Farmin´

I could not be any happier with my current farm choice. Everything about Lone and Rance´s farm is perfect! Although, they may tell you otherwise.

Their farm is essentially an experiment to see if a truly organic farm is possible. So there have been leaps and bounds for them, but there have also been plenty of setbacks. The best part about what they are doing is that they aren´t 100% sure of what they are doing. They are learning on the go. I suppose jumping off the deep end is an easy way to make sure you learn fast!

They have pigs, tons of them. They have two different breeds and if I knew the correct names I´d use them, but we call them the whites and the indians. The indians are sturdier and more friendly with each other it seems, so they have made the cut and it looks like Lone and Rance will slowly get rid of their white population.

I had no idea pigs were particularly vicious animals. I thought they hung out and sat in the mud all day and sometimes oinked when you were around. Well, I´ve witnessed a pig fight with chasing, biting, squealing and fence busting. Everything turned out alright, but I had no idea pigs could be so hostile.

The piglets make up for it. The piglets are adorable  and they sleep in pig piles! On a rainy morning one of the mothers was giving birth and the first piglet was left in the mud and it was cold, so I got to give it a bath in warm water, make it a bed in a box with straw and bottle feed it.

Chickens continue to surprise me with their stupidity. A chicken wanders into the pig pastures. A pig catches the chicken. The pig is eating the chicken. The pigs fight over the chicken. Four chickens waddle their way over to check out the commotion… the pigs catch the chickens… Luckily, there are 500 chickens and Lone and Rance are trying to get rid of them.

Pigs and chickens are slaughtered here every Thursday to be delivered to restaurants in Sao Paulo on Fridays. I normally don´t take part in the slaughtering, but I did pluck the feathers out of a couple of chickens last week. I also helped butcher meat from a big pig slaughter last week, and I made sausages out of most of it with Jamie!

The farm is also home to laying hens, cows, calves, geese, cats, dogs, and a couple horses lost out on pasture ten.

The workforce here operates as a unit. Everybody has tasks and responsibilities to keep the farm up and running, and everybody is always upbeat and excited about the work ahead.

Lone and Rance own the farm. Esben is their son, and he is also the farm manager. Joao and Clair,  “the boys”, are hired workers from the neighboring village. They do ALL the heavy work. They are amazing workers. They are strong and quick and always seem to get the job done rain or shine. Joao can carry 6 fence posts at a time, mind you they are taller than he is. Rosana is also a hired worker. She can also work like a machine, and she has the greatest sense of humor for a language barrier.

Then there are the interns! Dani is Esben´s best friend from college in the UK, she is 22, and she paraglides. Jamie is Lone and Rance´s friend´s friend. Jamie is from the states, she´s 29, she´s a chef, and she lives in New York. I am the third intern, the youngest, the one who is always offered as a sacrifice to the pigs.

The three of us live in the “intern house” about 1 km down the road from the heart of the farm. We are only ever there to sleep, and our only decoration is a magazine picture of Jamie´s dream man, Gonzalo (she will search for him in Uruguay when she leaves the farm), hung on her bedroom door.

The daily breakdown looks like this:

5 30 wake up and walk up to the main house

6 breakfast

6 30 start work

10 break, which is called “coffee” and is generally a second breakfast

10 30 work!

1 lunch

2 work!

4 finish work, hang out at the house, ask Jamie if she is willing to make more brownies, eat dinner, watch a movie, read

6 30 put the animals to bed

7 30 ask “oh my goodness I´m so tired. Does anyone know what time it is?”

8 (generally) walk back down to the intern house to sleep

Each week has had a theme so far …

week 1: WOOD WEEK

This included moving wood, chopping wood, burning wood, stacking wood, and anything else that you can do with wood. I discovered my bon fire building talents during this week and a week later the firepit was still smoking.

week 2: GUAVA WEEK

We had a guava harvest, although, I wasn´t much help because for whatever reason I couldn´t spot the guavas in the tree. I was designated guava peeler once we had a nice stock pile. We made jam out of the guavas.

week 3: HONEY WEEK

The 100 liter honey harvest ended up being more like a 20 liter honey harvest. After a few mistakes and some bee invasion, the bees ate most of the honey before we could harvest. The bees here are nuts, it´s almost as if they crave bare skin. We harvested the honey at night, so most of the bees were off sleeping someplace. Rance ran from a swarm of bees, but unfortunately the bees flew faster and he suffered from over 100 stings on his face, head, arms, and shoulders. Esben never has any luck with the bees even with the bee suit on. His hand and forearm were swollen for a couple of days. The rest of us were smart and stayed away from the angry buzzing bees.

week 4: BIG PIG WEEK

On Monday one of the great whites was slaughtered for the house. Lone, Rance and Esben are taking advantage of having a chef at the house to lead them through butchering a pig and using all the parts. Tuesday and Wednesday we spent most of the day cutting up the meat into pieces and grinding it for the sausages that were made on Thursday.

