A Breath of Fresh Air

After our dispiriting second host experience, we braced ourselves for all of the possible things that could be difficult in location number three. Our third hosts were a Spanish family (husband, wife and two children 7 and 3) who spoke very little English. The experience was a bit like an immersion Spanish language course, only we didn’t pay for it and didn’t get formal language lessons. We chose this particular host because we wanted to stay in the north of Spain during the heat of late July (good thing, too…as the rest of Spain experienced a heat wave while we enjoyed temperatures in the high seventies (22 and 23 degrees) and there weren’t many other options in the region. We were starting to rule out Asturias as the perfect place for us – too damp and rainy and very dreary in the winter, furthermore, if we lived here, we would have to drive 5 hours to Madrid to get a can of coconut milk to make Thai food. That’s just criminal. We learned that for most of Spain, actually, the concept of ethnic cuisine consists of Italian pizza places, Turkish kebab shops and an occasional Chinese restaurant. We’re hopeful that the south of Spain will have more Moroccan-influenced cuisine.

But I digress…coolness won over cuisine (free idea for a band name: Coolness over Cuisine) and we stayed in the north for three weeks. What a wonderful thing that we did so, as our hosts were exceptional! We really clicked with them – especially the husband, J, who, though he spoke almost no English, made us feel as if we were kindred spirits. He is the same age as us and is a former professional bicyclist for the Spanish team. He retired after lots of injuries and now works the organic farm, cooks, cares for the kids and manages any volunteers who might be around. His wife, S, is a school teacher and educator of special needs and disadvantaged adults who want to learn about eco-farming. The beautiful children, 3 and 7 years old, were on summer holiday, so we saw a lot of them and we eventually became an accepted part of the family.

Our accommodations were in a separate wood house with a bedroom, kitchen, dining area, bathroom, and even its own strawberry patch! It was wonderful to finally have some privacy again. This was their original home for the first five years in the small town on the eastern coast of Asturias. Their current home was perched high on a hill just 10 minutes walk to an excellent beach. When it wasn’t stormy or too cool, we (Michiel, especially) truly enjoyed the waves, as well as the beauty of the surrounding natural reserve. Michiel had the added thrill (scare?) of being a part of a life-saving rescue of a teenager who couldn’t swim into shore.

Almost all of the land just meters away from the coastline was devoted to growing corn and the primary structure of the town is a cattle-feed processing facility, which also served as the location of the local cooperative store (shopping was for members, only…a strange and difficult arrangement for the many tourists who stayed in the town for its famous beach). There was almost nothing to do in town except go to the beach and I use the term “town” lightly, as it was really just a strip of cornfields, homes, a couple of hotels, a train station and a church. The beauty of the place was the ocean, the green of the fields and the people we met while staying there.

The town as viewed from a nearby hill


Cornfields and coastline


Our hosts provided us with yogurt, cheese, vegetables, fresh eggs and homemade bread for snacking or dining in our own little house (casita). They even brought over wine and beer in case we needed “aperitifs” before the 10 pm (or later) evening meal. We also enjoyed the benefits of the daily bread delivery and twice weekly fish delivery to the front door of the main house!

The casita - our home!


Not only were our hosts ridiculously generous and accommodating, they introduced us to their family members and friends, as well. J made sure that we understood what was going on in the rapid-fire Spanish conversations by distilling it down to the gist and using simple language. We also met the three expats who lived in the town (one Swiss who discovered the town while walking the Camino de Santiago and an Italian couple). The Swiss woman seemed to enjoy socializing with all the Helpers who came through and she invited us to join her for fiestas, trips to the beach and local highlights and to listen to traditional Asturian music with gaitas (bagpipes) and accordions. It was great to have a guide who could answer our questions in English and help decipher some of the puzzlements of living in a different culture.

We worked from 9 to 2 on Monday through Friday and a couple of hours on Saturday morning. Our work was either on their property – picking and shelling peas, cleaning onions or sorting potatoes for sale, weeding or cleaning leeks, or working in the greenhouse pruning tomatoes or planting basil for pesto, which the 3 year old had become addicted to thanks to their Italian neighbors – or on the farm belonging to J’s parents, who lived just down the road. (He had grown up here.) They had a much larger piece of land with rows and rows of potatoes and fava beans growing aside cornstalks. Much of our time on that property was spent winding the beans around the cornstalks which was seen as less time-consuming than putting up strings and wires (we’re not so sure).



