So here’s something awesome: http://www.onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2222.  Yup.  We’re famous now.  Everyone, go read it and up the hit-count of onthecommons.org, a website run by some really quite nice people with all sorts of wonderful ideas and projects.  Also, they publish my writing.

Alright, everyone.  One month has passed since the end of the adventure of a lifetime…or “quarterlife crisis extravaganza,” as one might also call it.  And so, in this one-month anniversary edition* of “Mad Farming Skillz,” and probably the last post ever, unless Molly gets off her ass and puts something final-looking and reflective up here, I give you an update on the lives of key players in our summer activities.  Or, as it is commonly known…

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

DANIELLE: Danielle is in Washington, DC, pursuing a master’s degree in global communications at the Elliott School of International Affairs (GWU).  She is a little nervous, as one might expect, but generally positive-feeling about the endeavor.  She is also not at all intimidated by her fellow students who have all apparently had internships SINCE THEY WERE SIX YEARS OLD with such luminaries as Golda Meir and Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.  And then they all wrote policy papers that once and for all solved the problem of world peace and harmony.  Policy papers that, as a fringe benefit, also rid the world of Crocs and obesity.  My fellow classmates did this all in their sleep.  And then they were awarded Congressional Medals of Honor for having once again saved the world and with such style and panache.  And then said classmates called up their diplomat parents with the good news and cheerfully tossed their textbooks (which they’ve all already read) (unless they are the AUTHORS) into the air in a carefree fashion.

<uncomfortable, self-doubting fidgeting>

DANIELLE IS NOT INTIMIDATED!  BRING IT, I SAY!  <collapses in sobs>

<sniffle> Regarding Europe: Danielle had a great time and will miss the farms.  She has missed Molly as well.  She particularly misses Molly’s warm hugs, her kindness, her comforting scent, touching her face at night…

<awkward pause>

MOLLY: Molly is in Buffalo Center, Iowa, having just returned from a tour of Italy with our good friend Shanna.  She passes her days playing Chutes and Ladders with herself, cheating and then tattling to her mom, Pam.  She misses walking at a maddeningly slow pace while Danielle has aneurisms.

ANIKA: Anika’s children magically matured 10 years each overnight, and are the best farmhands in Europe.  They cook, they clean, they water the garden for their mother and lead 20 horse tours a day, as horse tours have recently seen a major boost in interest.  Anika has gained 30 pounds and eats bon-bons while watching daytime television and letting the water run ALL DAY because she can, because — oh yes — they also now have ALL THE ELECTRICITY AND RUNNING WATER A PERSON COULD EVER WANT.  Godspeed, Anika!!!

NIKOS: Due to an Ouzo-soaked evening on his fishing boat and a subsequent series of escalating “I am a Greek man!” assertions, Nikos decided he could beat an orca in a fistfight.  He has not been heard from in quite some time now.

CATERINA: Despite the aforementioned boost in maturity, she is still covered in cat poop.

SOFIA: Still loves Barbies.

YANNI: Religious conversion.  No longer devil-child.  Now an altar-boy.

HALLIE: Hallie is back at college, where she is happily pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in AWESOME.

(Yup.  That’s the best I could do.  Hallie, I hope you still like me anyway.)

ALLIE: Allie quit school to build rickety wheelchair-accessible ramps in the middle of Italian hayfields.  She is making a fortune.

PAOLA: About a month ago, Paola took some Quaaludes and then lay down for a nap.  She’s still sleeping.  Good for you, Paola.

ROBERTO: Roberto is teaching abstinence-only sex ed. to Sinbad.

PIETRO AND MARTA: Smoking up, watching “The Big Lebowski,” not getting any of the jokes or even dialogue, giggling anyway.

THE RABBITS: Upon dwindling to a population of two, the rabbits staged a miraculous comeback due to some truly amazing feats of reproductivity.  They are now fantastically inbred and are mostly blind in their right eyes.  Consequently, they hop/spin in circles all day long.  Except for when they’re vomiting from dizziness, of course.

FRENCHY: Shortly after Molly and Danielle’s departure from the Spanish farm, Frenchy was attacked and gnawed to death by one of the feistier heifers.  He is currently being chewed as cud, and is arguably serving more of a purpose in life now than he was a little over a month ago.