I´m currently in week 5 and don´t have a name for it yet.

The farm is absolutely gorgeous it is located in a valley surrounded by giant hills (They aren´t considered mountains because none of them are above 1,000 meters. They are all 900 and something meters.) There are many streams and waterfalls around. It is an hour and a half drive to the closest real city, and about an hour of it is spent on a dirt road in conditions that I couldn´t have even imagined. Luckily, Lone´s truck has a tractor mode right after 4×4 and can drive through everything.

Sorry about the lack of pictures! I´m using a computer at an internet cafe.

Today we took the day off to go to the beach and eat lemon pie and indulge in a little internet time.

Over the River and through the Rainforest to Sao Paulo I Go!

I had plenty of time to figure out how to prop up the camera to take a picture of myself on the bus. (This is also to prove to my aunt that there in fact aren't any chickens on the buses down here.)

My trip back to Sao Paulo wasn’t the smoothest. I was supposed to take a bus from Montevideo straight to Sao Paulo, but for whatever reason the bus wasn’t making that journey again until March 12. I left Estancia Don Miguel a day early in order to catch an overnight bus from Montevideo to Porto Alegre. From Porto Alegre to Sao Paulo I had to take two buses, which ended up being the same bus twice, but that’s an explanation that can wait.

I totaled approximately 33  hours of bus time, but the buses were all spacious and comfortable so it wasn’t a problem.

I arrived in Sao Paulo a day early with no place to spend the night. I visited the internet cafe at Tiete bus station to look up hostels. The first one I called had one bed left for the night and it was all mine! I had a nice adventure on the subway, and then walked ten or so blocks to Vila Madalena Hostel. It was easy to find my way and I didn’t experience any problems.

I was in a dorm for four at the hostel. One of them I didn’t talk to because he showed up after I had gone to sleep and was gone before I woke up. The other two were a couple from the UK. We exchanged some traveling stories, and they even let me use their superglue to fix my boot!

My bag and my bed at Vila Madalena Hostel.

In the morning I picked up my suitcase from Marcos’s apartment and took the subway back to Tiete. I had plenty of strange looks in the subway because I was wearing a backpack with a small backpack strapped to the back of it and rolling a suitcase…

At Tiete I met up with Esben, who is the farm manager and son of the farm owners of the farm I am at now. We rode the bus together to Taubate where Lone was waiting for us. It was about another two hours of driving from Taubate.

I arrived safely, and this is the last farm in my adventure. I will be here until I fly home in May.

There are two other interns here. Dani, who is from the UK, went to school with Esben and is here doing a three month internship. Jamie is from the states! She is here wanting to learn about where food comes from. The three of us live in the “intern house” down the road from the heart of the farm.

At the farm there is no internet access, and if a phone call needs to be made (or received) there are specific spots where you must stand.

I will post updates whenever I have access to an internet cafe!

 

Jumpin’ the Border!

The road to Don Miguel and a very flat Uruguay.

The ride from Porto Alegre to Montevideo took about 13 hours. The bus was spacious, and they even served dinner and breakfast! It felt like a plane ride with more foot room. The bus company collected our passports before we settled on the bus, so that they could take care of everything when we got to the border and we could continue sleeping. Although I had a minor panic attack about human trafficking, it all turned out alright and I did get my passport back.

The bus station in Montevideo felt more hectic than Tiete. I found the bus to Colonia Valdense and found an ATM for some Uruguayan Pesos. In about an hour I was back on a bus headed in the direction of Estancia Don Miguel, which is located about half way between Montevideo and Colonia.

I was forced to make a quick transition from “Fala ingles?” to “Habla ingles?” Spanish did turn out to be easier to understand than Portuguese.

Estancia Don Miguel is essentially a tourist attraction. They host families and sometimes even groups. People also came to only spend the day. They served breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner. They brought tourists on trail rides, walks, rides in their antique car, and they brought them to swim at a nearby water hole. If the tourists stayed overnight then they were able to help milk cows in the morning and make cheese.

