extremes (updated)

 

Looking back on our trip from Hong Kong, these are some of the things that stand out.  Updates to the post extremes, from November, are in blue.

The Good

• best live music – choir in Hallgrimskirkja (church) in Reykjavik, Iceland
  

• best dance music – in Istanbul (small sample size, N=1)
  
• place we’re most eager to return to – Istanbul
  
• nicest train – (C) Vienna to Budapest (J) Singapore MRT, due to the lack of doors between each train car.  Whoah!  Everything is bendy!
  
• best wwoof farm – the olive-picking farm in Umbria, Italy  Sorry, Italy: we have to go with the lemon/avocado Moroccan farm.  Read about it in the posts wonderful wwoofing in morocco and  wwoof write-up.
  
• best skyline – (J) Istanbul Hong Kong (C) Florence
  
• prettiest church – Saint Chappelle in Paris with the large stained glass windows in the small church

• most impressive Roman building/ruin – (C) the Pantheon in Rome (J) the baths of Caracalla in Rome  Dougga in Tunesia, even if a lot of it was rebuilt. 
  
• best treasure collection – the Hapsburg’s collection in Vienna (much better than the Medici collection in Florence)
  
• best drink – 75 cent 35 cent fresh squeezed orange juice in Istanbul Marrakesh…. or maybe the $9 dollar Leffe Browns in Jerusalem after three weeks in Morocco.
  
• best new drink – Floc de Gasgogne in Normandy
  
• best dessert – (C) chocolate dipped candied lemon rind in Perugia homemade fresh lemon tart at the Moroccan wwoof farm (J) lemon gelato in Florence
  
• nicest strangers – (C) people in Normandy who picked us up while hitchhiking (J) man who gave us books on Hinduism when we wandered into a temple (in Singapore’s little India) to watch singing and dancing.  He didn’t really speak English, but he wanted us to have those books!
  
• best dining experience – the Weinbau (wine bar) Stadlmann in Vienna where a glass of (recent house) wine costs 1,3 €, the food is delicious, cheap and cafeteria style, the atmosphere is cozy and it is completely fine to play a board game while eating and drinking.  (J) Singapore hawker centers!
  
• best park – Versailles or le Jardin de Luxembourg in France (C) Park overrun by cats near the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (J) Singapore botanic(al) gardens.
  
• best meal – handmade gnocchi with organic white truffle sauce in Umbria, Italy (J) Chicken tagine, Moroccan salad, fresh fruit and ‘Berber whiskey’ at the Sahara dunes.  (C) Each successive meal at the Moroccan wwoof farm, including eggplant/tomato bruschetta, tomato/avocado/onion/lemon salad, lamb, stews and lots of ginger, lemon, and garlic.
  
• best swim –  (C) the Blue Lagoon in Iceland Dead Sea in Israel (J) Szechenyi Bath in Budapest with its ‘angry’ river.
  
  
• best art museum – (J) Uffizi in Florence, (C) the Borghese gallery due to the masterful sculptures by Bernini, or the Kunsthistoriches in Vienna, with its thematic exhibit, good bathrooms, and frequent benches.

Apollo and Daphne (1625) and The Rape of Proserpina (1622) by Bernini at the Borghese Gallery in Rome.  My favorite was is on the left and Jack’s is on the right.  Either way, these are by far the best sculptures we’ve seen.

• most fortunate travel coincidence – visiting the Duomo in Siena during the 6 weeks a year where the amazing floors are on display

• best call to prayer – When we were in Jerusalem, we thought it was home to the best muezzins (maybe to compete with the church bells), but that was before we heard the beautiful call to prayer in Amman.  The topography helped, bouncing the sound back and forth between the hills and making Amman the clear winner
  
• Best tourist information – Iceland, though getting around Singapore is so easy one doesn’t even have any questions to ask.
  
• Most entertaining animal behavior – (C) ferocious three-way goose fight at the Malaysian wwoof farm and (J) two horses and a dog chasing each other around the field in Normandy.

• Best hike – Umm al Biyara in Petra, Jordan. 
  
• Best (mostly) walled city: (C) Rome, (J) Jerusalem
  
• Most “lunar” experience – a toss-up between the Sahara and Iceland.
  

• Best travel innovation (by us) – (C) putting her hours of eyebrow tweezing to good use to extract a fish bone from Jack’s throat. (J) taking advantage of the water heater in our damp, cold Jerusalem room to make our water bottles into HOT water bottles.  It was a Christmas miracle!