JOSEP: Dead.  Bovine syphilis.  Who knew?

JOSEP’S COWS: Content.

———————————————-

OK, so this is the end.  Really.  I’m sorry the blogging is over, because it was half the fun of the whole trip, but as the French say, “C’est la baguette joie de vivre oh-hoh-hoh.”  Thanks for reading all these months.

Signing off for good,

Danielle

———————————————–

*OK, listen up, word-snobs.  I know there is no such thing as a “one-month anniversary,” but you can just go straight to hell.  BOOYAH.

I can’t speak for Molly, but my end-of- and post-Barcelona time has found me saddled with decidedly bad luck.  Aer Lingus lost my backpack, for example.  Which I handled like a pro, thinking, “Hell!  I’m almost home!  Meh!  These things just happen!”  True enough.  And anyway, the nice Irish-accented Aer Lingus lady told me they’d FedEx it and I’d have it in 1-2 days.  “Sorry, these things just happen sometimes,” she said.  “Yes!  These things happen!” I cheerfully agreed, happy to just be away from French teenagers.  But you know what DOESN’T just happen?  Your bag of pretty souvenir scarves you bought for grandma and mom and your sisters DISAPPEARING from your backpack so that when you finally get it from the FedEx man you throw a HUGE fit and your father for the first time learns about the true versatility of the f-word, which as we both discovered, can be used as a noun, adjective, adverb, interjection, gerund, and even an entire subordinate clause.  So we did learn something from this whole debacle.

The other big happening of the week: while eating breakfast in our hostel one morning, we got up to leave, only to realize that my messenger bag was GONE.  We’re still not sure how this happened…we were sitting there, we were awake, surrounded by people, Molly’s usual hangover had dispersed unusually early…but there it was.  Robbery.  After two months of watching our shit like a couple of nervous rural Midwesterners abroad.  So we went to the police station and filled out the requisite forms and so on, and then Molly left me alone in the hostel room so that I could have privacy for a small, pillow-throwing, cussing-filled temper tantrum.

OK, so now that I think about it, that was really our sole “bad luck” per se in Barcelona…unless you count Molly’s bad luck in finding a pair of truly irresistible yet relatively expensive pair of boots that caused her to uncontrollably throw her credit cards at the sales clerk.  Despite a few face slaps, “Pull yourself together, woman!” moments, acknowledgements of lack of suitcase space, and reminders of the Euro exchange rate, the forces of commerce prevailed, and Molly walked away bleary and blissful, teetering in her impractical yet gorgeous slouchy grey suede boots with impractical yet stylish heels, smoking a post-spending cigarette and glorifying in the fact that this purchase would necessitate Danielle writing a 50-comma sentence on the blog. 

Bad luck all around, I say.

Anyhow, due to my loss of bag, debit card, and a bit of cash, it was decided that (a) I needed a new bag, preferably a cute, inexpensive, bright-yellow shiny vinyl one that nicely balances professionalism with whimsy, which lo and behold I FOUND, thankyouverymuch (I suddenly realize that this blog just went way Sex and the City…stopping NOW)…and (b) it was time to stop doing tourist things (i.e. museums, cathedrals, and things that in general cost money and also, incidentally, tend to bore the pants off of Danielle, who by now was fragile and faithless in humanity…not to mention that require us to wander at Molly’s maddening gawking-tourist walking pace) (sorry, Molly) and start doing free, relaxing things.

Hence, numerous visits to the beach.

The normal laws of the universe do not apply on Barcelona beaches.  For one, every woman — regardless of age, attractiveness, build, and <cough> the pull of gravity — is totally comfortable wandering around without a swimsuit top. 

Not horribly shocking, perhaps, but the men didn’t seem to notice or care.  Woman wandering topless down La Rambla?  Riots ensue.  Woman’s towel slips in the hostel bathroom?  Endless jabbering, whispering, pointing for days.  HUNDREDS of breasts, just out there swaying in the breeze, humming contentedly to themselves as they soak up the sun?

Nothing.