The family I stayed with couldn’t speak any English, and I didn’t know any Spanish. They were very understanding and patient with me while I tried to learn. It was difficult and frustrating at times, but I was amazed by how much I could understand and how well I communicated after only two weeks (unfortunately my plan to stay for a month was cut short due to scheduling conflicts with other WWOOFers). I would say that this experience has been the most rewarding so far. I was definitely stretching my comfort zone leaving Rachel in Porto Alegre, traveling to Uruguay on my own, and staying with a family whose English was limited to “muchas thank you.”

Me and my cheese! The cheese is being pressed by all those stacked pieces of wood. Above the stack of wood there is a long piece of wood with one end in a hole in the wall and the other end right behind my head with a weight on it.

It was also necessary for me to be more expressive with faces and body movements to be understood. I spent one afternoon sitting in front of mirror trying to figure out what faces worked best for certain moods, thoughts and feelings. It felt really bizarre, but I think it helped.

The best part about the Uruguayan work day is siesta! A long break after lunch in the middle of the workday, which lasted from 2 to 5 on the farm. Most of the time it was nap time and occasionally they would stay up and sit in the yard in the shade under the trees with their mate.

Mate is Uruguay. Everybody has mate. The people on bikes, on horses, on skateboards, they all have mate. The police have mate. The gauchos have mate. It was always the mate in one hand and a thermos filled with hot water under the other arm. The family, Hugo, Maria, and their son Miguel, would relax in the evening with one cup of mate and the thermos at hand. It was family time for them. They would fill the cup and one person would drink until it was gone, and then they would fill it and pass it to the next person. They always let me join them even though most of the time I couldn’t follow the conversation. It was good listening practice.

Beautiful corn that we harvested from the garden.

The daily breakdown:

7:00 Rise and Shine

7:30 Milk the Cows

9:30 Breakfast

10:00 Make cheese!/Farm work

11:30 Help prepare lunch (there were always tourists, so this was quite a production everyday)

1:00 Lunch

2:00 SIESTA

5:00 Farm work

7:00 Tea/Mate/CAKE

7:30 Farm work

8:00 All done

9:30 Dinner

11:00 Bed

Milking the cow that didn't like me...

Tidbits…

After Hugo picked me up from the bus stop we drove to the farm and it was incredibly dry and hot and one of their fields was on fire. Instead of stopping at the house we drove straight to the fire and had to whack at it with bush branches until the fire truck came.

I managed to break both the weed whacker and the lawn mower in the same hour. I don’t feel either was entirely my fault. They laughed and banned me from all machinery. Maria kept teasing me telling me not break anything else.

On my third or fourth day at the farm French tourists came for a trail ride, and Hugo decided I could take them. I really clarified this point by asking him repeatedly if he actually meant me on my own with the tourists. He was serious. I rode in front and the others followed. We explored the farm together.

One of their small vegetable patches. This one was conveniently placed in the middle of a cow pasture. It had metal fencing and electric fencing to keep the cows out.

During breakfast one morning Maria and Hugo asked me to make cheese with the milk from the morning. They showed me the recipe, which they taped to the wall. It was in Spanish, but it was nothing a two way dictionary couldn’t handle. One line literally translated to “fish the cheese.” Well, I made the cheese and the good news is that it’s aging, which means I’ll be long gone when they find out if it went horribly wrong. If it isn’t good that will be unfortunate because I made quite a bit of cheese.

One nice day after siesta Maria and Hugo thought it’d be nice to go to the beach. We spent the late afternoon on the beach and didn’t return to the farm until late. I was exhausted and told Maria I was going straight to bed and she asked, “What about dinner?!” I said it was fine and I wasn’t hungry, but five minutes later Maria came knocking on my door with a glass of yogurt and toast with jam.

Hugo came into the living room one evening wearing one of those small Jewish hats and he had google translated, “I am a Jewish Rabbi.” I laughed so hard I cried to this one.

I went for a walk one evening and sat right outside the pasture this guy was in and he wasn't a fan. He was making noises and kicking up dirt and stood watching me until I left.

When I arrived Maria pointed out that they have three cats that all look the same, so they are named Uno, Dos, and Tres in no particular order. She also named the goats Santa and Claus.

I milked the same cow first every morning, and she wasn’t exactly a fan of me. She would give me very little milk, but the second Hugo came over and took over he’d get almost a bucket full. This made him laugh more than anything. He also found it entertaining that in two hours I could only milk three cows max.

Despite the language barrier there I definitely feel that in those short two weeks we all came to know each other fairly well. When I left Maria gave me a letter (that I still have to finish translating) that said in Uruguay I have a home and a family. She signed the letter “your Uruguayan mother.”

