Ch-ch-changes

I arrived to my current farm after a full week of Couchsurfing and fun with three different hosting homes: in Milan, in a small town near Milan called Melzo and in Genova. These were 7 days of bliss, insane heat-wave in the north east of Italy and much-needed live music, drinks, middle of the night junk food (in Italy, mascarpone-filled canoli coated with pistachios is a night snack. In Israel it's more like a pack of M&Ms) and the best company I could have wished for.

True, traveling by train, bus, foot and whatnot in the middle of what felt like hell (35 degrees and terribly humid) took its toll on me, as well as searching for last-minute couches, never knowing where and with who I'll end up and sleeping on couches/folding beds/floor because it was too hot (seriously). Three pairs of my trousers had been cut to shorts by the end of that week. It was clear that I was in need of a more stable place again - where there would be a routine and I could do my laundry and sleep with actual sheets.

After taking a train to a middle-of-nowhere station somewhere near the coast of northern Italy, I took a bus which drove me 400 meters higher in altitude, hoping with all my heart that i was in the right place where my farm owner was supposed to pick me up. The night before, we spoke on the phone about how to reach the farm and it was clear at that point that I was dealing with only-Italian-speakers again. "I hope I understood what she explained to me correctly", I told the guys who I was staying with, and they helped me figure out what I should do using the broken names and bus lines I managed to understand.

Train rides to nowhere

I got picked up by a friendly, smiling man who took me yet ~100 meters more in altitude, through a one-way-two-way winding road (very common in Italy) where you have to honk the horn before every curve in order to avoid dying. When I got to the beautiful farm, a light late lunch and coffee were served to me and then the question - so shall we go outside to work?
But of course we shall! Let's ignore the fact that I'd just traveled for a bazillion hours and hadn't even put my bags in my room yet, and run out to the fields, The Sound of Music soundtrack playing in the background.

In the vegetable garden I met who would prove to be my good friend and ally - an adorable German girl who's been interning at that farm for a week and a half at the time. And so the questions began: when do they eat lunch? It varies. How many hours do you work a day? It varies. They work all the time. When do they eat dinner? Usually around 21:00, could be later. You have got to be kidding me, I smiled at the girl. You can't work outside all day and then eat dinner in the middle of the night. But that's exactly what they do, I found out later while anxiously waiting for the gong to ring, indicating dinner is ready. It was already 20:45, and I was miserably tired, hungry and disorientated. Then I was served a four-course meal I didn't know what to do with.

Picking cherries - our favourite job

It was extremely hard for me to get over my initial shyness and actually start talking. But I know for a fact she speaks Italian! Said the farmer. She spoke perfectly on the phone! (Really?). And so I sat quietly at the table, always listening, almost always feeling more lonely then ever. I don't deal well with chaos, I wanted to shout at her when she told me, after I finally managed to raise the courage to ask, that there were no defined working hours. And chaos it is: it's hot, then there's a thunderstorm. You work on something, and before finishing it are commanded to start something totally different (I will not sleep until I've finished with that asparagus field!). You eat lunch at 13:00, 14:00 or 15:00, try hopelessly to take over the hot mess of a kitchen, work until nightfall and then eat dinner at what feels like the next day already.

While crying on the phone during a precious Internet moment and having the call break again because the whole village uses one router, scratching my many mosquito bites, I suddenly got enlightened: Wwoofing is not for me anymore.
(Having said all of the above, I feel obliged to add a disclaimer stating that the family is more than nice to me, I get fed dishes that I could only dream of getting in top restaurants back home, I'm learning tons of Italian and all about even more alternative and high-end organic agriculture. All in all Wwoofing is a great thing).

So long, picturesque farmhouses

And what a hard realization that was. I, the toughest person in the world (right), am giving up? Am I a lazy loser? Am I, God forbid (take a deep breath for this one), spoiled?????????
No. Maybe. I don't really care. I'm just longing, for the first time in my life, to not work and ONLY be on vacation for a while. After congratulating myself for finally becoming a normal human being, I canceled my last farm, found two couches to cover me for at least a short while after I leave this farm and started contacting some international friends. Long story short, I'm going Couchsurfing and camping on the shore of Italy for an unknown period of time. It will be challenging, interesting, happy and sad, and I can't wait.

Then I realized another thing: for the super-anxious person I keep believing that I am, I'm not behaving all that anxiously. The previous week I even missed a train because I'd lost track of time, and didn't stress on it one bit. So it's true - I don't deal well with chaos, when other people create it for me. It's time to create my own chaos now.
And as I explained to a family how to eat the pita with hummus and shakshuka that I prepared for them - "with your hands, and get as dirty as possible".

Silence - We are living.

