Our time since the last blog has been marked by a lot of planning for our return home. We’ve been sorting out paper-work for our summer of trip-leading with Williwaw, making good use of the pro-deals that we have as part of this job, and frantically planning the scant three and a half days between our arrival home and our departure for training. In these three days we will have to unpack and sort out the mess involved in our year of travel, sort out the messes that we left at home because we left in the same overly-rushed fashion, and promptly pack up everything that we will need for a summer of leading teenagers through the woods, leading Lucia and Alberto through the streets of NYC (did we mention that these Spanish friends are coming to visit for two weeks immediately after our trips finish in August?), and then going to another friend’s wedding. Essentially, if I have described this right, your imagination should be generating circus music as images of us bumping into each other as we rush between our parents’ houses carrying bundles of outdoor equipment marquee through your heads. But that’s ok, I’m still very excited to get home, because at least it will be our circus.
Enough of the future, though, this is a blog anyway! Our third and final week at los Robledos was marked by a pair of summer-time cheese emergencies. The first was that a batch of milk bought from one of their contributing goat-farmers came contaminated with a mild bacteria, that caused the cheese to swell up and fill with air pockets. Not to worry, says Maria Jesus, we just throw those cheeses in olive oil, which suffocates the bacteria. What’s more the little pockets suck up oil and the cheese becomes extra delicious. The second was a bit more complicated. With summer, comes flies, eager to lay eggs in things. The cheesery is a very clean place, but flies being flies get in anyway, and on one of our cheese making days Maria Jesus walked in the door, took one sniff and said, “today we’re going to have worm problems.”
Her nose was not wrong. What followed was a marathon of cheese cleaning, which may have been Aubrey’s favorite job yet in this year of WWOOFing. That night, after showering for about an hour and a half, she told me that she wasn’t sure that she wanted to go to bed for fear of dreaming about worms. I was, however, very little help. I come from the same school of thought as Rafael (MJ’s husband), which teaches that worms are simply additional protein, and rather than avoiding wormy foods we should select them specially, because the flies look for only the best cheeses to lay their eggs in. After picking the worms off of the cheeses that hadn’t played host to the eggs themselves (worms that Aubrey dubbed “immigrants”), we chucked the really wormy ones that had hatched the eggs (these worms were “natives”) into the olive oil. The logic was similar to the bacteria: suffocate the worms, whose nicely drilled tunnels make excellent oil pockets. Go figure.
As Aubrey mentioned last time, another wonderful aspect of being at Monte Robledo was to be able to cook for ourselves. This was not always the case as twice a week MJ would bring down lunch for cheesing days. After three weeks, I think I can safely say that in their family, the cheese-makers eat nothing but grilled white fish, or pork and potato stew, as this is what she brought down every time. This diet is indicative of a general Spanish lack of adventurousness when it comes to food. I’ve never seen so many people who are squeamish about so many things. Raisons, sauces, anything green in general, breads that are any color but the purest of whites, spicey foods, ethnic foods – all of these things are suspect. It’s no wonder that when we entered MJ’s market to select things for our larder we discovered the selection to be depressingly narrow, as she carries things primarily for eaters she refers to has her “traditional” Spaniards, and she carries them frozen and individually wrapped. Despite this, we invited as many of the family members as could clear a spot in the working schedule (that is, we got one of the three sons to come with his girl-friend) to come to have a meal that we cooked. Aubrey whipped up a chicken in orange sauce with stuffing and green-beans that makes my mouth water just thinking about it, and I think it was a hit. At least MJ told us that she liked it, and the others finished what was on their plates (with the exception of some raisons) with out too much pushing things around with their forks or saying “¿Eso que es?”
After finishing at Monte Robledos, we made our final return to Finca Buenvino, and discovered a few new inhabitants at the finca – Sophie, an 18-year-old Australian helper, and Jago, the eldest Chesterton son – and that we had arrived just in time for another fiesta. This one was the romeria of Los Marines, the town nearest to the Finca. You might remember from a couple of blogs back that we have hit up a romeria already, and this one was quite similar, except that this time we were accompanied by Jago Chesteron, who, as his friends put it, is a social weathervane. Attending the romeria with him was a non-stop ride of being introduced to Spaniards, making circuits of the fair grounds, and being handed lots of beers (to the point where one of Jago’s friends took a beer from my hand that I’d just received from someone else, threw it away, and handed me another). Romerias are all about food, drink, and friends, but to kick the whole show off, they first carry a giant float with a gaudily outfitted Virgin Mary out to a chapel in the outskirts of town. The whole thing is very similar to Semana Santa, a fact that Charley vigorously denies saying, “No no, this is much more festive… you might even be able to whoop a little bit if you don’t get too carried away.”
Mid-week, two more WWOOFers arrived, bringing us up to a small army of five youngsters. The newest members of the crew were named Cesar and Vinita (very latino sounding to us), and Sam told us that they were from California, which prompted speculations that they would be “Latin Kiiiings” (imagine that one with Jago’s British accent imitating a Hispanic accent). However, they turned out to be from Calgary – very nice, unassuming yoga types. Again, go figure. During our last three days with the Chestertons things were very busy (five WWOOFers get a lot done) and social with big happy dinners. On the last night we headed into town to see what we thought would be a professional Flamenco show, but what turned out to be the Spanish equivalent of an elementary school dance recital. The show consisted of an enormous crowd of three to twelve-year-old girls (and one very out of place looking young gentleman), all throwing their skirts up rhythmically (or arrhythmically), looking at each other for a clue about the next dance move they were to make, and bumping into each other when inevitably someone started dancing in the wrong direction. While there were one or two other acts of higher caliber, the kids really made the show, and we left absolutely in stitches, recalling one moment where the crowd of girls turned around, lifted their skirts and shook their frilly, bloomer-festooned bottoms at the crowd, while the one boy, who had no skirt to lift, theatrically covered his eyes and shook his head. The evening was capped off with a barbeque down at the spring-fed pool that we had helped to fix up, where we told ghost stories and discovered that the patch job that Jago had done to the pool was wholly inadequate and the water leaked out before I could muster up the courage to jump into the icy water.
We bid farewell one last time to Buenvino on Saturday morning, and hopped a bus to Cadiz, a Spanish port town/peninsula and one of Europe’s oldest cities (founded around 1100 BC), to see a Spanish beach before leaving Europe. It turns out to be a great city for travelers of our ilk; that is to say, we found a lot of free things to go and see. We stumbled into an art exhibit, which had some great Brazilian “naïf” style on display, the history museum which happens to be free on Sundays, a Roman salt-fish factory archeology site, and a charity festival where, for one Euro, we got to watch professional quality Tango, belly-dancing, and of course the ubiquitous Flamenco. We also coincidentally bumped into Emma, a WWOOFer who we had met at los Robledos, who had also come to Cadiz for the weekend, and was staying just around the corner from our “pension.” And yes, we did see the beach, although at first it was difficult to spot between the thousands and thousands of umbrellas and semi-nude women. Frisbee-throwing seemed out of the question during prime-time, we decided to only go to the beach before 10am, and/or after 6pm, which meant that not only could we find a place to sit, but that we were able to watch both sunset and sunrise over the ocean.
So now here we are in the Seville airport, once again saying adios to Spain, and heading off to see our families. Between now and then we have one last chance to buy French patisseries and Kebabs in Paris, and a whole week of excitement in Iceland. Don’t worry though, we’ll keep you updated even after we get home, as we’re almost sure to have one last story to tell!
sambrey
