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.