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