 

Porto Alegre

Rachel cooks, and I peel and chop. Yet another vegetable concoction! I'm going to miss them.. This is dinner on the balcony with Freddy.

The bus to Porto Alegre was slightly terrifying. It was a two floor bus, and we were on the top floor. Every time the bus turned we were swaying all over the place. I was convinced we would tip over if the turns were any tighter. It was an overnight bus, but neither of us slept. The bus pulled into the station at 5 am, and we knew we definitely weren’t in Floripa anymore because it was pouring.

It was still dark and pouring when Rachel and I decided to start walking to her friend’s apartment. It took about an hour, and when Freddy (Rachel’s friend’s boyfriend) came down to let us in he was stunned that we didn’t take a taxi. I wish we had taken a picture of ourselves. We were drenched with our backpacks on, but we were still smiling.

We showered and went to bed. We woke up at one in the afternoon and went to the supermarket for fruits and things for breakfast. We finally ate our breakfast at about four, and had no desire to eat anything for dinner. Freddy insisted that we join him for a drink at least, so we went out around the corner to a small restaurant.

Rachel’s friend Betsy is currently taking a submersion Portuguese course in the north of Brazil, which is why we are here with her boyfriend. Betsy is from the states! She came to Brazil to teach English.

This is where Rachel and I parted ways. I was too eager to go to Uruguay and be back on a farm, and Rachel wanted to stay in Porto Alegre for a few more days to meet up with Betsy when she came back.

 

Floripa!

This was part way through the hike to the private beach. The back row is Max, Justyna, me, Regina, Carl, and Alex. The two guys kneeling are Marcelo and Otavio.

We arrived in Florianopolis late in the day, caught a public bus to the university, and walked to our next couch surfer’s house.

Our couch surfer’s name was Rafa, and he is definitely a unique host. He piles ‘em in. He has multiple couch surfers at once. He has a couple mattresses and couches and beanbag chairs in his living room where all the couch surfers crash at night. He is a student at UFSC and is hugely into African drumming and photography.

Rachel and I walked up to a house with a pirate flag hanging on the front gate, the front doors wide open with dim lighting inside, and a bunch of shirtless guys sitting around the front steps playing the African drums. This was it!

We were welcomed by everybody the Brazilian way with plenty of hugs and kisses, and then we were properly introduced to Brazilian music culture at a samba night at one of the local bars.

This is what Rachel and I have for breakfast every morning. We cut up tons of fruit and add yogurt and granola on top.

Traveling across the island via public buses with a group of ten people is an adventure. Learning how to samba with Brazilians all night and into the wee hours of the morning is also an experience worth having. I’ve never seen people dance as easily as Brazilians do. It looks so natural watching them move to music. They also seemed to love teaching gringos how to dance. I tried, but I didn’t have the same knack for it that they did. They always smiled and kept me moving anyways. I felt ridiculous the entire night.

Before Rachel and I went to Florianopolis people kept telling us we would want more than a couple days there. Fortunately, Rafa was looking for a week long couch surfing party. We stayed with him for eleven days experiencing the late nights and beach life of Floripa. There were couch surfers from all around. Alex is a Russian born Finnish guy. Carl is a Ugandan born English guy. Justyna is Polish. Marcelo and Otavio are from Sao Paulo. Regina is from Rio. Two guys who came for a short visit were from Spain. Rafa, Bettina and Max owned the house, and they are all Brazilian. Rachel represented England with Carl, and I had America to myself.

It's dinner time! I can't remember the ethnicity of this meal.

Most nights we went to bed around 3 am, and most mornings we woke up between 10:30 and 12.

Every morning we walked down to the market to buy fruit for the day. I suppose that normally people buy what they need for the week when they go to the supermarket, but there was always free tea and coffee at this supermarket so there was an incentive to go every morning. Sometimes there was even entertainment. Our last day in Floripa I went to the supermarket and was pouring myself some tea as these two guys ran past me into the store in the middle of a fist fight. Sometimes I was the entertainment. I kept going to the same register at the supermarket because there was hardly ever anybody at it, so I figured it was an express lane of sorts and I never had much to buy. Well, one day an old man behind me explained that it was a line for senior citizens.

Me, Alex, and Justyna enjoying a day on the beach.