The Less Than Good

• most power lines dangling over and on the sidewalks – Bucharest
  
• most footsore moment – in Glaises (Faverges) after hiking twice as long as planned with all of our stuff (J) I was pretty footsore in Petra, on the third day of hiking, after climbing up the Umm al Biyara… but it was a good sore.  My MOST footsore moment, however, came after a day of emulating the locals and walking around Singapore in flip-flops
  
• biggest letdown by google maps – the Gîte de l’École de Glaises which was about 3 miles up a mountain from where the maps said it was (see the most footsore moment, above)  Amman, Jordan - not only was google maps missing most of the streets, but searching was completely useless. 
  
• biggest rip off – 8€ Leffe beers in Paris.  This was our own fault. 
  
• most expensive feeling city – (C) Florence (J) Jerusalem in the moment I realized the exchange rate was 3.8 shekels per dollar, not 7.6…  oops.
  
• most smoky city place– Florence our windowless hotel room in Hong Kong, unfortunately
  
• most aggressive sales people – the rose pushers by the Spanish steps in Rome Ha ha ha ha, we were so young and innocent back then.
  
• worst planning error – not noting which side of the Danube our train arrived on in Budapest and therefore walking the exact wrong way (in the dark without a map)
  
• longest line – for the Bayeux tapestry in France where tour groups got to cut the line and the French people around us flew into a rage  (J) The line to get into St. Peters in Rome was way longer, but more expected.
  
• hardest place to communicate – Bucharest The Egged bus company information counter in Jerusalem… and not because they didn’t speak English. 
  
• what we miss the most – (C) Emo the cat, my clothes, and having an income (J) not living out of a small bag
  
• worst swim – in Corsica with the jellyfish (J) trying to paddle our windsurfing boards back in with no wind, against the current, in Singapore.
  
  
• most disappointing Lonely Planet pick – the Pirana Club in Bucharest, which was supposed to be in a happening student area and turned out to be in a cluster of two restaurants in the middle of nowhere
  
• worst museum – the ones in Mont Saint Michel, outside of the abbey itself
  
• worst credit card readers – all automatic ticket machines in France, Italy and Austria and the whole country of Romania
  
• most disappointing travel coincidence – the unexpected and unexplained closure of the Coliseum, the Forum and Palatine Hill
  
• worst sidewalks – (J) Istanbul with the downward staircases carved out (think Aggrocrag) (C) Bucharest with the construction,dogs, dog poop and wires  We have a new winner:  The Amman sidewalk with a sheer drop of about 30 ft to one side:
  
  
• worst candy – Iceland with the salty licorice or maybe the surprisingly bad Tunisian chocolate
  
• worst couch surfing experience – in Rekjavik with Sabrina (who lied or at least strongly mislead us)
  
  
• worst payphones – Romania where the phones appear to have enough memory for only 10-12 digits, meaning it is not possible to enter a calling card pin (J) Hong Kong, where our calling card is supposed to work, but where in reality the pay phones will not call any number (even toll-free) without putting change in
  
• worst bathrooms – France with the unexpectedly constant smell of pee, even when things look clean
  
• hottest day – picking tomatoes and peppers in Piedmont, Italy  Walking the approximately 1.5 miles from KL Sentral to our hostel in KL, wearing jeans, warm socks and our backpacks.  Welcome to Southeast Asia, Cari!
  
• coldest evening/night/morning – in Umbria with no heat but the fireplace
  
• worst sprint with our packs on – to the ferry in Nice (45 minutes of speed walking followed by about 20 minutes of running)
  

Obviously good wins out.  Definitely

WWOOF write-up

 

Over the past twelve years, wwoofing has taken me to six countries in four continents.  In this post, my goal is to review our wwoof experiences and to distil them into concrete advice for people who might be interested in wwoofing.

What is WWOOF supposed to be? Wwoof is a work-stay program for organic farms. It is supposed to give unskilled volunteers a chance to learn about organic farms, while giving farmers a helping hand and the opportunity to share their knowledge. There are multiple wwoof organization for different countries and a membership simply gives you access to the contact information for hosts. The rest is up to you.

Who are we as volunteers? Jack and I are probably not destined to be farmers, but we are interested in sustainable living, good food, and working up a sweat in the great outdoors.  We are fairly organized people who enjoy learning, but like to work hard and then relax.

