…and a bit more about our daily lives!
POSTED BY CHRISTINE
Jordi is a school teacher and this week finds him back in his classroom, giving us much free time during the day. Last week was holy week, no school, and so we were out on the farm every day working hard up until this Monday. Then he gave us Tuesday off, and Wednesday and Thursday we did chores around the house with large chunks of the afternoon free to enjoy the city (although yesterday was an unusually rainy day for a city who gets very little rain annually and is in a drought). One great part of the city is the library where we are able to obtain free internet use by showing our passport. It´s supposed to be 30 minutes, but they don´t mind you staying on as long as you like if there´s no one waiting and during the day, when all kids are in school, there´s usually no one waiting. So we´ve been taking this opportunity to use the internet as much as possible both to do postings and to do copious amounts of researching our next move, contacting other farms, finding our cheapest travel options, reaching out to couch surfing locations, etc. We´re guessing that internet use in the future won´t be quite as easy, especially as we move on to more rural farms in a few weeks. But for now they have come to be quite familiar with our faces at the library and when they see us coming pull out their internet log book and have it ready for signing in.
I wanted to write a bit more about our food habits at Jordi´s place. Every meal is the same routine: we all line up to make a line of helpers stretching from the kitchen to the dining room with Jordi in the kitchen. He hands things to the first person in line and then food, plates, cups, refrigerated items, silverware, all gets passed from person to person and on to the table.
When everything finally makes it on to the table there´s hardly space for the plates and cups. Most everything available in the house shows up from meal to meal, regardless of time of day, until it´s finished. This means the octopus piaia we had for dinner was the main course for breakfast too!
Here are some happy helpers ready to eat! Clockwise from left: Leonard from Sweden, William from Colorado, Jordi our host, Marie from Colorado, and Jonathan.
After dinner the line is reversed, starting with refrigerated items and ending with the dirty plates, and then we all take rotating turns washing the dishes based on a list of our names posted in the kitchen.
After a long dinner our free time usually includes sharing stories, looking at maps and discussing our next moves, or challenging each other to chess games. I made this travel chess board out of felted material I got from Goodwill and it has already come in handier than I´d ever imagined!
So we´re off now to enjoy our last free day in Balaguer before working the next two days and heading off to our next farm on Monday!
Tags: Travel, Tag Index
seeingspain
March 31st, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Wow!
I just found this in my old email account! Yeah!!!
So happy for you both!
Spain is amazing! I LOVED it!
Your whole trip will be amazing!
Let me know if you need anything while you’re there (friends with friends in many places) but it sounds like you’ve got it all worked out!
I’ll be checking this often and I’ll make sure that Mom and Michelle know about it as well!
March 31st, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Package on its way to Farm location #2, should be there in 10 days. Hope you find it useful!
Love, Mom