During the day most of us went out together to various places on the island. We went to a private beach that was surrounded by hills and rocks and mountains. We had to take a little hike over the dunes to get there, but it was worth it. We spent a day at a waterfall that we also hiked into. There were plenty of places to jump from and the water was surprisingly warm and clear and very deep. We went to the lake in the south of the island, but we went where the locals go instead of where the gringos go. It was completely secluded, surrounded by mountains and very quiet. We went to mainstream beaches, and we toured the island on public buses.

Lunch was fairly nonexistent because of our sleeping schedule, but dinner was a production. Justyna made pierogi, a traditional Polish dish. Carl made breads he learned to make at a farm in Salvador. Rachel made a vegetable concoction, as usual. They asked me to make something American. I had no idea what American food was, so I googled it. I still don’t have an answer, but hotdogs and hamburgers seem to be quite American. The only problem with burgers and dogs was that a few of us were vegetarians. I decided to go with something Mexican. I was going to make burritos. The supermarket didn’t have tortillas, so I thought I’d make the

After a few rounds of Uno we found a more competitive game that required more skill. It was a close race. (I won)

burrito filling and buy a few bags of tortilla chips. The supermarket didn’t have tortilla chips either. I bought pasta! So maybe it’s an Italian thing, but I think it’s popular enough in America. I made a saucy vegetable mixture by channeling Rachel’s cooking spirit, and it all turned out tasty in the end. Even though we each took turns deciding what was for dinner everybody cooked! It was a group effort. There were people peeling vegetables, people chopping, and people adding random spices to things. If it was your night to cook you weren’t alone by any means.

One food that I can’t get enough of is acai. It can come as almost an ice cream consistency, but all it really is is frozen pureed acai. It’s best the traditional way, if you ask me, with banana slices and granola. Honey is always a nice addition though. It also comes in juice form. We made many special trips to acai places while we were out so I could indulge in it’s goodness. A few hours before Rachel and I left Floripa I went off to enjoy one last acai.

We found a sugarcane juice & corn on the cob stand on the side of the road as we were driving back from the lake.

Besides frequent jam sessions with the African drums and tambourines, the record player had a good work out all day everyday. We always woke up to someone putting a record on.

Besides frequent rain from all the places Rachel and I had been before, Floripa proved to be extremely hot and sunny almost everyday. I understand why the guys were drumming with their shirts off the night we arrived. We often found ourselves walking around the house in our bathing suits even if we weren’t going to the beach because it was too hot to be comfortable in clothes.

It was hard to leave this community living lifestyle and all the people, but Rachel and I had five days left before we were supposed to be on the farm in Uruguay with one final destination left, Porto Alegre.

 

Curitiba

Dipping peanuts in Nutella...

The bus ride was gorgeous. We went through mountains and rain forest. There was fog rising out of the valleys. We saw huge banana tree plantations. We had time to catch up on some sleep.

We arrived in Curitiba in the rain around 8:00 pm and our couch surfing hosts, Oksana and Andre, were waiting for us at the bus station. They immediately asked if they could help us carry our packs, and we refused. Then we told them we would pay for parking at the bus station, and they said no because if we paid they would charge us the gringo price.

Oksana made dinner right when we arrived at their house. She is vegan, so this really worked out for Rachel. She made a vegetable pot pie type dish, which was delicious, and she even had vegan pudding for dessert! Although, seeing as Andre and I aren’t vegans we enjoyed a little milk based dessert called doce de leite.

The following morning we got up early to ride into the city center with Oksana and Andre. While they worked Rachel and I enjoyed the day roaming around the city. It was cloudy and drizzly still, but we both managed to burn our faces.

Capybaras!

It was Rachel’s birthday!

We saw a few old churches, a tall tower that you can go up to see the entire city, a telephone museum, a Spanish monument that we didn’t quite understand, and a couple shopping centers. There was so much to see in the city, but our destination was a park on the outskirts of the city.

Before we went to the park we found a supermarket to grab a snack. At the park we found a closed restaurant with outdoor tables protected from the rain. It poured for awhile, and we enjoyed our food.

The rain subsided and we walked out onto a peninsula in the park’s pond. There were capybaras! A herd of capybaras were swimming, eating, and sleeping all around the end of the peninsula. Rachel and I were able to walk up to about ten feet from them. We didn’t dare to get any closer. We don’t know anything about these strange creatures except that they look like oversized guinea pigs, and they’re South America’s largest rodent.

Our faces don't look too red do they? This was before we sang Happy Birthday, see that chocolate beauty in the middle? Mmm

On our walk back to the city center we found a small square with many little shops around, and we wished we had found it earlier so we could have spent some time there. We had to find a market to buy vegetables for dinner and catch a bus to go back to Oksana and Andre’s house.

