WWOOF! (No, this is not about dogs...)

First, a matter of business: It has come to my attention that many people have been unable to get e-mail updates regarding new blog posts. Thus, for those of you who aren't tired of my banter and want to read another year of my thoughts and memories (or just drool over my food photos), I have added a subscribition box at the bottom of this page. Type in your e-mail and VOILA! You will now get e-mails whenever I post something new. Don't worry, I think unsubscribing is just as easy.

Now onto the good stuff...

Last year, my French friend Gregoire told me about how the previous summer, he and his girlfriend worked on a farm in Austurias for 2 weeks with an organization called WWOOF, or World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. And ever since I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver 2 years ago, I've told Mom and Jackie that I want to live on a farm. My vacation time in Spain, before starting orientation and school, was just my chance to make it a reality.

I arrived to the Santiago de Compostela airport on a Thursday afternoon, looking for a woman named María (not an extremely specific characteristic in Spain), wearing a green shirt and beige pants. It took me a while to find her, in part because of a change in meeting location, but also because I wasn't expecting a 26 year old young woman.

María's WWOOF description reads, "Hace muy poco que he empezado con mi proyecto aunque llevase ya mucho tiempo con las ideas en la cabeza. Fue en Abril cuando decidí cambiar mi calidad de vida y mudarme a una casa." (It hasn't been long since I have started with my project, although I have been thinking about it for a long time. It was in April when I decided to change my quality of life and move to a house.) I didn't imagine that many 26 year olds have been thinking for a while about moving to a farm or changing their quality of life. But there she was, and the unexpected companionship was just the beginning of integrating myself into a new normal. Here is some insight to my WWOOFing experience...

Day 1:

• Since it was my first day, María showed me around the place. During my tour I met the pig, 2 goats, sheep, 7 chickens, rooster, dog (Pepa), 2 kittens (Max and Leo), and plethora of flies, most of which, María calls "Chookey".

Max... doesn't he look like Bubby?!

   This was Bubby's model shot ;)

Leo


Check out that handsome goat

• Later in the evening, we went to the bus station to pick up the other WWOOFer, who María told me was a girl from Switzerland. However, when we got there, we found out that she confused Suiza and Suecia and 'Love' is a male from Sweeden. Lots of surprises in the meet and greet.

Day 2:

• I gathered the eggs... or should I say egg... from the hen house. The hens are eating organically, but are not finding enough of their own bugs yet to have a hearty diet and to be laying a ton. The food intake changed later in the week when we brought home massive bags of corn that we got from a friend and ginormous (and heavy!) bags of mussel shells that we got from mountains of compost material. Unfortunately, during the time I was there the chickens didn't change their laying habits much.

 The rooster, snacking on some some weeds

• We picked judías to sell to the frutería.

Fresh from the garden

• While we were picking produce to take to the frutería, we also picked out a few things for our own lunch...

 

2 peas in a pod

Flowers from the zucchini plant, that then became this...

Coated in an egg and flour mixture and then fried. The bigger ones are filled with goat cheese. Mmmmmm....

•  In the afternoon, we headed over to María's friends' house to pick blackberries. The friends (2 brothers) are friends of María's from university, and the three of them often talked about doing something like this while they were in classes together. Now, prompted by the crisis, they decided to turn their ideas into actions. Rather than wait for a job like the other 56.1% of Spain's youth that is unemployed (The Guardian), they bought farms. María is handling the garden end of things, while the guys raise up cows to eventually sell high quality meat. The brothers' family owns a hotel and the goal is to be able to use these farms to provide ecologically friendly products for their own restaurants. So cool!

 About to be picked 

Fruits of our labor... literally.

• In the evening, we went over to the brothers' apartment (in Santiago de Compostela, practically right next to the cathedral) for dinner. Since they love their meat, we ate MEAT. 3 kinds to be exact: one of their own 3 year old cows, a 16 year old Galician cow, and an Australian cow. It was an interesting compare and contrast experience.
• Over dinner, with the three of them bantering in Castellano (Spanish), I got lots of language practice. Even more so since the moment I walked into the room they were drilling me about 9/11 conspiracy theories and explaining how, from their point of view, the train crash in Santiago was on purpose, planned by the Spanish government just like (according to them) the twin towers were bombed by the U.S. government. Since I currently have zero interest in conspiracy theories, I shrugged it off and left them to their banter. Love (remember, that's the fellow WWOOFer's name) doesn't speak much Spanish but caught on to the topic and later said that the previous WWOOF host he was staying with was interested in the same conspiracy theory. Can't say that I expected all of the farmers to be conspirators, but I guess it all fits in with the Dooms-day idea.