In this part of the garden, they decided to use strings for the beans


Putting in an "aromatic (herb) garden". That's the main house in the background and the ocean beyond


My favorite day was spent with the whole family harvesting potatoes. On that day, cousins, dad, a friend and our host family all gathered to walk behind the tractor and collect the potatoes that were “kicked” up by the bouncing rake (for lack of a more technical term). The work was hard on the back, but the spirit of community and laughter made it really enjoyable. I also got to drive the old tractor, which made it all especially fun!



Afterwards, we enjoyed beer and homemade chorizo (as a matter of fact, beer, wine and cider were regular lunchtime staples, much to Michiel’s delight). It’s really nice how families gather and drink together. We enjoyed the same phenomenon at our first Spanish fiesta.

Almost every day on the calendar is a festival day for some Catholic saint in Spain. If the church in your town has a relic (a piece of clothing or a body part) of the saint being celebrated on that calendar date, the town organizes a fiesta. The fiesta normally starts around 9 pm and will always have a stage and ridiculously huge stacks of speakers so that the people in the next town over can “enjoy” the music, as well. There will also be a mobile trailer that has been converted into a fold-out shop with loads of sweets and junk toys. The guys who run and own these must make a killing in summertime! Finally, there will be a bar of some kind.

The fiesta we went to was located in the little town where J’s sister lives. The evening started with families gathering at their own folding tables in the town plaza and enjoying big bread rolls filled with chorizo, cheese and sauce. These were provided by the fiesta organizers, along with crates of cider and bottles of red wine. The best part of the whole experience was watching the older folks in their folding chairs tagging swigs off of a bottle of red wine and passing it around. It was good fun getting sloshed with J’s dad, who didn’t really realize or care that we didn’t speak as much Spanish as he thought.

We didn’t go on too many outings as we really enjoyed just hanging out in our own little house, but we did spend a day in the Galician port town of Ribadeo, where we sampled the local specialty – pulpo (octopus), which was surprisingly tender and learned first-hand that, indeed, every province of Spain has its own fierce pride and sometimes its own language (indeed, Asturias has its own language, as well, which is enjoying a resurgence of interest in schools). Even though Ribadeo is just over the provincial border, the people here speak Gallego, which is a completely different language than Castillian Spanish. It’s the biggest reason why we chose not to consider living in Galicia, despite hearing about its greenness, beauty and affordability.

Ribadeo's Harbor


Downtown Ribadeo


So…was this the perfect place? We were awfully sad to leave our remarkable host and the couple of friends we made. We were even more sad to leave our comfy little house and the 10 minute walk to the beach, but truthfully, we couldn’t see living in such a small town with such limited transportation connections. For me, a discussion with a friend of our hosts clinched the deal. While cutting my hair (she did it for free and did a good job, too!), she told me how depressed she gets in the fall and winter because of the grayness, dampness and the lack of light. Hmmm…..sounds a lot like the reason we don’t stay in Alaska or Amsterdam in the winter. We decided to move on…

Leeks, leeks and more leeks

Alternative title: How to survive a host who can’t stand you

Our second host’s location was in a more industrial part of Asturias near the coast. Our arrival was a dispiriting one as we left the beautiful Picos mountains and drove past ugly old factories and belching smokestacks. The town had grown in size recently and housing developments had crawled up the hill from the town center to the hill where our host lived on her family’s property.

Nevertheless, we arrived full of high expectations. Our host was running a market garden and was preparing weekly boxes of organic produce for 21 customers. The reviews from other volunteers on the HelpX website were very positive and mentioned fun trips to the beach and the host’s good humor and sweetness. We hoped to learn some of the best methods to maximize harvests without using pesticides. We asked to arrive a few days earlier than planned as we soon discovered that our original plan of taking 5 days off between hosts would become quickly financially untenable - even the cheapest of hostals (small, independent hotels) were over 50 euro per night and campgrounds were often far from bus stops and supermarkets.

We arrived on a Friday and didn’t know that the volunteers did no work on Saturday and Sunday. We did, however, join the other volunteer after lunch for a couple of hours of weeding as a show of good work ethic. The other volunteer had been there a week and seemed to have a good relationship with the host. We, on the other hand, got absolutely no explanation of how things worked or any sort of a welcome at all. Perhaps we should have seen this as a sign of worse things to come.