What have I learned from wwoofing?  I learned to like tomatoes and plain yogurt and lots of other new foods.  I improved my French quite a bit, but not my Spanish.  Unexpectedly I learned about babies and Islam.  In addition to some specific practices for caring for plants and animals, I now have an idea of what permaculture is and some other sustainable living practices.  I learned something about how much I need clearly stated expectations, in order to work well and enjoy myself.  I also learned that being around animals can make me ridiculously happy.

Through wwoofing I have met people who have impressed me with the dramatic changes and conscious decisions they have made to improve their lives.

I have also practiced holding my tongue as I saw people do things I would never dream of doing, like driving on the freeway with a baby on their lap, burning plastic and feeding chicken bones to dogs.

Where have we/I wwoofed?

Key

• host is a summary of the relevent demographics of the host.
• B&B indicates how far along the host is in the hospitality industry.  This is a clue that very few hosts actually make money from their farms.
• miscomm is a reminder that in two weeks of working and living with someone from another culture and/or language there will be a few miscommunications.  Most of the time, they are no big deal, but sometimes tempers flare.

********** PRIOR TO GRAND ADVENTURE ********** 

What do I recommend when picking a farm?

• Go to a farm where the host has raised adult children or has a successful hospitality industry business.   Basically, go to a place where the host knows how to take care of people.  Of course you are not exactly a guest, but one of the most common issues (from our experience and what I’ve read) is inadequate meals.  It is hard to know in advance if the host has kids who have left home, but host profiles often give you and idea of their age and I recommend older hosts. 

Could I feed people for two weeks? No. Do I expect to be able to do so by the time I’m 50? Yes.

This characteristic alone separates the 2-3 bad farms from the rest.

• Don’t go to first-year farms.  Like the farm near Uvita, Costa Rica, they are unlikely to know what to do with you.  Wwoof Italia marks new farms.  In wwoof independent listings, the older farms are listed first.
• It’s hard to do, but if the host profile doesn’t explicitly list hours per day and days per week, ask about it.  It might feel like you will look lazy by asking, but it is harder to ask once you are already at the farm.  When you arrive, clearly ask about a start time and an end time for the day.
• You will do lots of dishes.  Without exception, every farm had a different dishwashing ritual.  Water conservation, availability of hot water, type of soap, dishwasher usage and drying method all varied.
• Most hosts prefer to cook most meals by themselves, but they usually appreciate it if you make a whole meal on your own.

 

A newer option that might fit more people’s interests, skills and trip time frames is http://www.workaway.info/.

the highest form of humor

 

In some of the places that we’ve been Dihram our trip, when you go out for Dinar at the restaurant around the Kroner, if you don’t have enough cash, Euro-n your own, there’s nothing Forint.  If they want to Ringget up, it would be better if they accepted credit cards in Leu of exact change.  Everything would be a Sheckle’ve-lot easier!

take-home cooking ideas

While I can’t exactly say that I’ve learned to cook anything new and amazing yet, I can say I have lots of new ideas for dishes I want to look up.  Here are some kitchen ideas I want to bring home:

• fennel – It is great in salads
• sprouts – We sprouted some beans at home after our trip to Costa Rica in 2006, and I’m inspired to get back to it again because they give such substance to salads, especially with salted sunflower seeds
• baking bread – I probably won’t get around to this for a long time, but our second Italian wwoof hostess regularly made some whole wheat bread with her own leaver (Is that the word?) and it was tasty and amazingly filling.  The rest of the world seems to eat a lot more bread than the US, and it is much better and also much cheaper (often subsidized with fixed prices…)
• eggplant – I don’t think it’s possible to cook it wrong.  We ate a lot of stewed eggplant, tomato, garlic, oil dish in Morocco and it’s stupendous.  I think I could eat it everyday.
• veggies in sandwiches – I think at home this is underappreciated.  Sure Subway will put a few raw veggies in but it’s nothing creative.  Today at lunch we had sandwiches and Jack’s had a coleslaw, an eggplant dish like what I just described, a chickpea and tomato dish and regular lettuce, tomato and meat.  More is better!
• pressure cooker – As scary as they may be, I think I need to get over it and get one.  All of our wwoof hosts have made wonderful concoctions with them and I suspect that few people cook beans regularly without them.
• cream – Ah France and it’s vast consumption of dairy products, which was a bit much, in my opinion.  That said, adding a little cream to a quick zucchini soup goes quite a long way.