"A silent sister... it's a thermometer without any markings, and the doctor checks it by laying a scale up against it and draws the chart himself "
"...and he had a brilliant insight about what time actually is - nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale"
These are the thoughts of Hans Castorp, the main character in Thomas Mann's masterpiece The Magic Mountain (which I'm reading these days with great pleasure). One of the possible interpretations of this quote is that time is a subjective matter and all our attempts to quantify it in objective units of measurement are in fact irrelevant to the genuine human experience of it.
And oh, how relevant this philosophizing is to my current life. On the farms, one day often feels like a month in my "previous life", which at times consisted of "work > eat > sleep > repeat". I sometimes can't believe that something which had happened three hours ago did not in fact happen three days ago. I almost feel like farmers here have longer lives because of that - like their eighty-something years of life are fuller, in a way, than "normal" peoples'.

6:30 - I wake up, totally naturally, when the first rays of sun come through my window. No rooster in this farm, Grazie a Dio. I get ready for the day (3 minutes of taking off my pajamas, wearing the same work clothes as the day before and brushing my teeth) and go downstairs. I set the table for breakfast and then have a few cherished Internet moments for myself.

7:30 - everyone comes downstairs for breakfast. It's supposed to start at 7:30 but almost always somebody's late and I want to kill them. They say their prayers to thank God for the food on our plates, wishing that it will strengthen our bodies and souls, etc. It's quite a nice prayer, actually, but I can't hide my glee when they finally say "in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit... buon appetito!". We eat.

The communal dining hall

8:30 - we start working, each in his or her field (see what I did there?). The work varies: with the animals, in one of the many gardens, in the flower nursery... today one of the girls explained to me that she was late for helping me cut the grass because she had to clean (?, It was all in Italian) the pony's genitals. She proceeded to explain something about when a male animal is alone with no females.. and that she did something with olive oil.. at which point I made it seem as if I understood absolutely nothing in order to avoid further details.

12:30 - the bell rings, we stop working and go eat lunch, at which point I'm usually famished. Italians don't snack between meals, even when spading the earth for four whole hours between breakfast and lunch. Somebody's always late and I want to kill them in even more ruthless ways than in breakfast. They pray. We eat.

14:30 - we resume work, usually finishing what we'd started in the morning. If it rains, I cut strawberries or peel nuts indoors. It usually doesn't rain, though, until the very moment I've finished working outside, or the moment my afternoon/day off begins.

17:00 - I stop working while everybody else continues. Haha (said in a Nelson-from-The-Simpson's manner of speech, while pointing at the others). I take a shower and read my book. If I have a few drops of energy left in my body and it isn't raining, a take a stroll outside.

19:30 - we eat. Somebody's always late and depending on my level of hunger, I want or don't necessarily want to kill them (lunch is quite a big meal). They pray, we eat. Three courses at least, if not four, are always served, one after the other. I usually can't handle more than two, in response to which they either mock my inferior eating abilities or feel sorry for me. "Look at the girl, she's not eating anything!", after I've had salad and a huge bowl of pasta with sauce and cheese. "She seems so pale!", when I'm visibly more brown than most of the big-eaters combined. I appreciate their concern but learned the hard way how to say "no, thank you" to an Italian cook. There's no reasonable reason to eat this much, I personally feel, and since not finishing off your plate is NOT an option here, I simply have to refuse. The mystery as to how Italians remain quite fit while eating so much (and no, they don't just "eat all the good stuff but in small quantities", but I suspect it could have something to do with their rather small breakfasts) remains unresolved to me for the moment and all I can do is envy that magical metabolism system of theirs.

20:30 - sometimes we play cards, sometimes we watch a movie. I read, write, surf the net for a short while when conditions allow it (there's only wifi on two square meters in the farmhouse, inside the communal kitchen).

22:00 - I try not to go to sleep before this hour, or else I simply sleep too much. Good night, sweet, weird, dreams, in "the pink room" with pink everything where the rocking chair seems to move on its own accord. Just sayin'.

One angle of The Pink Room

Then it struck me: I'm living in the Magic Mountain. Except for a few minor differences, like "work cure" instead of "rest cure" and no second breakfast (Germans and their breakfasts), it's exactly that. I even physically am on a (small) mountain (Ok, maybe it's more like a hill) and am constantly surrounded by clouds.

In between writing the draft for this post and publishing it, as I continued reading and without me even asking, Hans Castorp has once again answered my question:
"I've always found it odd, still do, how time seems to go slowly in a strange place at first. What I mean is, of course there's no question of me being bored here, quite the contrary... but when I look back... it seems as if I've been up here for who knows how long already, and that it's been an eternity since I first arrived... it has absolutely nothing to do with reason or with measurements of time - it's purely a matter of feeling".

I wish everybody a long life, or at least as long as they want it to feel at the very moment.