I haven´t updated this page in so long due to being busy working, traveling, studying, and having fun. But now after my first week of language school I have the weekend off, and thus time to upload photos and write. I´ve added photos from my visit to the Island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean, funny pictures of my friend Megan, who I was travelling with, and photos of Úbeda, where I am now, and where it snowed a lot the past two days. I never thought that it would snow while I was in Spain, but alas it has, and I quite like it, despite not being completely prepared clothing wise. It was hard to adjust to because I had just been on sunny and warm Mallorca wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and swimming in the mediterranean the week before.
The second farm that we went to didn´t end up working out for very long. Kate, the farmer had said yes to too many people, and thus felt overwhelmed with the amount of workers she had, and asked us to leave if we could. We wanted to leave anyways because we weren´t working harvesting olives, just clearing out blackberries and a plant much like Scotch Broom that I started calling ´Spanish Broom.´
I broke up with Eliza at that second farm. I could go into more detail aboout my reasons, and my feelings, but I don´t feel like this is an appropriate place to do so. This was a very difficult ending to a relationship, especially since we were travelling in a foreign country, which is a situation that can make or break a relationship, and I believe that it was one factor that led to us breaking up.
After leaving the second farm Eliza went back to the first one, and Megan and I flew to the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean to wwoof with our friend Clea at a farm at an old monastery. We were going to take a bus all the way to the farm/monastery, Son Rullan, which was about 30 minutes north of Palma, but Henar, who works at Son Rullan, happened to be doing some errands in town and she picked us up at the bus stop. Megan and I drank really strong coffee at the cafe in the bus station while we were waiting, and got really cracked out. Look at the photos of me with a sign that said ´Henar´ that I made out of a napkin. Right when we were about to give up on waiting we saw a beautiful Spanish woman wearing dark sunglasses enter the bus station with a cute little dog in her arms, and it turned out to be Henar. Her dog is named Linda (spanish for pretty) and looks kind of like a chihuahua, but is actually a type of dog that is native to Mallorca. Henar took us to her car, helped us shove our backpacks in, and we zoomed off on the streets of Mallorca talking a mix of Spanish and English about Son Rullan, Mallorca,nature the language of Catalan and it´s Mallorquin dialect that is spoken there in addition to Spanish. We went to the Spanish version of Home Depot, bought some gloves, and then escaped the city and headed for the mountains.
Once Megan and I arrived at Son Rullan our jaws were dropped for about two days due to the beauty of that place. It is an amazingly beautiful monastery from the 15th century with many floors, rooms, decks, windows...and the best of all was the fireplace. Instead of having a fireplace that has a fire in it, while you sit outside of it, at Son Rullan the fireplace is a room with benches around the edges, a giant chimney for a roof, and a campfire style fire in the center, surrounded by stones. It was amazing, like an indoor campfire all of the time. I don´t have any pictures of it to show you, but I´m going to aquire some from Clea to put up her. Check out the other pictures that I put up of Son Rullan, I made one gallery with photos of the surrounding land, views, and house, and another with pictures of all of the people we made friends with who lived or worked there. Like Alex, a film director from Madrid who is renting a room in the house while he works on writing two scripts. And Oliver a funny chap who lives in Copenhagen, but was born of German parents, and had an English accent. Oliver is living at Son Rullan and doing work trade. It was fun hanging out with both of them because they were both very funny, and nice to us.
The woman who owns the house is named Sybilla, but we never met her. She is apparently one of the most famous fashion designers in Spain. Her niece Monica, and Henar are the people that work for her to take care of the house, organize everything, arrange events like weddings, and manage the work traders and wwoofers like us. Our work boss however, the guy who told us what work to do was a really tall Nigerian named Everest. Everest was awesome, and super relaxed. He showed me how their small olive press works.
Most of the days we were there we worked moving stones from an inside storage area to piles outside. It was hard manual labor, but it felt so good to give back, and to trade my energy in exchange for being able to stay there and eat good food. We usually worked 5 hours in the am, and had lunch at 2pm, and then the rest of the afternoon off. The food there was really good, and included meat which gave me more energy than the food of the previous farms. Even though we weren´t harvesting olives since the harvest had been finished in November, it was still an amazing wwoof farm, the best of the three that we worked on.
In the afternoons we would hang out, go on walks, read, nap, talk, and relax. Our first night Henar took us to a bonfire party in the center of the nearest town, Deia. There were tons of people of all ages there, free food including many varieties of sausage that we roasted on barbecues made of kegs cut in half. There was also bread that we would smother with olive oil, toast on the barbecue, and squeeze and mash tomatoes onto with our hands, mmmm... And free wine too. It was a great way to end a long day of travelling and celebrate our arrival to Mallorca.
On our last day Henar took Megan and I to a secret nude beach on the mediterranean and we went swimming. It was the first time that I had seen the mediterranean up close, and swam in it. It felt so good to immerse myself in that cold water that I had been looking at all week from up on the mountain, and then to lay out on the rocks in the sun, in January! That night Alex made a great risotto dinner, we drank wine, laughed and enjoyed the company of new friends that we might never see again. It seemed like we all became close very fast, and I felt like we were a little community for that week. Son Rullan has definately been the highlight of my trip so far, and I plan on going back to work there for a week or two in April before returning to the states.
On the day of our departure Clea and I sadly packed our backpacks and reluctantly hoisted them onto our shoulders as we walked away from one of the most amazing places either of us had ever been, and from some great people that we would never forget.