We made a vegetable concoction for the four of us for dinner. Oksana made the most amazing vegan chocolate cake for Rachel’s birthday. We sang to her the English/ American version of Happy Birthday, and then we requested that they sing their version of Happy Birthday, which is complicated because every line is different.

Our second day we hung out at their house because it was raining. We watched a fair amount of Friends and caught up on some internet things. It was nice to have an extremely lazy day, but we both felt like we were wasting time sitting there. So, we booked a bus to Florianopolis for the next morning.

Oksana and Andre were wonderful hosts. They offered us everything and were very accommodating people. They were stoked to have us with them because we were their first couch surfers! They both loved sharing stories from their recent trip to Argentina, and their couch surfing experiences there.

The next morning we rode into town with them, and we were off once again.

 

Sao Paulo

Bruno playing some music for us.

The weekend before I left FAF I met a girl from the states, Kirsten, who lives in Sao Paulo. I told her about the eco yoga village and my plans, and she told me if I needed a place to stay in Sao Paulo at any time I could contact her.

When Rachel and I decided to leave Baependi and head to Sao Paulo we didn’t have time to contact couch surfers. So, I contacted Kirsten to ask if it’d be alright for us to spend a night at her place.

We spent two nights at her apartment in Sao Paulo with her and her room mate Bruno.

Neither of us slept well on the overnight bus, so when we arrived at her apartment, after trying to orient ourselves on the streets of Sao Paulo for a couple hours, we went straight to bed.

The first night we went out for drinks with Kirsten, Bruno, and some of their friends. We sat at a table on the sidewalk, which was perfect for people watching. I realized that toy size dogs are quite popular in Sao Paulo. I spent most of our night there talking to Bruno’s friend about American movies. When we returned to the apartment we listened to Bruno and his friend play some jazz music. Bruno’s passion is the saxophone, but he can play many other instruments as well.

Vegetable mixture night!

Day two in Sao Paulo was drizzly. Rachel and I spent the morning looking for a fruit market. We never found it. Kirsten told us Brazilians weren’t the greatest at giving directions, so why we asked Bruno for directions and not Kirsten escapes me. Instead we bought fruit from a man with a cart on the side of the road. His papaya prices were more reasonable than the supermarket’s.

During the afternoon Bruno brought us to a rather large park that I can’t remember the name of. We took a stroll around to look at the park’s art. Unfortunately all the museums around the park were closed because it was Monday. Places being closed on Monday still doesn’t make sense to me.

Bruno drove us around parts of the city and showed us where some main tourist attractions are. Then we learned that when you’re driving in Sao Paulo and miss your exit you’re going to be driving for a much longer time. Bruno laughed when he noticed Rachel and I falling asleep in the car. He said it was because we weren’t used to “wasting our lives in traffic.” As a result of our detour we ended up going to his mother’s apartment to pick up another instrument of his, and to meet his toy size dog! Her name sounded like “teka,” she was perfect to cuddle with, and she even had her own little bed on the couch that she was literally tucked into before we left.

The two of us leaving Kirsten's apartment on the way to Curitiba.

On night two Rachel made a vegetable concoction of hers in their kitchen, which we were told wasn’t used very often. Kirsten had a meeting for one of her architecture projects, so she wasn’t able to join us for dinner.

The following morning Kirsten and Bruno walked us down to the fruit market. When we finally arrived I noticed that Bruno’s directions from the day before actually made perfect sense.

We ate breakfast back at the apartment, and then Rachel and I grabbed our bags and went out the door. We walked to Barra Funda station to ride the subway (here it’s called the metro) back to Tiete station, where we boarded our bus to Curitiba.

 

Caxambu & Baependi

Enjoying some JIF at Hotel Catagua!

The night I left the farm my bus left from Guaxupe, which is about a half hour drive from Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza and the town of Igarai where I had been staying.

Marcos and Sylvia drove me to Guaxupe and we visited with her friends. We drank coconut water and ate crackers. I tried my best to decipher their Portuguese conversation.

When Marcos and Sylvia were leaving their friend’s English teacher and other students showed up at the house. They were so excited to have a native English speaker in their English class, so Marcos and Sylvia left me there for the class and headed back to the farm.

I never realized how little I think about how I speak, or how little I know about how I speak. I can’t listen to English and pick out the past perfect tense or other tenses, which is exactly what they were doing when I spoke. I felt like they knew more about the English language than I did! It was fun trying to speak how I normally would while they asked me questions about how I speak. For example, they asked me whether I pronounce often as “off-ten” or “off-en,” and I couldn’t figure it out.