But upon closer inspection, the men usually had better things to do than gawk.  For example, roughly half the men at the beaches were vendors of some sort, wandering about screaming, “Coca Light?  Coca?  Coca Light?  Coca?  Cerveza?  Coca?” and getting in the way of your sun rays.  Some also sold pieces of coconut.  These vendors inexplicably wandered around yelling, “Da-doo-da-doo-da-doo-DA-DOO-DA-DOO!”  (And though I haven’t looked it up, I don’t think “da-doo” is the Spanish word for “coconut.”)

The other half of the male beach-goers were British 18-to-20-year-old men on what Molly called “The 2008 Losing Your Virginity Tour of Europe.”  These young men spent most of their time talking in Cockney accents about what a ”smashing” and “brilliant” night they had last night with “that bloomin’ bloody blinkin’ big-titted girl from the club.”  “Oh, really, Cecil?  THAT strumpet?  How simply delightful!”  “Indeed.  Oh, drat, there is sand in my marmalade.”  “Oh, your bloody crumpet is ruined!”  “Quite!”  In between gloating over girls, they flagged down the vendors and quietly engaged in transactions that involved rolls of Euros, large amounts of marijuana, and very little Coca Light.

Consequence-free nudity and drugs.  God bless you, Barcelona.

Incidentally, this same college-age Brit male crowd made up a striking proportion of our hostelmate population as well.  And it was at the hostels that Molly and I really started to feel our age.  We were the old girls lurking in the courtyard, sipping a beer (singular) while reading New Yorkers and Newsweeks sent to us by our families, who then snuggled in at 10:30, talking about how tired our feet were from the EXHAUSTING walk to all those museums and cathedrals.  Everyone else in the hostel rolled in around 4:00 AM, each one on their 15th beer of the night, scantily clad, awash in sequins and lycra and eye makeup (fairly often regardless of gender, God bless ‘em), usually with several MORE 18-to-20-year-old British men in tow.

Of course, I exaggerate, because 4:00 AM is when Barcelonans call the sitter and put the kids to bed.  My morning runs (around 6:00 AM) were both agility and endurance exercises, as I was forced to nimbly dodge the packs of stumbling-drunk fools on La Rambla.  It was rather nice, actually, not being the only person out and about early in the morning (running down dark unfamiliar urban streets alone = panic attack), though I occasionally attracted douche-baggy packs of drunk clubber men in shiny silk shirts who thought it would be fun to run with me.  Fortunately, beer is kind of hard on the ol’ motor skills, and with enough evasiveness and strategic darting, I was able to run several of them into lampposts to get them off my tail. 

Anyhow.  I am now back in Iowa, where it is warm and sunny and flat.  I have finally had the time to pause and reflect upon my adventure, and I have come to one chief insight: Europeans have no effing clue how to make a hay bale.  Between Greece’s wire-bound monsters, Italy’s wet and moldy beasts, and Spain’s positively soaking wet, 5-ton bastards, I learned to appreciate how Iowans do this until-now-seemingly-simple task.  I realized this the other day, as I unloaded several racks of hay bales for my dad and contentedly juggled the nice, dry, under-75-pound, rectangular bales before casually tossing them off the rack.

And I’m getting PAID for it.

God bless America.  It’s good to be back.

————————————————–

Alright, this blog is about tapped out.  But stay tuned for <sniffle> THE FINAL POST.  Oh man.  I think I need to lie down.

There are times when life deals you a winning hand — you are young, smart, energetic, charming, reasonably hygienic and literate, etc., and you also have saved up enough to go to Europe for the summer to farm.

Right.  So things can be good.  You have a royal flush, you are kicking ass and taking names, you are peering out from behind your unstylish reflective professional-poker-style sunglasses and sizing up your truly unworthy opponents and counting up just how many gallon-sized margaritas and hot dates with gorgeous men in fast cars you can buy with your winnings.

But then life hands you a 2, a 4, a 6, a 9, and the deck’s instruction card.  With a pile of poop on top of it.  And if you’re like me, you grit your teeth and let your pride just RAGE, sister, high stress levels and general mental and emotional well-being be damned, as you let the betting soar higher and higher until you have given up one and a half kidneys and your mother and your last piece of chewing gum, just because you refuse to fold already.  No, you are in this for the long haul because you saw “Rudy” and “Hoosiers” and you know that QUITTING IS FOR LOSERS!  LOSERS!  QUITTING IS UNAMERICAN AND YOU SHOULD DO EVERYTHING YOU EVER TRY FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT AT ALL AND IT GIVES YOU STRESS ULCERS!  HELL, YOU SHOULD DO THE ENTIRE FARM WITH ONE LEG TIED BEHIND YOUR BACK AND WHILE INFECTED WITH CHRONIC S.A.R.S., SURVIVING ON ONLY WOLVERINES AND WILD BOARS YOU KILL IN THE FOREST WITH A STICK YOU WHITTLED DOWN TO A POINT WITH A LITTLE RED PLASTIC MCDONALD’S KNIFE AND HOLY CRAP WHY AM I YELLING?

