Molly and I arrived at our Spain farm a little over a week ago.  After a lot of train-riding through BEAUTIFUL south France and a lovely day in Figueres, Spain (where we saw the truly-batshit and truly worth-the-11-Euro Salvador Dali museum), we arrived at Ripoll, Spain (12 kilometers from our farm) with high hopes of practicing Spanish and hanging out with dairy cows.

The Spain farm really is situated in as pretty a place as we could hope for: rows and rows of the Pyrenees, covered in forest.  My morning runs were cool and misty and breathtakingly gorgeous.  Plus the weather was the best of all our farms yet…the days were pleasantly warm but not scorching, and the evenings were cool (not the sweatfests that we had in Greece).  Furthermore, the farm had a very down-home farmy feel, with chickens and ducks running freely about.

The work also was my favorite yet.  We woke up around 8 to chain in and milk the 29 dairy cows.  Then there was breakfast and roughly one-and-a-half hours of shoveling cow shit…which actually wasn’t as bad as it sounds.  The truly frustrating thing about the shit-shoveling was that it was apparently against our host (Josep’s) religion or cultural heritage to have flat surfaces, which meant lots of careful wiggling of the shovel into little nooks and crannies in the cracked concrete and cobblestones.  Then we would have a day of varied work, usually involving hay-baling (with maybe a break thrown in, and lunch around 2 or 3).

Nighttime meant milking again…ostensibly it started around 8, though cows are the laziest animals on earth, and as we quickly learned, a heifer doesn’t have to move if it doesn’t want to.   Thus, what with waiting, chaining them in, and feeding, milking usually really started around 9 and ended around 10:30…meaning that supper happened around 10:30 or 11:00 at night, though late-supper-eating seems to be the Spanish way.

To be honest, I really liked working with the cows.  I mean, despite the heavy shit output (if you have never worked with dairy cattle, you have NO IDEA, friend) (though if you are reading this, you are potentially from home, in which case you might have a very good idea, and if so, don’t judge me.  I just can’t believe the amount of poop a cow can produce.).  Dairy cattle are generally docile and well-behaved (well, these were, anyway), and they WANT very badly to be fed and milked, so they’re pretty cooperative.  Plus they generally don’t move too quickly and are easy to herd.  I say “generally” here because one particularly wily one got away from me one day while I was herding them all up to the pasture.  I started to panic at first — holy shit, how did I LOSE a freaking HEIFER?  — but this proved to be the most fun I had working this summer…running through the forest holding a large cow-herding stick (according to Josep and co., it helped with herding, though I never quite saw much difference in effectiveness between waving a stick and yelling and waving my arms and yelling) and stalking the evasive holstein, which I eventually apprehended and took into the protective custody of the electric fence.  ROCK!

The people at our farm were a colorful bunch…there was Josep, the head of the whole operation; Alex, our co-WWOOFer, an 18-year-old kid from Paris; and Josep’s fam, to whom we were never formally introduced, though we did interact with them a lot: Josep’s mom, his dad, and his aunt (who we ended up calling “Grandma,” “Grandpa,” and “Auntie,” respectively) (not to their faces). Josep spoke English, Catalan, and Spanish, so we could somewhat communicate, and Alex also spoke both Spanish and English (along with Italian and French and German, apparently) (giving me a major nerdy case of education-envy).  Grandma, Grandpa, and Auntie, however, only spoke Catalan and Spanish.

We didn’t get quite as much Spanish practice as we had hoped, because Catalan was the language spoken around the house.  Meals usually involved silence from the WWOOFers as Josep and the fam jabbered in Catalan.  Catalan, as we have learned, is the major language of our area (Catalonia, in NE Spain), so everyone here speaks both it and Spanish.  But everyone seems to prefer Catalan.  Catalonia has a lot of regional pride; there is a crapload of “Independence for Catalonia!” graffiti around Ripoll, and lots of bumper stickers broadcasting the same general sentiment.  It’s sort of analogous to the relationship between Quebec and Canada, from what I gather.

Anyhow.  The fam.

Grandma was a sweet old woman who very patiently spoke Spanish with us, even if we were a little slow on the uptake sometimes.  Essentially, she and I talked about the weather roughly four times a day, though she had all sorts of questions when she discovered that I liked to run (“You like to run?  REALLY?”).  She had a very elaborate oxygen-tube set-up so that she could go upstairs and downstairs and into the upper cow stable while still connected. Fortunately for her, the house was rather “rustic” (meaning gaps between the upstairs floorboards that left plenty of room for threading tubing through).

Grandpa was a sitcom character.  He was the “rapidly going senile” old man caricature you see on TV all the time, and at the risk of sounding insensitive, he was rather entertaining.  He drank wine for every meal, INCLUDING breakfast.  He sat for hours on end in the entryway and talked to the cats and ducks and chickens in this squeaky high voice.  He one day beat the living bejeezus out of a frog with his cane, muttering the whole time (after which the frog happily — and amazingly — hopped away).

Auntie was a sour, hunched-over old girl who didn’t seem to quiiite speak Spanish, or at least nothing we understood…more of a Spanish-Catalan muddle.  Either way, she shuffled about, mainly mumbling and seeming slightly inconvenienced at our presence.

All three were quite spry for elders, though…they all came out and herded the cows into place at every milking time, and they were very liberal with using the word “mierda” (“shit”) when the cows pooped.  We appreciated this.

Speaking of things we appreciated, with a lack of TV and internet (explaining the lack of blog-posts recently), we had to find new entertainment.  We found it in our new spectator sport: rooting for (or against) animal-mating.  No, we’re not pervy…just going apeshit, as we noted in our Italy posts.  We usually had nothing to do in that “waiting for cows for evening milking” period, so we would sit above the pasture yelling things like,

“Toro!  Yes!  She wants you!”

“Girl!  Run away!  You’re too good for him!”

“Yes!  No!  Wait…not her…HER!  Dammit!  No!  Turn around!”

“Listen, heifer…HE has to jump onto YOU.” (Some of the cows didn’t seem to “get” how it worked.)

Furthermore, one of life’s great mysteries was answered for us one day when I saw the ducks mating.  I am glad no one walked by and saw me being wholly enthralled.  I’m not gross, I swear.  I just remember a time in high school when Molly was off at Writing Camp and sent around an e-mail asking, “No, seriously…HOW DO BIRDS MATE?  Has anyone actually seen one do it?”  And no one in our circle of friends really knew.  I mean…I dunno…it just seems like an odd and mechanically complicated procedure.

As I found out, yes and yes.

Think of me what you will from this.

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So.  A few holes I have left in this post:

  1. I have yet to describe Josep in much detail.
  2. Same goes for Alex.
  3. This entire post is in the past tense.

Those questions are easily answered:

  1. Describing the complicated, multifaceted enigma of Josep requires lots of space
  2. Same goes for Alex
  3. We left early because…well, as we put it to each other on a daily basis, “Dude, God has abandoned us.”

All I’m saying is this: stay tuned for Molly’s next post, as well as “The Spain Farm: Part 2.”  Doozies all around.