A Happy Thanksgiving

Goodbye to the Umbrian countryside!

But when you wake up to snow in the cow pasture, you know it's time to go.

 fond farewell from our host Adje

and her doggies

reviewing our memories of the past two months - on the train to Naples we listed our best experiences, our most grateful moments, the people who meant the most to us....

When who should appear but these Indian guys we had shared a compartment with on the train from Slovenia to Germany, 43 days ago.  Is that weird.  They were on their way to the SAME HOSTEL as us. Cue Disney - "It's a small world..."!

At the Hostel of the Sun in Naples we had our little Thanksgiving.  What we were thankful for, specifically on this table, were the black trumpets we found in Umbria, the goat parmesan made by our Slovenian host, the crushed red peppers from our Tuscan host, the $2.50 decent wine, and most of all the olive oil from olives we picked in Umbria.  Thanks everyone!!

Expat Italia

"All I need is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground..." - Dave Mallett

Well - turns out, you need a lot more than that to move to Italy and create a retirement homestead!  But of course many people do, but why? Obviously there is a sort of absolute allure about the rolling hills of well-spaced rows and diagonals of olive trees, oak forests, ancient stone retaining walls peeking out of any hillside no matter how remote, castles on random hilltops, sheep and cows, tiny ancient villages of people sweeping their patios with twig brooms, 90 cent espresso, truffles, wild boar stew, all that.

But try buying a deserted stone farm house and turning it into your dream home in a country where nothing, NOTHING works the way it is supposed to, including people!  Things are totally illogical, bureaucracies are ludicrous, businesses all close for most of the afternoon, and don't open til 10 a.m. Trains and buses can be cancelled without any public notice at all, the post office can't find addresses, mail just doesn't come. It goes on and on. Some may find this charming. But it appears from our Yankee practicality point of view to be a nightmare! We're trying to figure out if all these people from Holland and England and the U.S. and Australia have any idea what they are in for when they buy these places, or if the weather and scenery really could actually make it worth it!  

Anyway, right now in this Workaway stay we are experiencing Italy by looking over the shoulder of one Dutch expat who is making her way through all of this.  Six months into it she has a pretty good start, but she was once the Director of Facilities for the City of Amsterdam, has run a museum, owned an art gallery, and managed her own B & B.  She is also very single-minded, stubborn, sufficiently wealthy, and completely independent.  Plus she has a good handle on Italian language, acquired in the last couple years. These tools seem to make her able to keep moving forward, but she is usually dealing with something exasperating enough to justify ulcers. Before we are through here with the olive grove and hanging paintings and lamps and mirrors, we hope to meet some more of these intrepid settlers and find out what gets them through the Umbrian mud puddles!

Working in the very irregular, just recently recovered olive grove.  A totally different experience from the previous, 30-year-old grove in Tuscany.

The Hoeh and two other Workawayers with a small part of the brush they moved in one day.

Rake gets fun, manly projects.  Adje favors her.  Rake always was teacher's pet.

Adje our host flipping a crêpe.  She is an INCREDIBLE cook.

Stone shed here.

Orvieto on our day off.

Funicular up to the town.

This gargantuan cathedral was built in this tiny town because someone noted that some communion bread started bleeding in resonse to some priest voicing his doubts.

Funicular back down.  Then we got on the train, which, when we arrived back at our station, would not let us off!  The doors of two consecutive cars were not working.  Train officials were outside the door observing, but helpless. It simply started back up and kept going, so we had to go to the next town!  Perfect example of Italy.

Our first trip to the olive press here! 380 kilos.

Yield: 45 liters!

Employee lunchroom at the olive press. Note wine, olive oil, fire in fireplace.

"Our" olive oil.  Followed by pasta with truffles....

So here we are in sort of art gallery, eating gourmet food, drinking local wine with dinner every evening, cursing the changeable weather and the ubiquitous mud, but sleeping in the most comfortable beds ever. As Drew Barton's father would say, Could be worser!

castle in the back yard.

A different sort of olive grove

Hello devoted readers!

We're back. 

So, where do we start? Above is a picture of me picking olives at our new home in Umbria. In front of the tree is our new host, Adje (a better picture to come). We have been here now three days and it couldn't be more different than our last place. Adje is a 63 year old dutch woman fixing up an old house and abandoned property with the help of workawayers like ourselves. She has been here since May and managed to turn the house into a beautiful living space and also to uncover about a hundred olive trees that she didnt know existed from a gigantic thicket of brambles. 

The techniques we use to pick olives are different. For example we use rakes to help us get the olives off the branches, and we also have a machine to get the really high ones (since this grove has been abandoned for so long, the trees are not maintained at all and some have grown up too high to reach with a ladder). There is a lot more room for creativity here, since we are all pretty new at this and open to each other's ideas, whereas at the last place, there was one, and only one, right way to execute each of the steps for each of the trees. 

There are two other girls, Verena (18, german), and Lilly (25, Irish), who arrived shortly before we did. They are both very nice and vegetarian. However, all of our dinners so far have also contained meat for the meat eaters! Adje is an amazing cook, and we all pitch in and work together on our wonderful dinners.

This afternoon, as a reward for our hard work, and since the weather was not great for olive picking, Adje brought us to her favorite Patisserie and treated us to some frothy cappuccinos and immaculate bon bons, chez Michele.

Me and Adje with her dachshunds.

Things are relaxed and pleasant here, and we feel like we are making a difference every day with the work we do, helping Adje to realize her vision of this place.

