Things that are the Devil

1. Bottled water
2. Crotch seams!
3. Brambles

Wind in a Dry Place

Laroque des Alberes is about 8kms from the Mediterranean Sea, at the foot of the Pyrenees. I am on an organic olive orchard, where we (that's me and, right now, 5 other WWOOFers) are clearing forest to plant young olive trees. Raw/natural olives taste absolutely nasty, for anyone curious to know. Something of a mix between mush, oil, unripened bananas, and bitterness. My mouth was dry and stained with the distasteful flavour for a while after two bites out of a ripened olive. Don't ask why I took two bites. I think I hoped the second one would taste better? Then I worried that raw olives were poisonous, probably because someone who didn't know anything about olives told me that once.

The forest here is full of a lot of bushes and trees I have no idea what are, but also cork oak. Cork trees are really pretty--their bark is quite similar to that of Douglas Firs, for any west coasters who don't spend 100% of their time in the city, but are much smaller, and often quite twisted. There are Strawberry Trees that have bright red fruit and a rather mild flavour and a spikey texture. And brambles. Oh, how I hate brambles. I think I'm going to start a list of Things that are the Devil, and brambles are going on as my #3.

The farm is a vegan farm--no milk, no meat. There are hens on the farm, but the eggs go to the dogs first, and it being winter (or 'winter'), there aren't many extra eggs after the dogs. Lucy and Elise, two WWOOFers from the USA made Thanksgiving breakfast and dinner on Thursday, and did a bang up job of making pancakes and pie without the aid of eggs or butter. All were quite well filled by the end of the day.

The farm is built to be fairly ecological. There are solar panels for hot water, and the woodburning fire place also heats a radiator that warms parts of the house. There is a graywater system that takes the water from the washing machine to a small fruit tree orchard, and a separate graywater system that takes the rest of the house's waste water and filters it through two sets of plants, the last being a pond full of beautiful aquatic plants, to produce clean water for watering the vegetable garden. The toilets are compost toilets, which means no water is wasted for flushing, but it means that someone has to empty them every day and someone else has to ensure we have a daily supply of woodchips. Compost toilets are great; I've been reading a lot about them, and saw mention of a Brasilian advertising campaign to encourage people to Xixi No Banho (at least that's what I think it says...)



Yesterday I woke up CRANKY and pedalled my way to Collioures to work out the cranks. It was a day off, and beautiful, and the hills were what I needed. Collioures is really beautiful--your typical Mediterranean port town, with a beautiful brick walled harbour and an old lighthouse. The streets are narrow and cool and crooked and full of filtered light. I was disappointed I didn't remember my drawing book, but I have three weeks here and plenty of days off to return to sit in the sunshine and draw.

Last night was incredibly windy, and we spent most of our time cleaning up after the wind, and building fences to keep the wild boars out of the orchard. We plant three broad beans with each olive tree, and the boars seem to like rooting up the beans, damaging the trees in the process. I don't know what they are after, since they don't seem to eat the bean plans at all. The beans 'fix' the soil, making more minerals and whatnot available to the olive trees. (And broad beans are also one of the prettiest bean plants around...)

Laroque des Alberes

where it is sunny and warm. In the afternoon, it is in the 20s--the 20s! I prefer the south of France to Vancouver come winter.

I am chopping down trees and clearing brush to make way for olive trees. Cork trees are gorgeous! I even went for a trail run this evening. Such a lovely November...

You're from Canada?

There are three things people ask me when I say I'm from Canada.
Are you from Quebec?
Do you get a lot of snow?
What about the bears?
I forget that not everyone lives in such a large, mostly unpopulated country with wild! animals! Of course, then someone tells you stories about encounters with Canadian wildlife. A guy I met in Ashland, Oregon at my bike mechanics course said he went on a hiking trip in Montana or somewhere, and he knew he'd passed into Canada when a moose charged him. My French family read an account of the Olympic torch being interrupted by a Polar Bear in Churchill Manitoba! So it's Polar Bears 1, Olypics 0.

Living French

I've been enjoying having a routine these last three weeks. Sundays are lovely days of eating and meeting some of the family's friends. Yesterday, a family of four paid us a visit, with a gift of Coeurs de Picardies. It was a jar of small, heart-shaped cakes soaked in Calvados, an apertif (or digestif? I forget now) made from apples. They were darn good. In Bayeaux, new-found friends of mine, Cindy and Darren, shared a bottle of Calvados with me. We tried drinking it straight while cooking, but it was a bit too strong for us. Mixed with fresh apple juice, it was much more palatable. If only we'd known to buy cake!

The French Sunday is really wonderful. It's a time to sit down with friends and family and socialise. Every meal is started with a small apertif--often a hydomel, which I know the English word for but cannot remember--a mead! To me an apertif has always been something you drink while cooking when guests are over. Pommeau is another lovely pre-meal drink made, obviously, from apples as well. I think it's distilled from cidre.

I also love the post-meal cheese! A platter of cheeses to slice and choose from, a basket of apples to eat afterwards. People ask me why i'm in France, and I say that Canadian history is the history of France and England, but really, I just think I belong here. It's sort of an instinct, and sort of a wish. I do wish that someone from my ancestry was French, though!

Bazancourt!

Well, kids, I've been shoveling shit and milking cows for the last three weeks with a wonderful family in Bazancourt. The village is very small--not a shop nor a cafe in sight. I'm up most mornings to milk the cows and see the sun come up, then again at 6pm to see the sun set. I've learned how to make fromage blanc, which is delicious, and laundry soap from ashes and water, which is less delicious, but pretty strong. Sundays we eat all day with friends of the family. Grampa (Dede) visits every few days and washes the dishes and folds the laundry!




One afternoon, I rode my bike to a nearby village where I'd seen this--Une Chapelle de la Vierge, with a set of white statures of women in the tree beside it. I've been reading "The Discovery of France" by Graham Robb, and he mentioned that a lot of these sites are old pagan sites that have been transformed into Christian (RC) sites. It's amazing to read that pagan rituals lived along side Christian ones until surprisingly recently. I prefer the ladies in the tree--far more natural--to the stone and iron chapel, but the chapels are usually quite pretty, with a small shrine inside, though the door is usually locked. Claire told me that they are less and less attended to--no surprise, really. Perhaps there will be a rejuvenation in interest in old sites and old practices such as these. I did my part and placed a few coins at the foot of the statues.

I was going to head back home, but decided instead to follow a sign pointing me off to a Commonwealth Graves Commission Cemetary from the Great War. It was a small square filled with non-European labourers--mostly Indian and Chinese. There were two apple trees to one side, and the ripe red apples spread about the grass was a pretty contrast to the plain white headstones.

One afternoon I looked out the kitchen window to see a solid line of Starlings perched on the wires. By the time I had returned with my camera, most of them had flown off, but I took a shot anyway; I love clouds and blue sky; I love wires and birds. It was a perfect picture, and reminds me of how quite the house could be in Bazancourt.

My French has improved vastly, I think, living with a French speaking family, and they've been quite patient with me as I've stumbled my way through it. I'm sad to be leaving, but the day is approaching--Tuesday I set off to cross France, literally. I'll be travelling from Paris to Perpignan and possibly to Laroque des Alberes all in one day. Fussing around in Perpignan trying to find a hotel at night (7) seems like more work than 15 extra minutes on the train and an 8km bike ride. But it's in the dark...

If you haven't got your letters in the mail, why not?