Do You Come from the Land Down Under?

Oh yeah, that's a "Men at Work" reference.

I do have a good excuse for it though: we are currently in the Land Down Under. (“Where women glow and men plunder”-  seriously, what does that even mean?)

Bad 80’s music aside, our first week(ish) in Oz has been a great introduction to the country. We started our stay with a weekend in Sydney, where we stayed at our friend and generous host Maura’s apartment. The great thing about staying with friends is that you have a fun, comfortable welcome in a new place and someone to explain Aussie Rules Football to you. The downside is that you spend most of the weekend eating and drinking and hanging out with friends instead of being tourists and actually seeing the city.

We did manage to tear ourselves away from the cozy, wine-filled apartment long enough to walk along Sydney Harbor one afternoon, take a few pictures of the world's most recognized opera house and eat a famous meat pie from Harry’s Café de Wheels, one of Sydney’s oldest culinary institutions. 

The Phantom of the Opera House

Harry's Famous Tiger Pie: a steak and gravy-filled pie topped with mashed potatoes and peas. Delicious.

We were also lucky enough to be invited by Maura to an Aussie Rules Football (AFL) match, where we struggled to follow the chaos that was happening on the field. 36 players, eight referees, two message runners, and a massive round field with four goal posts at each end. Even without all of the wine from the night before, I still would have had difficulty understanding what was going on.

As a last hurrah in Sydney before taking our plane out, we visited the Sydney Vivid Festival, which is a celebration of art through the colorful lighting up of Sydney monuments at night. It was spectacular and original: the perfect temporary good-bye to a city that we can't wait to explore more in a few weeks.

Sydney by Night, as seen from Maura's balcony

Vivid light show on the Opera House

Light show on the Modern Art Museum

From Sydney, we took a plane up the East Coast to Brisbane in order to catch a bus to Byron Bay, where we are spending two weeks working in the countryside on a pecan farm. It’s a similar deal to the farm we were working on in Argentina: five hours of work a day in exchange for room and board. We are living with a lovely Aussie couple who run the farm along with a pecan factory and a little country café. (A side note- they also have a hilarious teenage daughter who runs to her room and blares the opening guitar riff of “Smoke on the Water” whenever she’s mad at her parents. It’s awesome.) The area is beautiful and our hosts are great fun, which makes five hours a day of picking and sorting pecans a little more tolerable.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against a pecan or two, but after a full week of dedicating my life to the nut, I’m a little pecaned-out. The actual work tasks aren’t mind-blowingly exciting, however it has been really interesting to learn about the operation and understand all of the work that goes into growing, harvesting and processing the nuts. We’ve worked at nearly every stage of the supply chain, from shaking the trees and collecting the nuts, to working in the factory to separate, crack, sort, grind and package them. 

Another up-side is that we've had endless opportunities to giggle over juvenile "nuts" jokes, i.e. "Your nuts are huge!", "These nuts are old and wrinkly," "Stop playing with your nuts," or my personal favorite: "Can you hold my nut sack?"

Fondling my nuts

And I have to admit, I feel kind of badass working the line in a factory, like I’m some tough worker from the Industrial Revolution or something, enduring grueling conditions just to make a wage.  

Workin' the line...

Aaaand then I remember that I’m a middle class, college-educated white girl who’s choosing to volunteer in Australia for fun. Not exactly Rosie the Riveter, ya know?

When we aren’t working, we have been have a great time hanging out with our hosts: watching Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (it doesn’t get more Aussie than that!), going to the pub for Thursday Trivia Night and attending yet another AFL match. After seeing a second match and having the rules re-explained by die-hard fans, we’re finally starting to understand the game. Kind of. 

On a totally unrelated note, today is Vincent's and my fifth wedding anniversary. It's also our day off, so we are celebrating our special milestone by spending a rainy day lazing around on someone else's couch. I know, the romance is overwhelming.

So that's the summary of us volunteering in Australia: spending our days off being immobile sub-humans and spending our work days playing with our nuts.

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Frambuesas! y Nueces!

