wonderful cooking

-Attend a wine/proscioutto tasting event at a nearby winery

-Try a local delicacy, raw sausage (questionable, yes)

-Learn how to life a wine glass with a toothpick

-Get lots of goodnight kisses from Harriet, the 18 month old princess of the farm

-Learn lots about soil quailty and how to get good soil

-Hear a lot about plans to build a forest (Tim has plans to turn the back portion of his property into a forest with some EU stimulus funding) And with this came lots of information on EU farming policies

It was a really amazing 5 days at the farm with the family and I can't wait to return there as a friend and a guest. They were wonderful hosts who have lived inspiring lives and whose beliefs about life I found to be very much in line with my own. I had a wonderful time there, learned a lot, and definitely made some lifelong friends. So many thanks to them for having me!

Now if you ever take a trip to Italy and want to visit the famous wine region of Piemonte (Piedmont), you should absolutely go and visit Villa Sampaguita. They are wonderful hosts, will help arrange your day trips, will cook for you, and are all-in-all super nice hosts.More info at www.villasampaguita.com

But for me, my time was up and I headed off early one morning to go to a farm outside of nearby Tortona (about 1 hour by train away). I will spend my last three weeks of this European adventure on a small family farm in the Piedmont hills of Avalosca with a Belgian woman, her Italian husband, their son, and an array of fields, fruits, and livestock to keep me company.

Manual Labor but La Vida

My second day on the farm showed me that they don't always work quite as hard as we did on my first day.

For the morning they needed to run to the market for some supplies, so I got to accompany the family into Asti for the outdoor market and official bag-carrier girl. Marina and I went off for household shopping while the men and little Harriet went to look at tools and other play-things.

These markets are quite different from ones at home and I love them. The indoor market is a permanent place, essentially the equivalent of an USian (more on the term 'American later'). Each vendor has their particular genre of ware to sell, one for chicken meat, a pescaterian for fish, the bread man, a cheese shop. And you wander between all these specialists to order your freshly butchered meat. In the fish section you actually see the fish you're going to eat and, if you'd like, you can watch them be de-finned and de-boned right there on the spot (or you do it at home yourself later). I talked with Marina about how different this is than in the US, where our food (even what is presented as fresh at the butchers in the back) is already so de-animalized that you look at fillets instead of the actual fish they come from. And here they really are whole, eyes, gills, fins-you can see it all. If you've ever read Michael Pollen you'd know what I'm referring to in noticing how far removed we are in the US from our food, most things are already so processed and packaged we don't really think of the physical animal/shape it originally came from.

Anyway, while I squeemed and tried to come to terms with seeing my dinner in a life-like form, Marina was amazed at how sheltered we are from our food so she made sure to take me by a number of other life-like meals to see what I thought.

When we were finished stocking up at the markets, we made our way home for the afternoon meal and naps.

And I realized they're not so intense about their work schedules as they made out to be on day 1. We got going around four and put up the plastic covering for the winter greenhouse, including stringing rope over it to hold it down and digging trenches along the sides to ensure the side tarp was held down. We took apart the old greenhouse doors and then the day was over, Tim was tired so we went in for the day with plans to finish the doors tomorrow.

Before dinner I did a little front yard yoga session and practiced headstands with Marina before we made our way to the outdoor dinner table under the terrace for a lovely meal of roasted bell peppers, potatoes and salad. We had a lovely bottle of red wine from the local vineyard Vaudano and then these absolutely heavenly amaretto cookies called Amaretti di Mombaru LLO (last three letters are the initials of the three Asti ladies that made these cookies so popular in the region). They're honestly heaven.

And with extra wine for this evening, we had a table debate on the classification of music into genres and, well, just one of those conversations about music that last until everyone is rather intoxicated and ready for bed. Another wonderful day gone by here!

Life at Villa Sampaguita

My arrival last night (after another disaster train ride) was perfectly timed, Tim, an Englishman raised in South Africa, who lived in Napa Valley for about 20 years, picked me up and with many stories to fill the air, took me to a point where we could view three different parts of the French/Italian Alps and catch a glimpse their home, before he took me home for dinner! It was an unusual night because Marina (tim's wife) cooked a curry instead of the normal Italian food, but after a day of old sandwich and crackers I wasn't one to have any complaints about real food. It was Delicious! We dined and wined, and the wine carafes kept being refilled. A great family meal. I then went to my luxurious home-for-now, the B&B suite with a bed adorned by the best pillows I've layed on for months. I've got my own bathroom and some great views of the surrounding countryside.

We started work the first day around 8am, not too early I was thankful to note. I went out with Gerald, Marina's son, and worked till, about noon, and I know I am going to be hurting later because this morning's goal was to clear the old vineyard of all the posts used to hold up the grapes. There are a mixture of 7 foot long metal ones and then 5 foot, thick wood ones and there were at least 700 of them scattered throughout the field. We had to carry them up this hill, load them onto a truck and once the truck was full we drove and unloaded them somewhere else and started over again. And these things are heavy! And still clodded with dirt from when they were pulled up. Thankfully the job was done shortly after a luxurious lunch partnered with some yummy red wine and our mid-day nap.

The schedule here is to get up, breakfast around 745 for 30 minutes or so, then go to work till noon in the fields, garden, or sheds. We then sit down to a feast prepared by the woman of the house, Marina, then have an afternoon siesta to do as we like and rest until about 3(ish). After that we work another 4 or so hours before dinner, lots of wine, and then deep long-day-is-over sleep :)

Harriet is the riot of the house, at 18 months her command has everyone on a leash: so work, hammering, even tractors stop in their tracks for a few minutes of her attention. The geese and cat (Mr. Bean) also have special places here on the farm whereas the ducks are not named but instead referred to as any number of delicatessen sauces (they are for eating after all).