<pause while Dani regains her shit>

Anyhow.  Just when you are staring at your cards and wondering if it’s time to just end it all with a nicely sharpened poker chip, there is that voice of reason (and on this trip, that voice usually belongs to Molly) that says, “Um, perhaps it’s time to leave???”  At which point you slap your hand down, toss back your whiskey and slap the lounge singer on the back and high five all the loose women watching your game and yell, “Hot diggity!  I’m going to effing Barcelona!  Later, suckers!”

Work ethics can be good and all, but quitting can be DIVINE. Schedules and budgets and plans be damned.

So.  To the point: we left Spain, as we have noted.  And now, the story of all that.

Alarm bells started ringing at the Spain farm when the first phrases out of Josep’s (the host’s) mouth were:

“Whenever you want to leave, you can.”
“It is not that clean; we live with the cows.”
“Do you think you can survive for three weeks here?”

But whatever.  We had been working really hard for a month and a half at that point and were still going strong.  “Survive”?  Hell!  We were BADASSES.

But then the alarm bells grew louder when we noted that, when Josep talked, he only addressed our chests or thighs.  Nice.  (I swear I am not exaggerating here.  On about our third day there, I turned to Molly and said, “You know, I mean, I really don’t want to accuse him of something nasty, but…”  “YES HE DOES.  HE MOST CERTAINLY STARES AT MY CHEST.  YOU TOO?” said Molly.)  EVERY DAMN TIME HE TALKED TO US.  HOLY GOD.  IT WAS REALLY DIRTY-FEELING.  AGH!  AAAAAGH!  AAAAAAAGH! <hyperventilates>  So OK, we’re badasses with pipes and skills and all, but come on.  We have dignity, too.

The alarm exploded when (a) Danielle was having homicidal urges towards Alex, our fellow WWOOFer, an 18-year-old snotty twig of a French boy who we fittingly dubbed “Frenchy” and (b) Molly was having homicidal urges toward whoever invented hay bales.

So here’s the deal with Frenchy: he didn’t want girls in his clubhouse.  Neither did Josep, actually.  We were actually excited to meet Frenchy when we got there…to have a sort of little brother or comrade in arms or whathaveyou.  We were our sweet little Midwestern selves…but to no avail.  City boy Frenchy had been there for two weeks before us, meaning that (despite the fact that we both could have dropped him like fourth-period Home-Ec.) he considered himself our de facto boss.  Furthermore, during his two weeks he had formed an unlikely yet strong bond with Josep.  I say “unlikely” because Frenchy was a rich kid from Paris with a father who was some sort of petroleum mogul…whereas Josep was an ape, except with slightly better motor skills (I’ll cover this later).

So they had this weird “father-son” thing going, where Frenchy would do his little weenie run after Josep EVERYWHERE JOSEP WENT, even when it wasn’t technically “work time.”  Now, this was all merely irritating and actually occasionally funny, and everything would have been fine, except Josep would only give the directions for our jobs in VERY hurried Spanish to Frenchy, who would understand but NOT TELL US unless we WRESTLED HIM TO THE GROUND, TOOK HIS LUNCH MONEY AND BEAT IT OUT OF HIM WITH A CATTLE PROD.  And then when we didn’t go help them, I felt all guilty and awful, but what the hell could I do?  So there goes Josep in a tractor, there goes Alex, skipping off into the distance, and there we are, running and yelling after them in broken Spanish, “HEY!!!  WHERE YA GOIN’?”  After a few days, Frenchy even started sneaking off to do the work without telling us what it was, so that we couldn’t ask, and then we would be the bad guys for not doing it.  I am not making this up.

