Notes on France

Well, my friends, my time in France will come to an end in only but a few hours (the last of them having been, and will be, spent waiting in an airport). These are some things I'd like to take note of...

1. Apparently, & according to my fellow Frenchmen on Blabla car (will explain the Blabla later), an American should normally have vacationed elsewhere in France, say Paris. Bretagne, they say, was an odd choice of location. Perhaps this is because Bretagne is a newer addition to the country, only having joined a few hundreds of years ago... I'll remember to try and add traditional France to my schedule next time..!

2. The bottled water here does not taste pleasant and refreshing. Tastes like I'm drinking some weird old pool water, or something. Note to stay away. It's not horrible, but not good.

3. Blabla car. Amazing thing. Systemized ride share that is usually cheaper than flying, driving, train-ing, or busing. Wonderful!

4. French croissants and meringues taste SO GOOD. At least at local boulangeries. They know what they're doing.

5. If you're gonna sleep in Orly airport, Orly airport *will* yell at you safety tests over the intercom repeatedly for 40 minutes, starting at midnight..... :\

6. If you wear normal clothing, and not Hawaiian shirts with stretchy waistband pants, you're likely to get confused as a French-speaking human. In light of this, learn how to tell people you really know nothing of the French language! Either that, or learn French.

7. There are weird little instant specialized coffee machines that give you all sorts of weird options, like Oreo crumbs in your cup of Joe or KitKat filled hot chocolate..... Note: bring euro coins to try aaaall the options next time!!

8. American fast food chains = sooooo different outside the U.S. In Iceland, KFC offered lamb soup, I think. In France, McDonald's offers Le P'tit TexMex burger and thick cut fries with curry sauce!

Well! Off to Naples, Italy now (in 2 hours) to visit my brother's family in their new home! Wooohooo! Wish me a good flight (unless you read this more than 4 hours from the time I published this-- haha).

Long time no post!

Well, everybody, I cannot post photos to blog posts from my smartphone's Blogger app. It malfunctions every time I try. So, sorry... badger Stephen to make a post!! Hehehhh-- he may not reply to Facebook posts, but he reeeads theeem

So! Here's a tidbit about Copenhagen, Denmark & Bretagne, France.

To me, most of the area of Denmark we were in seemed like a version of San Francisco, except with older infrastructure. And some palaces. There were people out and about, & a hippy-ish vibe was in the air. We found some cool old buildings and there were lots of beautiful green spaces and parks, including a maze! I felt like I was in Harry Potter, and ran to the center of the maze with Cedric. ...except Cedric didn't die-- we never touched the portkey......

Anyway!

We arrived in France beginning of this past week, in Pleurtuit-- at the tiniest airport! The Airbnb host there had the funniest family & cleanest home, but they spoke almost no English. It was interesting to communicate with them and figure out rides!  Google Translate was a our friend. We got a 2-hour-ish ride through an app called Blablah car for around 10€ each to Quimper, and spent the day there until we were picked up by the owner of the farm we are now staying at. Old town Quimper was pretty cool. We got some nice photos :)

The farm is near Pleyben. It's a farm with dairy goats! But the weather reeeally reminds me of Humboldt. When I got out of the car, heading toward Quimper, for the first time, I exclaimed, "Smells like McKinleyville!" (Or, at least, that's what I exclaimed in my mind)

At the farm, we do a few different types of tasks. The first day, I made cheese and sorted wool. Stephen worked on installing a beam into a farm building that's being converted into a living area (I think) and milked goats. Besides that, I've also done a bit of harvesting of tomatoes, etc., and we helped with making bread. And they make a lot of bread. Those are the biggest masses of dough I think we'll ever knead..!

And, speaking of bread, they do NOT make the typical "French bread"  you might imagine...oh, no. It's like gnawing in leather. For reals. Even when it comes fresh out the oven some loaves are hard to chew. And we only bake once a week because it's old school-- huge wood oven that you could fit 5 people inside of..! So they bread gets harder with each day, until the next baking day arrives. If we still haven't finished off the old stuff by then, we have to keep eating it until it's finished off! Oh, bread.... Why you so dense and hard?....

Besides bread, we eat lots of vegetables and cheese here. And the tomatoes are delicious. Almost everything is from the farm.

Here's what I've learned so far:
1. Not disturbing old ladies can be a challenge! (The mother of the farmer--both grew up here-- lives downstairs & prattles off in French at the turn of a hat! But she seems nice enough when not disturbed)
2. Cheese making is truly a science.
3. Milking a goat is dang hard. Learning how to even start to do it took a bit!
4. The hills in this area are pleasing to the eye.
5. Never trust a cow.

Testing App

Test, test. 1-2-3

Counting sheeps

**forenote: this is a partnered post-- by both Stephen & Hannah! Woohoo!**

A quick word about sheep. To whoever thought sheep were submissive, trusting, gentle creatures, think again. They are wild! They are unruly, and they are stubborn! And, boy, are they poopy...

Ok, now we can continue..

Herding sheep can in a way, bring out the natural instincts of the hunter gatherer in all of us. The chase instantly makes us more agile, swifter, resilient. I feel I was made for this. And it's true, our evolution has made us superior chasers. We may not be the fastest, but we can sure run down other creatures with efficiency!

First is the gathering from the valleys and mountains. We don't know what to expect. The day starts with breakfast, and we head out, getting a free Icelandic four wheeling tour in this car! (Minus the trailer..)

Once the "tour" was over, a brisk hike began! Yay, more tour content! With wind not only blowing our hair, we picked our way through rocky hillsides & narrow sheep trails. Falling was an option, one we often took against our will..