But it is lovely here, I have my own space to rest and clean up, they treat me like family, both Marina and Tim practice yoga every morning and as part of their lifestyle, the stories I get to hear of their lives are endlessly fascinating, and I'm loving the long days of labor. Grandpa, you taught me well :)

Well that wasn't very nice-Travel Disaster...again

I purchased a youth Eurail pass for this trip, valid for 15 days of trips within 2 months-meaning I could use the pass 15 unique days for as many trains as I wanted.

Part of the stipulation of the pass is that you fill in your date of travel before you board the train. Until today, this has not been enforced and one ticket-checker even said to wait to write in the date until someone came to check it. So that is what we've done with no problem...until today.

I agreed with Tim, my host at my first WWOOF farm, to arrive in Asti at 4pm by taking the 930 train. All was well this morning as I found out our hotel actually provides free breakfast every morning (would've been good to know the last two mornings we woke up there and ate cereal from small cups) so the day started out great. After a little confusion at the Rome Termini I figured out what train to board and was on my way.

I did a bit of reading and decided to nap a while. Eventually I was woken when the man came by to check tickets. So I found my pass, wrote in the date, and then he told me I'd have to pay €50.

Ummm..."No" I explained. This pass gets me on for free. Then he went on to say its €50 because I didn't write in the date before I boarded. I explained my past experiences, pointed out how there are numerous dates on my ticket that I wrote in and no one checked, I had already written in todays date, on other trains I didn't have a problem...and he had none of it. He said "cash or credit card". Well, I am in no place to pay €50 for a ticket that should be free, I asked him what it would cost to just buy a ticket and he rolled his eyes and said €100. This is when the passengers nearby started getting involved and (seemingly) argued my case. Again, he had none of It and said to pay or get off. I was stunned. He showed absolutely no sympathy or sincerity. Just kept rolling his eyes and saying "are you going to pay?".

I told him I wouldn't and asked what my options are, and seriously won't he just give me a break. I had no bad intentions, just following the precedent his peers had set with me so far. He said I had to get off and catch the next train...in 3 hours.

Well this would all be fine and dandy except I have my next boss/host/food provider expecting to pick me up from that train. But what option did I have, this guy wouldn't budge and was getting more rude by the minute. I told him that fine, I would get off and then take another train and he rolled his eyes a few more times and left.

I picked up by stuff and with the sad faces of the people nearby giving me their support I sludged to wait by the doors of the train. The first stop was some town that I couldn't even bear to look at the name of and when I got off I found the mean conductor man again and asked if I could please re-board the train. I had shown my good intentions by getting off with al of my stuff right? Wouldn't he please just let me get back on? I'd stand if that made him happy.

But no, not even another train employee working on the platform could convince him to make a decision in my favor, so with him blatantly ignoring me and waving away his co-worker he hopped on the stairway and waved the man on.

So I sat and waited for another train. The lady inside the station said I may be able to get to Asti by 7, 4 hours later than I'm expected. No good.

What's amazing though is that even though this one guy was a total and complete jerk on a power trip (I understand now that I messed up but I did all that I could to show that I had no bad intentions) there were so many other nice people. The two couples around me who argued for me with the man. A nice guy in the line at the station who, without my asking allowed me to go ahead of him in line. Another guy on the train platform who carried my tent onto the train for me. And of course the 3 guys that jumped to help me when I struggled to lift my bag into the luggage rack on the train.

On the next train...

This train will arrive in Pisa in 2 hours where I will try to call Tim from the winery to let him know when I will actually be arriving in Asti. What a day.

2 hours later in Pisa...
And of course I cannot just catch a train straight there. I will now go to Genova at 3pm, and catch a train from there to Torino, arriving around 8pm. I also had to pay €10 for a reservation on this train :/ Loss of time and money-what a bummer!

I called Tim and left a message, hopefully he won't be waiting at a station somewhere expecting me!

On the train I sat with Michelo, a student of 'laboratory' who has traveled the world, know italian, English, Spanish, and is learning Portugese, and who lives in a beach town in northern Italy. He empathized with me about the mean train man and over some chips we talked philosophy.

By the way, the train ride I'm on now, from Pisa to Genova, is astoundingly beautiful. Ragged cliff-faced mountains. Brick castles perched atop mountain summits. Occassional views of the sea beating on the rocks below the train tracks. Vineyards stretching out across the valleys. Its gorgeous!

Later in Genoa...

I got off the train as quick as the long line would allow and headed to see when the next train to Torino would come to take me to Asti. As I expected, one hour. I went to look for a payphone to again call Tim and let him know the situation. Digging 30 cents out of my purse I used a pay phone and got a hold of him!! He answered in Italian and when I responded asking for Tim he laughingly switched to English and asked how I was doing. We chatted about my disaster of a day then, consulting schedules, agreed on the train I should take. He told me I should go wander around Genoa for my hour and enjoy the beautiful city and hed be there to get me at 8. What relief!

And so exploring Genoa I went (laden with backpack, tent, and groceries). First though I stopped in at a restaurant for a nice dark German beer (I felt I deserved one after all the stress!) and then I wandered the streets of the quaint city.

Back on the train to Asti now, I can't wait to get to my home for the week! And guess what, Every person who I mentioned my destination to has exclaimed how Asti is the center of wine-making in Italy! Particularly known for champagne! I think I chose a farm well!

What a(nother) disaster of a travel day!