down on the farm
Saturday, August 29th, 2009same place as yesterday, Italy – so nice we didn’t move on
chickens clucking
ducks quacking
donkeys braying
dogs gnawing on bones
doves cooing
roosters crowing
horses neighing
reindeer banging a box
geese gaggling
wasps humming
sheep baaing
peacock screeching a howl
emus staring
goats butting
rabbits hopping
cat meows under our van
And that was all before breakfast!!! When you stay on a farm you’ve got to expect the predawn chorus….and in this case, it continued on all day. Much to the children’s merriment, the donkey returned Rob’s heehaws, the deer bounced round and round their pen in post-rain exuberance (yes, it rained – a magnificent summer storm dropped suddenly from the sky with lightning flashes and deep rolling thunder and mercifully plunged the temperature to 26 degrees and everyone spent the afternoon shivering!!!), and an Italiano boy recorded the peacock’s screeching on a voice recorder and played it back to the bird, who answered in reply.
We like farm life.
Of course, we are not responsible for feeding the animals or collecting the eggs or cleaning enclosures or retrieving straying animals or shearing the fleece or shovelling manure or mending fences…..but we’d like to be. Each farm we stay on confirms this thought. The rural life beckons.
Is that why we feel so relaxed here? For the first time in Italy, Rob commented last night, he feels relaxed. It’s not that we have disliked the place, but both the men have just been a little on edge. Maybe it’s their friendly counterparts, who have come to our van to warn of pickpockets and thieves, maybe it’s the erratic driving taking its toll, maybe it’s that initially we were not used to everything closing for half the day and then reopening late (and needing to wait until 9pm for the pizza ovens to be fired up), maybe it was the surprise that it was nothing like what we had imagined, and bore little resemblance to the countries we had just left, maybe it was the unexpected frequent feeling that *this is like Asia* (the scruffiness, the people piled on motorbikes, the crazy driving, the heat, the litter, the peeling paint, the fenced compounds, the motorbikes driving the wrong way up the street, the beggars – but this is meant to be Europe, not Asia), maybe it’s the raw barren countryside, maybe it’s that people do not engage with us the same as they have in other countries (we had heard there’s a bit of anti-German feeling in Italy and we are wondering if our numberplates are doing us no favours), maybe it’s following road signs to find a supermarket but the signs peter out to nothing without any sign of any shop anywhere nearby, maybe it’s that this has happened four times, maybe it’s the lack of language ability (although we were certainly worse off in Vietnam and Laos and Thailand to begin with), maybe for Rob anyway, it’s apprehension at the places we are about to visit (Macedonia where you have to register with the police, Serbia where they water down the gas and allegedly have the worst drivers in Europe, Bosnia where they were fighting a war not so long ago), and maybe, just maybe it’s a little bit of all these things.
Whatever it is, we are relaxed *here*. It’s a pleasant feeling.
heehaw
rayres