On another note, we have one exciting story to tell about our last week in Tuscany. During a misadventure typical of our previous location, we found ourselves stranded in the rain, 10 kilometers from home, in a town where the one cafe was not open. What started out as a beautiful day for a walk had quickly turned sour and we had resigned ourselves for an afternoon of misery. The Hoeh was reading under the shelter of the bus stop, and i was pacing under a large tent in a small parking lot, when a young man ran out from the next house and then came and stood under the tent next to me and looked around. After a minute, he said something to me in Italian. 

"Non parlo italiano. Sono Americana," i said.

"oh," he said, "sono di morocco." 

Then he somehow communicated an invitation into their house and after a half second hesitation, i said "si!"

What followed was an afternoon of sitting around with three Moroccan guys in their early twenties, drinking moroccan tea and beer, trying their hamburger kind of things, spiced with spices straight from morocco, and watching music videos while it poured outside.

(Me, Said who invited me in, Friend we were not introduced to, Said from Rome, Adil who spoke some English)

Only one of them spoke a tiny bit of english, so even my ten words of italian were appreciated. we spent about 4 hours with them, and talked about everything we possibly could, given all of the words we knew in common. We drove to the nearby larger town, had a coffee and came back. and then, after exchanging contact information, they gave us a ride home! Then Said-from-Rome texted me to tell me he loved me. And then he called me and asked him why i hadnt answered. and then he said some other things that i didnt undertand and i said "va bene." He lives in Rome so we are supposed to call him when we get there on December 1st. We'll see...

thats it for now. Buona notte, kids.

rainbow during tonight's sunset

adje's house.

Hope on the Horizon

Just as we were about to despair, hitting "Send" on a desperate last attempt to convince a new host to take us (the same moment as our current host came into the bar to fetch us), The Rake sent a prayer out.  The phone rang as we approached the driveway and Elisabeth answered it. It was an invitation to come work in Umbria, from the 62-year-old dutch woman to whom we had just sent our last prayer/ email. She said "when you get the feeling that 'these people are alright,' i say you have to act! And i just had two people cancel on me this afternoon." She has a special project in mind for Elisabeth because she saw she was a carpenter. Yes she has all the tools needed for it because she used to be a carpenter! We'll be traveling there on tuesday.

Anyway our hopes and spirits are back up, and we thank you for your good wishes if you had any.  

bar where we get wifi every few days - we will be forever in its debt!

Olive Harvest (or: Trouble in Tuscany)

So.  We rearranged our trip, cancelling the Schwarzwald, because of Cynthia's obsession with the Olive Harvest.  Maurizio's invitation to assist them on their farm "between  Grosetto and Scansano, on a hillside overlooking the sea," sounded just fine, and the news that the olive harvest had come early this year sent us scrambling to make it in time.  Readers saw our account of our great luck travelling to Tuscany.

Our farm

Upon arriving we unpacked in our nice hotel-like room in the Agriturismo accommodation managed by the middle-aged (He is 55, she 67) couple Maurizio and Barbara.  We were immediately a bit disappointed by the fact that instead of 80 sheep, they now had only 20.  They sold them because there are so many wolves around (due to a highly successful reintroduction of them to the region) that the sheep have to be kept inside.  We then heard a litany of  woes related to seeming bad luck that have them struggling to decide on a direction to go with their business. We also learned that there was usually no internet here, for various reasons, and that we would have to wait for the occasional trip to town (maybe weekly) for wifi.  

We then accompanied them to a very charming choir practice, directed by a gifted and quintessentially Italian conductor named Rosella. The people were all very friendly and jolly and we thought this a good beginning.

But later at dinner we found out that they are vegetarians, and furthermore that Maurizio is allergic to eggs and tomatoes.  A little disheartening, but we still had plenty of hope. (We would soon become familiar with the regimen of dense, hard whole grain bread with no salt, raw carrots at every meal, various grains and legumes and other components of dogmatic dietary regimens randomly employed ineffectually...NOT the fantasy Tuscan culinary experience, needless to say).  

Maurizio and Barbara

The first day on the job we really felt awkward.  Picking olives was easy, fun, aesthetically great. But compared to our earlier hosts, these absolutely fluent-in-English people (native Italians who had lived for years in England) were inscrutable and difficult to please.  It didn't seem we could follow their instructions correctly no matter how we tried.  They often seemed uneasy or even suspicious - on our third morning they accused Cynthia of having poisoned them the previous night with her borscht, because it contained vinegar.  Maurizio, although he had complimented it the night before, believed that his skin had exuded vinegar all night, and that C had done this knowing it was wrong, etc., and she would not be allowed to cook for them ever again....

OK then!

This all took a little while to get used to, especially the isolation.  We like meeting people but there is no one to meet.  We also depend so much on the internet.  To say the least. but now a week into it, we've come to appreciate the beautiful scenery and the lack of diversions, so that we have finished a few books and had lots of discussions about the effect of adversity on character!  Maurizio talks all day, in a deep, rather soothing voice, about the problems he has with government regulations, about auric healing, etheric energy, and other aspects of their Rudolph Steiner studies (they aspire to become auric healers), about history and olives, sheep, wolves and wild boar, and he has become more friendly. We went out with the choir one evening and the whole restaurant ended up singing. It seemed so Italian! We spent a day in Scansano (our day off, we had to hitch-hike in the rain 15 km) and ate in a restaurant. We found some porcini, and we have seen the olives we picked brought to the old fashioned mill and turned into olive oil which we have been able to use on our - buckwheat groats??? Well, you can't win'em all...

                                                                           

Yay, Italian food at a restaurant.

And yes, we are still desperately hoping to find another "situation" soon, but it's kind of hard without internet. Send luck.

Ciao