There was one guy who was having difficulty with dessert and desert, the meanings and the pronunciations. This is a hard one to teach. Without the right pronunciation it’s difficult to give a meaning to either of these words… I hope that made sense.

Rachel with a huge plate of fruit, as usual. Rachel being more healthy than me and my JIF, as usual.

After the class they wanted to take me out for pizza and ice cream, but I had to catch my bus! The English teacher brought me to the bus station and said if I’m ever back in Guaxupe I should stay with her (and go out for pizza and ice cream of course!).

While I waited for the bus I saw a horse run down the street and three men on horses run after it. After a few minutes of only hearing neighing and other noises, the free horse ran back up the street and the three men followed. I didn’t see them or hear them again after they went back up the street, but I found it amusing and laughed to myself.

The bus ride took about six hours and arrived in Caxambu at a ridiculous hour in the morning. Before I left the farm Marcos helped me arrange a taxi to a hotel for the remainder of the night, so I was safe and had a place to catch some z’s. Overnight buses are freezing; when they say air conditioning they’re not kidding. Now I know to always pack pants and a long sleeve shirt for overnight buses.

Checking out the river the day after it was on the verge of overflow. It was right up to the bottom of the bridge the night before.

In the morning my lovely taxi driver came back to pick me up to bring me to Baependi, the town the bus to Piracicaba village leaves from. But, it’s the rainy season! It was chucking it down when we arrived at the bus stop in Baependi. The taxi driver asked somebody about the bus and found out it wasn’t running that day because the dirt road had become a mud road. He asked me if I wanted to be taken back to the hotel in Caxambu, but I thought it’d be much easier to stay in Baependi and find a hotel there. I told him to drop me off at the bus station.

At the bus station I tried asking people if they spoke English (I don’t think anyone in Baependi does) and if they knew anything about the bus to Piracicaba. I was in the middle of a sort of conversation with some old men when Rachel and I spotted each other. She had been on a vacation from her vacation with her dad in Rio, and we had planned to meet at the eco yoga village. She was supposed to arrive at the village the day before, but the rain kept the bus from running the day before also. We went back to her hotel room and that is where we spent the following three days waiting for good news about the bus to Piracicaba. On the second day while Rachel and I were eating breakfast the people who run the hotel brought a guy over to us because he spoke English. His name is Jiri, he’s from the Czech Republic, and he was trying to go to the eco village as well.

During our stay at Hotel Catagua we ate many salads prepared in our bathroom with a pocket knife. We also took complete advantage of the included breakfast. I miss breakfast at Hotel Catagua.

Rachel and I decided we should move on. The rain wasn’t ceasing and there wasn’t much to do in Baependi. We booked an overnight bus to Sao Paulo and set up couch surfers for the next leg of our trip. The following day before our overnight bus we received emails from the eco village saying that the bus was running, and that they were going to pick us up in ten minutes…

Unfortunately this didn’t give us enough time to change our plans, and we had already bought our bus tickets. We skipped the eco village and headed off to Sao Paulo.

Rain, rain, go away! Come back on a rainy day.

The women of Cafe Igarai working on their embroidery.

This past week I started to really experience the rainy season. So most of the work was indoors, and I did a lot of organizing and cleaning in various rooms around the farm.

On Wednesday I spent the day in the village learning to embroider with women from the group Cafe Igarai. They were quite patient with me, which is a good thing because I wasn’t very good at it. They told me my piece was beautiful anyway. I will post a picture when I finish it!  I went to a small cafe for lunch and asked for something vegetarian. The woman was confused and gave me a lettuce, onion, and tomato salad, each vegetable separated into it’s own pile, with bread.

Rachel and her dad left on Wednesday to go visit Rio.

I spent two days on the farm by myself. (So scary!)

One afternoon while it was raining I went through all the pictures on my camera with Josangela and Lillian. I showed them Manny and Lucy, the cats, my house, my family, friends, school, hockey, halloween, Christmas, and birthday parties. We used a two way dictionary to communicate. I absolutely loved their facial reactions to all the pictures I had of snowboarding.

Over the weekend there were six guests here working on a housing project in the village. Marcos and Sylvia also came back. It felt good to have so many people around again.

Tomorrow I leave the farm to go live in an eco village for a few weeks. There is no internet there, so I will write a nice long post as soon as I can after I leave!

Pigs, Honey, Chickens and Chutney

I hope this wasn't Wilbur.

The past two weeks have been busy with pigs, honey, chickens and chutney. And weeding.

