O Monte

I am at another host, still in the Algarve. I am staying with Dorine Tideman outside of Santa Catarina. It is so beautiful that I wont even try to take my own pictures to show you, just take a look at the home page. O Monte is hidden off of a long dirt road, nestled within the soft hills of Santa Catarina. There is a cluster of buildings, the Guesthouse, the Big house, the Annex, plus the pool. The exterior architecture of the buildings is cement with clay tiling, very typical of the Portuguese countryside. But then the interior reflects its Dutch owner, sensible style full of straight lines, clean wood, and simple furniture. Dorine is my host and we get along fabulously and she has two dogs TheeBou and Olive and one cat Bec. I am weeding and clearing land and getting ready to build a shed with her neighbor, Senhor Manuel. Senhor is Portuguese, Dorine Dutch, and the only common language is French, so we do all of our planning en francais.
Last night we went to Jean Jacques (another WWOOF host from Belgium) and had dinner with his three German WWOOFers:Nina, Natalie, and Lara. I can't tell you how nice it was to spend time with people my own age for a change, plus German girls are fun (is it okay to generalize? here i think so).

Today we went into Tavira (the first city I have been in since Dublin) and I bought a big stack of postcards. So you can expect a note in the mail soonish. If I don't have your address (I know I don't have it for a few of you) then leave it for me as a comment on this post!(or email/fb/etc)

I think I am staying here next week instead of heading to Dorine's friend Benedicte. We went there this morning ... long story but she is not really ready to host because she doesn't have any food in her house and does not want to keep any there. So I will stay here longer and maybe even delay my move to Monchique if we are still getting along well. As I am writing this post Dorine and I are drinking our Nettle juice that we extracted from the plant we found the other day. It tastes awful and smells worse, but it will help the health of our kidneys (I hope).

Now I am going to switch topics and share with you some pictures from my previous "Solitary Confinement" spot.



Here is my caravan (trailer) on a (hand scrubbed) laundry day!


This is one of my favorite spots on their farm. I consumed 2-4 fresh oranges per day, usually as juice.

Here are the greenhouses, full of fresh produce and growing plants. It was in one of these that I was washing all of the flower bulbs.



A solution to the dilemma of the organic farmer. Because they dont use pesti/herbicides they must find another way to protect against weeds. So Volodomyr and James built an attachment for the tractor that lays polyurethane sheets into the plowed soil. The sheets physically block the weeds from attacking. One of the more fun projects I worked on was with Volodomyr to put these sheets down.



Although they didnt offer me any company, I did have use of the bike. I took advantage of it every day for grocery shopping and for amusement. I am trying for the third time now to upload this video. Hopefully the link will be here by the time I am done writing. No! the computer crashed and so we will have to wait again for this silly, short clip.

The other place that I biked to was the ocean, it was only 20 minutes away. Much of the Southern coast of Portugal is made of limestone. It is very soft and the tide eats away at the stone formations very rapidly. Since the tide is striking at the base of the stone, it takes that part away first. Then while the water works its way under the rest of the stone, its "digestion" of the rock releases gases that also eat the stone. The end result are deep pits in the middle of otherwise solid rock formations. These are called "Algares" and if you look down into them you can see the water crashing away, continuing the process.

These formations are also wonderful for climbing, and that is how I liked to spend my time. Here are some pictures that I took one Sunday afternoon while I was having a climb.


These first few pictures give you a general idea of the coast and the rock formations.


Oh wow! This picture (above) makes me want to go back to Lagoa.
I couldn't find any way to enter this cove, but I like to imagine it hides a lair full of treasure.

Here is a picture of one of the Algares.
And with the water at the bottom.


This is the way I climbed down, but I couldn't get back up. It was a ledge 5 feet off the ground that sloped up and to the right very sharply. I had only 1 ft of ground below me before a steep drop to the ocean. I had jumped down, but the face of the ledge was too smooth to use to pull myself back up. For a minute, I raised each one of my arms and legs to see if they could find a path that my eyes could not. No luck. After a moment of panic, I climbed down to the bottom and ascended at another point.
The top of this green patch is where I took my lunch. In total privacy, it seems none of the other walkers wanted to go out that far.

A little cove that I could access.
And a picture of me, reminding you not to hassle me because I am local. (The shirt I am wearing is featured in the excellent movie What About Bob?)

Back to life at O Monte. Today I have been moving wood chips all day, tonight I hope we have the big bonfire (unrelated). I just got off the phone with Lara and I am meeting them tomorrow to go to the beach and then for a big fish dinner. Fun! I hope they have salmon ...