Problems mounted.  One day I heard Josep and Frenchy talking about us (derogatorily, of course) in Spanish, and though I didn’t catch it all, I did definitely catch that they referred to Molly only as “la morena” (the brunette).  And it occurred to me that they never actually addressed us directly either.  After a bit of discussion and a day or two of observation, we became pretty sure that they didn’t know our names.

Frenchy started following me around during shit-scooping time, re-scraping the concrete after I finished it, just to be a little assface and show me that CLEARLY I wasn’t cleaning the shit well enough, that CLEARLY it needed to be BLEACHED AND SANDED AND BUFFED SO THAT IT WOULD BE SANITARY FOR THAT NIGHT, WHEN THE COWS WOULD SHIT ON IT AGAIN.  Furthermore, he complained about our supposed lack of cleaning skills to Josep, IN FRONT OF US.  Then they would have a hearty laugh.  Little frenchy tattletale bastard.

So one day I was lifting a particularly heavy hay bale up to Molly (a task that was difficult for Frenchy, the little turd), and Frenchy bodily brushed me aside and insisted on doing it.  “No, no, I will do,” he says, shoving his pointy and weenie little elbow in my face.  At which point I, in immature and petulant retaliation, decided I had had enough and let my bad “BOYS SUCK!” G.I. Jane side come out and I wanted to do it myself so I sort of maybe body-checked him aside.  Like, hard.  Oops.

Not coincidentally, this was also the moment that Frenchy hit puberty.

Of course, we tried to enjoy ourselves.  For example, in the grand tradition of the hoo-la game, we had a new game in Spain.  Mainly it involved going on long, high-pitched rants about the joys of being French.  To wit:

“Ooh!  Look at me!  I’m French!  I’m from France!  Lalala!  I like baguettes and brie and bordeaux!  Lalala!  Ooh!  Look at me!  My language sounds funny and I’m SOOOOO proud of it!  I like my political leaders to have very visible private lives!  Ooh!  Lalala!  Look at me!  I’m anti-Semitic!  And I hate immigration!  And my military is worthless!  Ooh!”

It wasn’t that REWARDING of a game or anything…

Anyhow.  Frenchy’s idol for the month of July had been Josep.  I earlier described Josep as an “ape,” but upon further discussion, we have decided that he reminded us more of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies; for one thing, Josep was a small, wiry fellow…and for another…well, do you remember that scene in LotR when Gollum captures a fish, beats it against a rock, then slobberingly chomps into it?  Well, that really is how Josep ate, and I’m not exaggerating here (OK, his food was usually dead when he got it, but bear with me).  Meals were profoundly uncomfortable because food would FLY when this man ate.  He did not take food; he snatched.  No, he SNATCHED.  All caps.  He STABBED.  He would take a piece of bread, grip it in his slimy little hands, tear it in two, and leave one now-appetizingly-smushed half in the basket for the rest of us to fight over (Frenchy usually snuck this piece off to his bedroom and slept with it, sighing dreamily all the while).  Josep would even put his face down to his plate to slurp up the dregs of the dressing/sauce/etc. when his food was gone.  I am still not making this up.

Josep also liked to just talk down to us…for example, he thought it was very funny that we wore work gloves; this made us “city girls.”  And furthermore, no matter what we were doing or how hard we were doing it, he would leer knowingly (in the direction of our breasts, of course) and say, “You are tired?  You are so tired now?”

I note here that this sort of thing NEVER happened over in the boys’ clubhouse.

OK, even typing this is giving me major stress issues.  Suffice it to say that one day — as Frenchy re-cleaned for AN HOUR after we had finished shit-scooping and then snuck away to do whatever — I was close to tears and bravely soldiering on as Molly and I unloaded a trailer of firewood.  Molly, sensing my discomfort and having nearly lost her shit herself that morning when she dropped a peanut M&M on the floor, thus rendering it likely-contaminated-with-cow-feces, said, “Um, we can go early, you know…”

Fortunately, Molly never saw “Rudy.”

So now we are in Barcelona and having the best time ever.  Sangria and paella for everyone!  Yes!  And those seemingly superfluous dresses we packed?  Aw, yeah.  We look good.

——————–

Anyhow.  The point here is this:

<enter sweeping chorus of violins>

It’s the people that make WWOOFing worth it.  It’s not the hefty pay, the oodles of easy men at our doorsteps, the glamour, or the workload.  It’s the people.