Oh and by the way family, I have even eaten a few olives!  I don't love them, but some of the "less-olivey" (according to Jack, this means less briney) olives are not terrible.

Venice is the Venice of Italy

Last week we spent a very enjoyable two days staying in Venice between the olive wwoof farm and our 6 days in Vienna.  After doing Florence thoroughly (1 week) and Rome aggressively (3 days) several weeks earlier, we had a different plan for Venice: no research beforehand, just walking around, and nothing that required paying for admission.  It turned out to be a good city for this kind of lazy plan. 
With no cars or scooters on the islands, walking around was a pleasure.  It has to be the only city where every 4ft wide alley shows up on the map as a street of its own.  And there were plenty of  beautiful and free churches to sit in when we needed a break from walking.  The old medieval island itself was small enough that by the end of two days we started stumbling upon places that we had already been and actually knowing which 4 ft “street” to take without consulting a map.

In a city completely served by boats, Cari and I managed somehow to not set foot in a boat one time- we stayed exclusively on dry ground (and bridges).  We saw garbage boats, mover’s boats, DHL mailboats, and ambulance boats (after which we decided it would be better not to have a medical emergency right then).  We learned from a Venice guide podcast that the city is experiencing rapid depopulation and may soon cease to be a city at all- it will just be a place for tourists to come and ogle.  But I think it could be a great place to live, provided someone started a ‘zipboat’ boat sharing company

One strange thing we noticed among all the alleys was that, contrary to our expectations, the city smelled… good.  The water looked clean and you could always smell the sea, of course. No matter how dark and twisted the alley, there was never once a pee or garbage smell - we actually noticed bakery and restaurant smells wafting out of the back doors more often.  The garden of the museum on the North side of the Accademia bridge (we had to walk by it many times, there are only 4 bridges across the Grand Canal) smelled like roses at all times.  And with the tourist/local ratio all out of whack, there was much less smoking than in all the other Italian cities.

learning how to use the camera

 

I have been attempting to use the cameras manual mode some lately- previously, about all I ever did was force the flash to ‘off’ all the time.  Mostly, this has been useful in low-light situations, and we even bought one of those little tripods that they sell to tourists to try and get some better shots. 

Someday soon I will be ready for a wildly expensive camera, clearly.

food we ate

 

At our wwoof farm in Umbria, we ate organic vegitarian food for two weeks.  We felt extremely healthy and it was also quite tasty.  We’ve eaten all organic at several places we wwoofed and I am pretty much convinced that it does taste better.  We had many simple dishes like lentils or vegetable soups and they just seem to have more flavor.  I don’t know that we’ll ever be (able to be) devoted to organic food, but I do think the taste is better in addition to the other health benefits.

If you ask Jack about the food we ate, there is a 99% chance that he’ll say “Hunger is the best sauce.”    He has a point, but so do I :)

We had a great salad every day at lunch, including fennel, a new favorite.

We also tried two completely new foods.  We had persimone out of the neighbor’s garden, and we needed a dictionary to identify it.  We also ate a large cousin of celary, which Jack really liked and thought tasted something like asperagus.

Oh and in my opinion, Italy tasted better than France, because French food was so heavy and creamy.  

Next up is wiener schnitzel in Vienna.

the dark ages of road construction

 

This is the Appian Way a few miles outside of Rome.  It was built around 300 BC to move soldiers and it connected Rome to Brindisi, in south eastern Italy.

This is the road near our wwoof farm in Umbria.  It served for about 15 years and then the government decided to improve it.  That “improvement” lasted less than a year before sliding away and now they’re back at it again.  It’s easy to spot the places where the newest work has collapsed yet again.  The land to the north is covered in debris and sand and mud from all the shoddy work.

an excellent Sunday

 

On our day off we rode horses at a neighbor’s and went to a bustling chocolate festival in Perugia. 

We are exceedingly inexperienced riders and hunters with hounds and guns filled the woods so we didn’t leave the farm, but it was still quite fun.  I made it into the saddle much more smoothly than the last time we rode, which was in Costa Rica five years ago. My horse was called Betty and Jack’s was Merlin.

The chocolate festival was the place to be, even though it was the last day of a TEN DAY event.

The best thing we ate was some candied lemon rind dipped in chocolate…

Note the enormous Lindt chocolate balls in the picture above.