While traversing around on mountainsides after untrusting sheep proved challenging (& they said the next gathering, happening the day after we leave is 5x harder terrain & 5x longer work day! Woooow...), the views were beautiful!

Here's Stephen, after we exited the rocky mountain area, bloodied, bruised, and well exercised. With sheep in the lead, we headed toward the farm:

The farm in the distance... :)

The sheep changed direction very often, in favor of a more effective escape route. Being constantly on your toes, and fast to boot wast the only effective method of countering the problem. Forget sports, be a sheep herder...

The sheep were all gathered up, but 1 lamb was left behind, confused & bewildered. (It had been on a trip in the 4 wheel truck just previous to this part of the round-up... Maybe it was car-sick?? Haha!)

Anyways, we were thinking, "meh... We didn't gather all that many sheep today, maybe 30-ish." So, I asked Joí, and he said probably more like upwards of 100! Wow. And seeing them all herded together at the end...yup. Also, after seeing them herding together, we now understand the whole jumping sheep thing. They jump. Oh, yes, they jump.

After all that herding, we released them into a large field to chow on grass for a few days before giving them all check-ups. 

Now, fast forward a few days past more construction projects, etc. (which we will probs come back to)

After some last minute barn clean-up, we were sent out to the fields to gather these sheep once more! (We went to the wrong fields at first--oops..! But we got it straight eventually...)

On the way we met horses & berries! Berries are a tasty snack for a hungry sheep chaser.

But then the fun began again! Running around as human sheepdogs! Sheephumans! We herded those sheeps, we herded them good! Right into that new round-up corral we helped build :D

And they told us many of the sheeps like bread! ...more like one sheep likes bread...

Next, we gathered the sheep into the sheep house barn thing, called a fjöthus (sheep sheds), which took a while. And began sheep check-ups, sheep shearing, sheep getting pooped on, sheep crap all over us-ing!

They do not agree with us cutting off their disgustingly warm, matted wool.. They do not agree one bit. But it must be done if their wool is going to be useful later, because this old stuff is terrible!

Really wooly! Really heavy! And really, really gross...

Hannah in a sea of sheeps!

And Stephen finds his inner Viking...

We ate special stuff today!

Lo & behold, I made my food post too soon! For tonight we ate whale fat & horse!!

Here is a photo. Whale on the left, horse soup on the right:

The whale fat was a little weird, but the texture was not that strange-- it was a mixture between a custard & pineapple, Stephen says. The flavor is off, though, because they always add something to make it sour. So we don't really know what it actually tastes like.

The horse meat is wonderful. It just is. Sorrynotsorry. It's tender & flavorful. I think it's like a beef-lamb hybrid, flavor wise. Stephen loves it so much, he's eating another bowl now even though he's full. And before you get too freaked out, there's a legit reason for eating them. They are set into the fields in the summertime, and they are free to roam...and breed. If they didn't eat some of them, there would be too many horses to sustain through the winter months. 

So! There you have it. Horse...mmmmmm. Whale...eh.

Oh, the Stuff that Sustains Us!

So, what do Icelandic people eat? We wondered that same question, until arriving at Joí's house (pronounced yo-A).

Here's what the innards of the fridge look like (plus they have another fridge and freezer in the pantry). We eat a loooot of dairy product here. Some of the milk is straight from the cow at a nearby farm! And quite a bit of meat, too-- the raise a lot of it themselves. And, yes, they eat horse. We've been promised a horse meal while we're still here...! Hehehehhhh

Last night we had fiskur (fish) and potatoes! Both were boiled. You put em on your plate with butter & mash em all together, and it sho' is delicious! 

We use sooooo much cream here. Cream with your milk, cream with your yogurt, whipped cream... Stephen and I couldn't believe how much had been used up in the span of a few days! But, mmmmm, it's good.

They have this lactose free thick milk stuff we use at this house because the youngest has issues with lactose in regular milk. It's good, though! And Skyr is the traditional Icelandic yogurt-- similar to Greek yogurt.

They have this crazy-person stove that you have to jab with your finger to turn on or adjust heat because it's got digital controls. Kinda cool, though...

They have a crazy-person utensil rack in their dishwasher, too! It's kind of nice having all the utensils separated all apart from each other, but also a semi-hassle.

Stephen steals the iPad and takes a shot of the crazy person in the kitchen!

I made a pretend snack meal, and made Stephen model. We have these midday snacks in between the main meals. They're not casual, though-- they're like clockwork. [&STEPHEN, stop licking my leg while I'm typing!!] when you wake up, breakfast, 10am is coffee break, 12pm is lunch, 4pm is snack and coffee, 7pm is dinner. And snacks usually have bread, cheese, assorted meats and vegetables, butter, coffee, sometimes sweets.

Weeeell! That's all for now :D 

Hope you have a good day--we're off to go fix some barn door thresholds..!

Farming it up in Iceland

Well...! 

Our first few days in Iceland were beautiful, but a bit rough. So, after enough of getting soggy sleeping under tarps, we decided to email some farmers we had previously connected with (& who we had also denied, since we thought we would camp the whole time) through workaway.info. And (luckily) one responded! 

Now we are at a really beautiful farmhouse in the very north of Iceland with a fun, hardworking Icelandic family! There is a mom, a dad, and 3 young, rambunctious kids. Oh, and 200 sheep roaming around. Here's a bit of what this place looks like:

We put on overalls cuz we get all dirty & nasty.

We fix things.

We work and live in these red-roofed buildings.

We are happyyyy! And drive and ride in tractors.

And diesel, trailer-hauling vehicles. We haul around a lot of waste & old hay! Woohoo!

We also help build things (this will be a fence made of pallets).

And we sleep in a nice, warm bed! :D

And hang out in a nice, warm house 

And no matter what we're up to, we always have a great view..!