<chorus swells>

Sure, making horse fences and cutting lavender and shoveling cow shit are all lots of fun, but it’s your companions — your happy, tight-knit, temporary family of hosts (Anika still ROCKS), host family members, and co-WWOOFers that truly make it a memorable experience.  You can shovel shit anywhere, after all (well, I mean, maybe not ANYwhere…).

<add timpani and Mormon Tabernacle Choir>

But only friendly, flexible, colorful, open cohorts will allow you to one day look down from your old, creaky rocking chair and past your old, creaky knees to the expectant and rosy faces of your grandchildren and say with true, wistful nostalgia:

“Our farm in Spain was populated by dickheads.”

And you, my friend, will sincerely mean it.

Check it out…a new page of Spain pics! (Links are both to the right and way up at the top.)

NEW!: pics from Italy and the days between Italy and Spain…as well as a sterling post by Molly on cow feces (see below).

Soon to come: pics from our abruptly terminated tenure at the Spain farm.

And then: hopefully a few reflective and calmly contemplative posts in which we really ”take stock” of how we have grown and learned in the past couple of months.  With any luck, we will avoid words like ”douchebag” and phrases like ”Molly needs to shower more often,” because we are reflective and contemplative like that.

It is my understanding that many of our readers might not know the mechanics of stable cleaning. For general knowledge purposes I will now present the steps required to make your or your neighbors’ stable a clean and welcome refuge for your giant domestic beasts of all shapes and sizes.

STEP 1: Don full body armor and rubber boots. If your boots have holes in them (like Danielle’s did), put plastic bags in them first. And whatever your boss says, put those gloves on.

STEP 2: Grab shovel. Clutch it.

STEP 3: Begin cleaning around very large animals in a dark, enclosed area.

STEP 4: Notice how the cow bells ring louder and louder, increasing their violent speed, the sound bouncing back and forth and growing and multiplying and turning shrill and pulsing in your ears, drowning out every other sound on earth. Dizziness. Disorientation. The dark room starts to blur and spin. The bells. The bells. THE BELLS!

Then a French teenager will make a disapproving noise in an area you have just cleaned, and you will be brought back from the black, noisy abyss.

STEP 5: Help Grandma or similar octogenarian motivate cows to go back to the pasture. Note: Grandma gets a big stick and a full arsenal of surly Catalan to do this. You flail arms and maybe offer grumbling suggestions. “Maybe it is comfy to sit in your own filth, Bessy, but I have to clean there now, please.”

STEP 6: Once cows stand up and start moving home, they all will suddenly poo in unison. They like to do it on the cobblestones while walking at a medium pace. The splattering sound seems to make them happy, and walking ensures more splatter. Some of the cows seem to look at you first, their big watery eyes filled with mischievous glee, before they turn away and leave a big present behind them.

STEP 7: Start the bulk of the scooping here. Hint: It is helpful to use your boot to push stubborn remains on to your shovel.

STEP 8: After scooping comes scraping. Tighten your death grip on the shovel and rake the business end over the trouble spots until fairly clean. An aside: The following is a brief shout out to any cow, ever, in the entire world and whole history of time, that has ever, in his or her life, managed to defecate on a flat surface. I love you, neat and obliging cows, wherever you are. May you have long happy lives of good weather and green grass and freedom from old ladies with sticks.

STEP 9: Continue scooping until wheelbarrow is full to brim.

STEP 10: Dump into tractor.

Repeat steps 9 and 10 many, many times.

STEP 11: Ask French teenager if you are finished. No matter what he answers, punch him in the face in response.

STEP 12: Dance the flamenco on the new clean cobblestones.

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.

—————————————-

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.

Go here and learn all you will ever need to know about the WWOOFing lifestyle.

WWOOFing seems to bring out the sulky teenager in any otherwise self-possessed and rather charming 20-something.  We’ve seen it in our co-WWOOFers, and we saw it in each other as well during the last couple of weeks at Ca’ del Buco.  There is legitimate reason for this metamorphosis — a WWOOFer is essentially in the position of a 15-year-old.