Solitaire

I've been playing a lot of Freecell, with a real deck of cards, because I´ve got some time on my hands. I'm in Lagoa in the 2nd week of two with my new host. No pictures to post, my camera is entirely devoted to my RoadTripNation efforts at the moment.

I am hosted by James and Suzanna (daughters Rosey, Isabelle, and Alice) Brits who moved here permanently some 12 years ago and havent looked back since. They speak the language, their children go to the local school, and they never go ¨home¨ (uk) more than once a year. We are situated on 6 hectares (or something) of land. They grow lettuce, oranges, flowers, berries, spinach, potatoes, tomatoes, the list goes on. And they sell it all retail at Da Terra, their shop that also sits on the land. They also keep horses and are teaching their young daughters to ride. They stay pretty busy then, and as a result i am ¨self catering¨. This means i live in a trailer on the back of the property and cook all of my own meals. The plus side of the deal is that i only work five hours per day (8am til 1pm), which then means that I have lots of free time. It´s a pretty quiet town, but luckily I am also only 20 mins bike ride away from the ocean. Which is amazing, I almost biked over some cliffs on my first visit there and I cant wait to post some pix of this place. The Southern coast is lined with lots of limestone, very soft, and the tide eats away spectacular (and dangerous) rock formations every year.

When I am working I am washing flower bulbs (very tedious but evidently worthwhile. Chanel perfume makes a killing by using this type of flower in their perfumes. They farm it in huuuge quantities in the North of Africa) or pruning bushes, weeding fields, clearing dead stuff, or laying polyurethane sheets into plowed soil for protection against weeds. The last task is the hardest to explain and also the most fun, because I dont have to do it alone. I work sometime with Igor (25) but mostly with Vladmir (40s/50s) who are Ukrainian farmhands. Vladmir doesnt speak a work of English, so we have to get by in Portuguese. I would describe him as gruff and knowledgeable (he taught me the proper way to eat an orange the other day, with a few slashes of a knife you can eat the whole thing in less than 10 seconds). If I'm not working with Vladmir, then the rest of the day is spent on my own.

Luckily, I have received some good advice about living on your lonesome, so i am doing things like sleeping, making sandwiches, and creating my own puzzles. I´m also biking (theres a really neat path that takes me to the local grocery store, im gonna try to film it) and reading (some good books about crazy Brits who have settled on rural farms in Spain and Italy) doing crossword puszzles, listening to NewsHour and Washington Week on podcast, and cooking for myself. Never really had to cook formyself before. Doing a lot of rice and beans and pasta, sometimes with meat (churico). Lots of salads because i have all of the fresh veggies that one might ever desire (the avacados are the best) and at least one glass of fresh oj per day. Also the first time I´ve lived entirely on me own. Some days it is absolutely terrible, but most it´s very calming. Speaking of firsts, this is the first time/place that I have had to do all of my own laundry by hand. Drying things on the line, I can get behind that. but scrubbing out my own filth in a sudsy bathtub full of warm water? That's a moment where I am glad to live alone so as not to have to do this chore with a shared load of laundry...

New section in the blog called ¨Look Em Up¨(wanted to call it Have Some, but thought twice about that), a list in the upper right of the page. It is a list of nouns that I have either experienced directly or indirectly in my time here. I put em on the list because they are interesting and you should look them up. Perhaps with Google, although I did a bit of poking around, I guess about a month ago, and if you search the same keyword with Google and with Yahoo you get pretty different results. Not when you are looking for a specific site, but if you are looking to compare prices or service providers, there is a difference. It makes me remember that Google is a for-profit company and it doesnt have us users at the top of its priority list. On the same idea of for-profit companies, Facebook is getting pretty creepy. Not because of how people use it (that is debatable) but because they are a black hole of data. Most social networks, Twitter, Myspace, whatever, will export some of the data they collect to external sites. For the purposes of integrated functionality, presumably. But Facebook is not so generous, it keeps all of the information that we enter to itself, using it to find ways to make money. Once I am regularly connected to the Internet again, I think I am gonna offload my fb profile to another site, most likely another blog.

Wayyy off the point. I will put some pictures up here in a bit, as well as some stories a la ¨day in the life¨. In the meantime I recommend you listen to this free episode of ¨This American Life¨ which does an excellent job of explaining what da heck is going on with the banks and the bailout:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=375