Picking raspberries beneath soaring granite mountains. Laughing with a local family over home-cooked meals. Grabbing ripe apples directly off the branch when we want a snack. And all of this before we retire to our cozy log cabin in a corner of the farm and make a fire in our wood-burning stove.

Did I mention that all of this is free?

Well I guess not entirely free. For six hours a day (five days a week) of our time and labor, we have our cabin, breakfast and lunch provided, and weekends free in an area of Argentina where there are more hikes than we could do in a year.

That's the deal for two weeks of volunteering on an organic farm in El Bolson, Argentina, in northern Patagonia. And I have to say: we are loving it.

A typical day starts at 8:00am for breakfast with the other three volunteers before working from 9:00-12:00. Lunch is prepared either by a volunteer or by the hosts and is eaten with the group around 12:30 or 1:00pm. We then clean up the kitchen and have a break until 3:00pm, when we start working again until 6:00pm. It goes pretty fast and the work isn't too physically demanding.

Where the actual work is concerned, I will admit that we were a bit naive in our expectations. When we decided to make volunteering a part of our trip, we saw it as an opportunity to learn important skills that we could use later for a possible career change. So far, we have learned the useful, resume-building competencies of collecting walnuts, digging up weeds and separating raspberries based on their ripeness. Heavy stuff.

I actually really love picking raspberries. Dead serious.

Miss March of the "Lesbian Farmers of Patagonia" Calendar 2012

Despite the rudimentary work, we are absolutely loving working outside and being active all day long. The farm itself is gorgeous and set in a stunning location, and it's nice to be in one place for more than a week.

My dog Mia. She loves me almost as much as I love her (but apparently not enough to open her eyes for our family portrait...)

Sunset on the mountains that overlook the farm

An aperitif on our makeshift patio

 This place is over-run by adorable fluffy things.

I have no witty caption, I just like this picture.

The best thing about the place, though, is our accommodation. While our cabin is extremely rustic, it is cozy, has a kitchen and a bathroom with hot water, and above all, it is private. For the last three months, we've been constantly sharing a living space with other people. We have gotten used to working around other backpackers in the kitchen when we are cooking, passing people in the hallway on our way to the bathroom and being forced to make small talk in the breakfast area before we've even had our first coffee. For the first time since we left Switzerland, we have our own space (albeit an extremely small and basic one) and it is wonderful.

Home Sweet Home

Keeping the romance alive with bunk beds

Our kitchen/dining room/entry/office

We also lucked out with our hosts, Roly and Analia, who are extremely sweet. That is, we think they are sweet, but since they only speak extremely fast, incomprehensibly-accented Spanish that sounds like a turkey's gobble, we usually only have a vague idea what they are saying and basically just try to interpret facial expressions and hand gestures. In fact, for all we know they could be insulting us during every conversation, but as long as they do it with a smile, we'll just nod with dopey grins on our faces and say, "Si, gracias!"

Just to make things even easier on us, Roly is a very kind but very excitable man who Punctuatates! Every! Sentence! With! An! Exclamation Point! He's so excited about things like walnuts (Nueces!) and raspberries (Frambuesas!) that he talks even faster than usual while giving us instructions, making it all but impossible to understand him. Below is a typical conversation between Roly and us:

Roly: Gobble gobble Nueces! Gobble this morning gobble!

Us: Si!

Roly: Gobble gobble behind the house gobble!

Us: Si...

Roly: Si, si, si! Nueces! Afterwards gobble gobble gobble! Bueno!

Us: Si, gracias!

Lunches are even more awkward, when we sit around the table with Roly and Analia and try to keep up our end of the conversation for an hour. Our Spanish is slowly improving enough that we can make basic small talk, and when Roly isn't talking about walnuts, he calms down a little and we can actually understand him. But it's still pretty painful and we sure as hell aren't having any philosophical discussions around that lunch table.
Overall, our time here is both relaxing and enriching. We are enjoying the place, the work and the people, and are managing to improve our Spanish as well.

But I think by the time we leave this weekend, I'll be glad to say goodbye to nueces.

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