Living under someone else’s roof
+ eating someone else’s food

+ someone else doing your laundry (our hosts have thus far insisted on doing it themselves…)

+ the fact that a WWOOFer is usually WWOOFing to travel on the cheap (and thus probably doesn’t have the funds to leave early and live at a hostel for a few weeks)

+ limited transportation options

= regression in maturity level

So the last few weeks could find us rolling our eyes when “Mom” and “Dad” yelled for us or gave us tasks.  We cussed even more than usual.  We consumed enough extra food and wine to sufficiently consider ourselves “inconveniences,” which is sort of how we were treated anyhow (for example, they forgot to feed us on several occasions) (and locked us out of the house at the same time) (thus cutting us off from all food aside from what we could scrounge from the garden) (and the rabbit pens…YUM!).

(I am not joking.  They really neglected to feed us.  A few times.  If you know me, this puts a person on my permanent shit list.)

Anyhow.  We are officially Italian 18-year-olds: out of the house and ready to do as we please.  I am happy as all get out.  Ecstatic, overjoyed, dancing happily down that highway, all the way to Torino, even while wearing my 200-pound backpack.

Yes, for the first few days ol’ whats-his-face was a charming facsimile of an Iowa farmer type, and the food was good and plentiful, we ate as a big happy family, and Allie was around, and I went to bed each night with a delightful “good kind of hurt” ache.

That was the first few days.  I now stand corrected.

Fortunately, one can always put on some rose-colored glasses.  And so I give you:

THE GOOD THINGS ABOUT OUR ITALIAN WWOOFING EXPERIENCE

1) Buffness that is only brought on by over 12 hours a day of manual labor.  Seriously, have you ever made lavender sachets for hours?  We have, and our hands are effing SEXY.  Major wrist definition.  Aw, yeah.

2) Varied work. One minute could find me putting labels on bottles of lavender oil (please, someone, tell me a purpose for this crap), the next picking 50 pounds of plums (and operating at a 1:3 eat-to-pick ratio), the next in my sports bra and jeans in the 95-degree heat, swinging a pickax into the dense Italian clay-packed soil as I attempted to make a nice deep grave to accommodate several bunny corpses.  Surprisingly enough (or maybe not), I enjoyed the grave-digging most.  To be perfectly, morbidly honest, I lately found myself secretly hoping that more bunnies would die, so I could be put on graveyard duty instead of whatever other tasks there were.

Speaking of varied labor, I also ended up hanging out with the children at Paola’s farmy day camp thing.  And if you know me and Molly, you know that she is generally the kind, personable, good-with-kids one in this operation.  I, on the other hand, am the big, sarcastic, cynical one with a potty-mouth that only a drunken sailor could love.  So one day I am in the middle of a three-hour raking-up-weed-whacker-droppings-for-goat-feeding-purposes session, singing dirty Tenacious D and rugby drinking songs to pass the time.  And of course, because she hears me singing, Paola comes up to me and says, “Ooh!  Next week is music week at our day camp!  You should help with the activities!”

In Paola-speak, this is not a suggestion.  It means, “Help me with the children or you are going to have to gnaw on weeds and goat haunches for the rest of this trip.”

If only she knew better English.  If only she knew that half my songs were about beer and rugby and the others were full of creative sexual euphemisms.

<sigh>

So I ended up playing duck-duck-goose — which I realize has nothing to do with music, but no one seemed to care — with the kids when Paola felt tired of hanging out with them.  Fortunately, though the kids knew little English, they did somehow know “GAME OVER!”  And when they finally screamed it, I said, “OK.  Do whatever!” and happily made a dismissive gesture.  Then I snuck off and downed some limoncello.  The day got much better from there, probably for both the kids and for me.

In short, it was hard to be bored.  Exploited, yes.  Bored, no.

3) The accomodations. Our room was in the agriturismo part of the compound, so it was clean, with a lovely shower and nice toilet and multiple pillows and towels and sheets we could change whenever we saw fit.  Granted, we were never granted express permission for this, but we were also never prohibited.  So there.

4) The “Camp English 10″ Factor. (This will only make sense to NIHS alums.)  Eventually we took to calling our farm “Camp Fascist,” and then the more-fitting “Camp English 10.”  Much like the North Iowa High School incarnation of English 10 when we were there, WWOOFing at Ca’ del Buco taught us that sometimes people have unreasonable, arbitrary rules and are just unpleasant for no particular reason.  It seems that at every meal we and the fam ate together, we would have some variation on the following conversation:

“Hey!  Don’t use that ________ (sugar/milk/butter/jam/cheese)!”