Day 3:

• I made stuffed peppers like Hanah and I made at in our Mediterranean Cooking class at the Institute of Culinary Education a few weeks earlier. I didn't have a big-wig chef to help me out, but I did pick the peppers and tomatoes and mint right out of the garden before taking them into the house to make dinner. Not too shabby.
• My Spanish-English dilemma began to become even more frequent. In translating conversations between Love and María, I would often speak the wrong language, English to María and Spanish to Love. When they asked me "What?" or "¿Qué?" I repeated myself, in the wrong language, until I recognized the laughing look in their eyes and confused furrowing of their brows. We'll see if I get any better.

Day 4:

•  Between my relaxed afternoons reading in the hammock and my leisurely mornings and evenings fiddling around in the garden, I didn't think this experience could get much better. Then we went to the beach. BINGO. We went to Ribeira, where María's family has a small plot of land with 11 other families. When María was young, they camped on the land, but in the past few years, María's family constructed a little house out of an old refrigerated shipping container that is even more efficient than Ikea. After lunch with some of María's family and friends, we went for a walk, soaked up some rays, and went snorkeling. My 56€ plane ticket really paid itself off!

Just a few hundred meters away from the house

The water was so clear that I could see all of the little snails on the rocks below

 The rocks where we sunbathed... quite convenient for not getting too sandy

• Although I continued to mix up Spanish and English with Love and María, I realized that I can understand Gallego (the language spoken in Galicía) pretty well! Although I lose details here and there, I was able to interject once and a while over lunch. This came in handy when they tried to give Love a shot of some pure alcohol while telling him it was water. 

Day 5... and 6, 7, 8, 9, 10:

After a few days on the farm, I got pretty accustomed to the slower pace of life, free from e-mails and work and worries about the future. After all, watermelons and corn only grow so quickly. As I got into the routine, I stopped trying to remember the events of each day and let them blend, strung together by laughter and meals and briefly punctuated by gorgeous sunsets into the mountains and stars that really sparkle like diamonds. Nevertheless, there are a few more memories and reflections worth recording...

• When I was in Hershey, I would often tell Mom that I would take Sookie on my run with me. That was code for: I don't want to run so how about I take Sookie with me and turn around 2 minutes later? Some mornings, however, Pepa accompanied me on my 40 minute jog around the small, winding streets lined with farms. Pepa didn't get tired and want to turn around though; instead, she would bolt ahead of me and then turn around and wait while I struggled to catch up. After a few minutes I got over feeling slow (I was, after all, well versed in feeling slow when running with Ali), and it later gave me a sense of security when the dogs that we passed barked, scratched, and tried to jump their respective fences. Then, later in the week, a dog Sookie's size joined in on the run. All I could think about was how I would explain to María's grandmother that I had left her dog stranded 2 miles away when it got tired. I guess I underestimated how far a dog would go to be with the only female dog (Pepa) in the neighborhood.

 

• One thing that did not cease to baffle me during my time on the farm was María's creativity. Those of you who read my blog last year may have noticed that I was bit disenchanted with the Spanish education system, mostly because of how little creativity was built into the classes. Thus, I was amazed to see what María had done in the span of 5 months. Using scraps of wood, bits of string, leftover seeds, and a lot of google, she had gotten her garden to flourish. Yes, the tomatoes were planted too close together and some of the gates lacked proper locks, but who cares? If you can use a loop of string and a rock, why do you need to buy a piece of metal to keep the chickens' area closed? María had a clever solution for every challenge: getting the ripened pears off of the highest branches, creating a pond for her new ducks, the list goes on. Up through the last day, I fully enjoyed discovering how María had become so successful with such few resources.

These ducks were quite happy with their make-shift pond made out of some rocks and scraps of plastic

• Since it is her first year, María isn't selling much of her produce. But one of the local fruterías calls her twice a week for her to bring in her ecological products. Thus, we spent some time here and there preparing her products to be sold.