The Monday after the Christmas gatherings we were invited back to neighbor John’s farm to butcher a pig. At first I honestly didn’t think I would be able to stomach it, but it turned out to be quite fun. The pig was slaughtered the day before. The skull was removed, the tongue was missing, and the pig was cut in half. We skinned the pig before cutting it into pieces. Skinning was my favorite part… there was something satisfying about it. Johanna preferred and rather enjoyed cutting the meat after it was skinned.

The most difficult part for me was returning to it after eating lunch. The smell just wasn’t easy on a full stomach, but it didn’t seem to bother anybody else except me. I also thought it was strange that there were pigs roaming around right outside the room we were in, and we could watch them out the window. The pigs on the farm are completely free range. The only fence on the farm is around the property.

Rachel when she returned from the hives! and "zeh" greeting her.

On Tuesday, Thiago and Johana left the farm with Sylvia. They were all on their way to Sao Paulo.

For the remainder of the week we worked with honey. Rachel has been dying to go collect honey here and watch the process from the hive to the jar. For awhile it didn’t look like she would have the chance to go because the men who collect honey can’t speak English and it seemed like they didn’t want her near the bees. By the end of the week Sylvia had called one of the men and told them to take her out, so she was ecstatic to finally be doing the bee thing.

I didn’t go with them to collect the honey from the hives, but I did help them extract the honey when they returned. Rachel and I spent almost entire days in the honey room uncapping the combs with combs, letting the honey drain, and spinning the combs around in a centrifuge. There were many bees in the honey room with us, and I wasn’t too keen on watching them land on me or crawl on my legs. I wish they had given us bee suits to wear in the room. It all turned out okay though neither of us were stung.

In the honey room picking the caps off the combs and tolerating the bees.

Rachel and I were the only ones on the farm for Christmas. We slept in, had a nice long late breakfast, talked to our families, and watched a movie before going to bed. It was actually an enjoyable day on the farm. Everybody was relaxed and happy, and we could hear music coming from the little neighborhood where the workers live. It was techno music, of course.

Rachel decided we should make mango chutney to deal with our surplus of mangos around the farm. I haven’t fallen completely in love with mangos yet. If I’m eating fruit it’s more likely to be bananas. So needless to say I wasn’t exactly thrilled to be making something with mangos, but I was excited to learn to make chutney. I’m developing a useful kitchen skill: peeling fruit with a knife. I’ve improved so much that I can even peel ginger with a knife! It’s incredible. But besides that, we peeled many many mangos.

The chutney was smellin’ good. Every time I held my head over the pan

Eating lunch between the butchering of each half of the pig.

to smell it I think I singed the hairs in my nose because of the amount of vinegar that was in it. Despite my previous conception of mango chutney I couldn’t help but try it because it smelled so good (and Rachel makes me try everything, even milk that she can’t tell has gone off or not and neither of us drink milk so it’s always hard to tell). It tastes good too! I think I’ve had almost two jars already. We made a second batch later in the week. I eat it with everything. Mango chutney with my egg in the morning, mango chutney with salad at lunch, and mango chutney on whatever we eat for dinner.

The second batch of chutney was harder to make because our surplus of mangos diminished when the cows had a night out under the mango trees.

We have 92 eggs and counting… the chickens are happy and in super egg laying mode. Maybe it’s because we hung curtains in the coop so they have privacy, or maybe it’s because I thought they could use some leafy greens and I picked some cabbage leaves for them the other day.

Our Christmas breakfast.

Rachel is still religious about doing yoga every night before dinner. I usually join her five out of seven nights a week.

We’ve started a habit of making dinner and bringing it up to our house to eat while we watch an hour of Planet Earth.

Last week we made a vegan carrot cake! It was incredibly moist and delicious. We finished it a few days ago, and made a banana cake yesterday, which is just as good.

Our new year was more lackluster than our Christmas. We were finishing our hour of Planet Earth and realized it was two minutes past twelve, so we said happy new year and that was that. We weren’t even aware it was the eve of the new year until we were making dinner. The most exciting part about the new year was that I was able to adjust the calendar in the kitchen to January first.

This morning Simone drove Rachel and I to the main city in the area to pick up Rachel’s dad at the bus station and stop at the grocery store for beer and toothpaste. Simone can’t speak English, but it is obvious that she wishes she could. We brought our phrase books with us and had a nice chit chat on the way there. Simone was surprised that the word estrada didn’t mean road in English. We tried coaching her through the pronunciation of road, but she was having a hard time with the r and gave up laughing.