“Uh…OK…?”

“We only use THAT ________ on Thursdays/cloudy days/Arbor Day/etc.!”

“Uh…”

<then we would go replace it with ANOTHER milk/butter/etc.>

“NO!  That one is even WORSE!  We spit and pee in that one!  EVERYONE knows that!” <they shake their heads, unable to BELIEVE the idiots they have hooked themselves up with>

5) Advancing my stick-driving skills. Now I can go into second gear!  Ooooooh…

6) Pietro and Marta (Roberto’s parents). These two were friendly, kind, patient, generous, helpful, etc., and the best people we met in Italy — all without speaking a word of English.  Marta helped with work and patiently gestured at us when we didn’t understand her. Pietro wandered about, smoked clove cigarettes (though, given the smell of his car, he may or may not smoke other things…), and made up nicknames for us — Molly is forever “Princess Stephanie of Monaco,” and I am “Julie Andrews.”  This pleased us both greatly.

7) It strengthened our friendship. Or, depending on how you look at it, it introduced the strange new dynamic of making me fiercely protective of Molly.  This is because Paola decided early on, seemingly at random, that Molly would just be the one to pick on in the new batch of WWOOFers.  Like I said above — arbitrary and unpleasant for no particular reason.  So whenever Paola yelled at Molly, I knew it meant 15 more minutes of holding Molly that night while she gently sobbed.  I’m a friend.  Such duties are part of the package, I suppose.

8. The animals. I thought the goats were a riot.  Molly loved the rabbits.  Feeding the animals was a simple pleasure — you give them food, they immediately love you and happily munch.  By the end of our time there, the goats would come running if they saw me approach.

(Oh, and in response to Catherine’s question, the rabbits had been for eating, but all that stopped when they caught the plague.  I have no idea if Paola and Roberto and Co. will now eat the bunnies that are left…)

9) “The Hula Game.” Yet more evidence that we have LOST IT.  The Hula Game is a sort of “who’s-on-first” back-and-forth that we do for two major reasons: (a) we hate cleaning wool. HATE IT.  And yet we had to do it all the damn time…bags of the stuff…by hand.  Its purpose remains unclear.  (b) To make fun of Paola, who pronounced “wool” “hoo-la.”  A typical Hula Game session was a riff something like this, with one of us playing Paola and one as the hilarious American WWOOFers:

PAOLA: Girls!  Please start with the hoo-la!

US: …seriously?

P: Yes!

U: You have that here?

P: Yes!  Lots of it!

U: I mean…I thought that the hula was a Hawaiian thing.

P: Dammit!  It’s time to do the hoo-la!

U: OK!  <removing clothing> You got a coconut bra or grass skirt or something?

P: What are you doing?

U: The hips gotta show!  They tell a story!

P: DO THE HOO-LA!

U: Calm down, woman!  The hula is a dance of relaxation and beauty!  You’re just introducing tension.

P: DO IT NOW!

U: I am!  Watch my hands!  Every movement has a meaning, you know.

P: I really can’t wait around for this.

U: Listen, if you want artistry to happen, it takes time.  Sometimes I wonder if this is all a ploy to see us half-naked and wiggling…

P: I really want this hoo-la done before you leave!

U: …Paola…is the hula ever really done?

Ahahahaha.  Such moments of genius make this trip even more worth it.

Anyhow, tonight we are in Torino, as we were last night, and it is one of the best cities I have ever visited — gorgeous views (cathedrals and castles!  mountains!  rivers!), delicious food (I ate an entire pizza yesterday) (and two gelatos) (among other things) (no joke), outstanding public transportation, wonderful running trails, and things are a bit cheaper here than in Milan or Bologna.  Molly and I live for these 2- or 3-day vacations after farmwork, so I’m sure we’ll pull out all the stops in Barcelona.  Tomorrow we get to go on a train ride through the south of France, and in two days we will be at our Spain farm.  Cow-milking!  Yes!  I am excited already (that wasn’t sarcastic, either).

This was long but worth it.  I hope you agree.