Pimientos de Padrón

Love and María, weighing the apples from the apple tree 

• A number of times, we ate with María's friends at their work-in-progress farm home. The house is made of gorgeous stones and they are rebuilding and renovating it with little outside help. However, the progress isn't moving too quickly and the furnishings are modest: plastic picnic tables, camping chairs, no electricity or running water (Yes, that means the bathroom is basically an outhouse. But since it's next to the cow's stall, you feel right at home.), and sticky fly tape hanging from wooden beams. But it was in that house, with chickens pecking around our feet and geese honking at everything in sight, that I ate some of the highest quality food of my life. Beef that had been grazing in the brothers' pastures for years and tomatoes grown from ground that had never seen chemicals were eaten off of plastic plates. Most of the meals that rich in quality that I have eaten took place in nice restaurants, on special occasions. But there we all sat and ate, with dirt under our nails, among the animals that would soon end up on the plates. And although I felt like the meal was getting far from the distinction it deserved, it felt right. It was wonderful to feel so connected to the food I was consuming.

 

Dinner

• The connection to the food also made me think of a line from "Hold on to what you believe" by Mumford and Sons: This city breathes the plague of loving things more than their creators. Living on the farm, I thought about how I rarely know where my food comes from in Madrid, let alone my leather bag, my t-shirts, my desk supplies, etc.. We all put so much focus on the things we have, but we don't love their creators enough. We don't think about the people that make the things we consume or, to take it even further, the people that provide essential services to us on a regular basis. Now that I'm back in Madrid, I am trying to be a little more aware and make more decisions based on the people who work so that I can live the way I live.
• Throughout my time on the farm, we talked about everything: guns, language, family, exercise, food, healthcare, gender equality, freedom.... One night, over a few hours of washing and cutting tomatoes, I asked María and Love what they were most proud of of their country/city. Love responded quickly, talking about the preservation of forests and the freedom that Sweds have to use even private property for hikes, camping, and berry picking. When he said, "You can pick mushrooms in another man's forest," I couldn't help but think it sounded like a Swedish proverb. María didn't take long to respond either... she is proud (and rightly so) of the quality of food produced in Galicía. Neither of them asked me and I'm not sure how I would have responded. I'll have to consider my own answer for next time I ask someone that question...

 

The more tomatoes, the more conversation

• The second to last day, I asked María if she would mind taking us into Santiago for a little bit of tourism. Having done part of the camino last September, I was eager to see the destination of so many peregrinos (pilgrims). It was neat to be in front of the cathedral and see so many people just laying in the plaza, exhausted from the journey and happy to have arrived at such a well known destination. It was also fun to watch the groups saunter in, cheering at their accomplishment, when you knew they had only done a day hiking trip. The large group of high schoolers would never have been that pleasant if they had been hiking for more than a few hours. Nor would they have looked so clean with daypacks only big enough for cell phones and water bottles.

La catedral de Santiago

 Looking over Santiago de Compostela

• When María and Love took me to the airport, I expected to get dropped off in front of the entrance. When I told María she didn't have to park she responded with a very firm tone, "No, hombre. Vamos a acompañarte." (No, man. We're going with you.) So she and Love walked me to the Ryanair desk to get my ticket stamped and then said goodbye at security. On the walk into the airport, Love spent 2 or 3 minutes trying to ask María, "Do you think we are going to make it without Amber?" I held back, seeing how the communication worked out. When they finally understood each other, she said, "Yes. We will make it. We won't talk too much, but it's okay." It felt good to know that I had been helpful, wanted, and at times, needed, during the previous 10 days.
• Even though I had only spent 10 days with María and Love, I was surprised to realize how close I felt to them. We had conversations about just about everything and were united by a common passion before we had even met each other. It was the closest to the community of Upward Bound that I have ever experienced. Furthermore, we were all in the process of changing our understanding of normal. María took on farm life, rather than waiting the crisis out in her family's apartment like the majority of other young Spaniards. Love had decided to travel from farm to farm for 9 months, improving his Spanish and English and seeing the world before beginning university. And I was about to start my second year living 6 time zones away from my family. We had all decided to redefine normal, much like the new Fulbrighters are doing now. All of this reminded me of the advice I had written them a few months ago, which I needed to remind myself of as I began this new year: Be flexible. You never know what doors will be opened, what doors will be closed, what doors need to be knocked on 13 times before being answered, and what doors are located in the middle of a labyrinth of hallways. Be persistent with your desires but acknowledge that it's likely that they won't be fulfilled in the way that you expect. A year in a foreign country has provided some of the most exciting experiences of my life, but it has also converted the exotic into normality. Be prepared to have a new normal that others won't understand. But know that you are better for it and when the challenges are conquered, you will have done what so many people never even consider trying.

Much love,
Amber