Our living quarters - a converted horreo or granary


Common dining area and our host's bedroom (she slept on some blankets thrown over a camping mat and some wooden pallets!


We were quite surprised to see how young our host was and over the next two weeks felt the full consequences of dealing with an immature and undeveloped manager, communicator and coordinator. At first, Michiel and I were unsure if we had done something wrong, misinterpreted the situation, or were experiencing cultural differences. We found her to be self-absorbed, unfriendly (to us, anyway) and inconsiderate (we had to ask for toilet paper for 2 days before we got any, luckily we have learned that while traveling it is always handy to carry some in every one of your trousers), and we discussed early on whether the situation was too intolerable to stay. The success of her garden and some of the techniques she used were compelling enough for us to stick around. From day 2, she made it clear that she didn’t care for us by saying as little as possible to us when we were not working and providing only the barest of instruction and explanation. Questions about why she was using certain rotation techniques were met with responses like, “I follow that book. You should read it”….which happened to be in Spanish and she knew that our Spanish wasn’t very good. She didn’t care for comments like “Why do you do it this way?”. Either she thought we were judging her or she didn’t have the energy or desire to explain her methods to us.

It could very well have been that she was tired (who wouldn't be after trying to sleep on wooden pallets???!!). She had hosted over 300 volunteers in the past 4 years and it was clear to us that she had lost any sort of interest in being a real “host”. She provided little to no instruction, no follow up on our progress, very little encouragement and simple one or two word answers to our questions.

Things got even worse during a tour of the fields when I said, “we ate battered comfrey leaves at our last host’s made with eggs and flour.” She blanched and said, “you do realize that this is a totally vegan household? It was on the website.” I had read so many HelpX host descriptions that I completely forgot which was which. Somehow in our excitement in working in an organic market garden, we conveniently forgot that her household was run on a strict no alcohol, no meat, no caffeine and no dairy policy and furthermore, she had no refrigerator. She looked annoyed, but it was only a couple of days later when she actually asked us, “Do you eat meat?” We weren’t the only ones who said “yes”. The other volunteer also answered truthfully….”um, yeah”. In fact much of the conversations between the three of us in the evening in our little dormitory (we slept in a converted granary that is common on Asturian properties) had to do with food and what we were missing in our diets. We snuck out on Day 2 to eat cheese; the other volunteer went to town almost every evening for an ice cream. On Day 3, we giddily slurped down a bottle of wine with lunch in town. It was unavoidable, really, since all set menu lunches (which is the most economical way to eat) come complete with a bottle of young Rioja. We simply didn’t want to waste anything.

Since I’m on the topic of day menus, I want to wax poetic for a moment about what you can get for 8 to 12 euros per person in the set menus (menu del dia) that are available at all Spanish restaurants. All include at least a salad course, a main course, a bottle of wine or cider, fizzy water, bread and dessert. Some even include a small appetizer. It’s a great way to try out lots of different food for a very reasonable price. Since lunch is the biggest meal of the day, this bonanza feast is a great way to get into the spirit of Spain, especially since a bottle of wine at 2 pm is enough to get almost anyone ready for a siesta. Sadly, it’s really hard to take a siesta in the middle of a city when your bed is a 25 minute walk back uphill, but the parks are usually empty from about 3 to 4 when everyone else is comfortably snoozing at home.

The old part of the city of Aviles


We returned from our excursions to town slightly tipsy and full of the dreaded dairy products (mmmm…..sheep cheese or pizza) that our host wouldn’t allow in her kitchen and crawled into bed early in preparation for the pre-dawn start. The work day was 6 hours and we agreed as a group that we would work from 7 to 11 am and then another two hours from 3 to 5 pm. It made for a long day, especially since the work was occasionally rather strenuous. Our host didn’t believe in using machinery (are you getting the trend?), so all of the garden beds were dug and turned by hand. We also did a lot of wheelbarrow ferrying of mulch and manure from one lot to the other. In addition to lots of weeding and mulching (application of dried grasses on the beds to retain moisture and stop weeds from growing), removal of aphids by hand, planting of beans and basil, and harvesting of strawberries (we weren’t trusted to harvest anything else), our primary task during week two was replanting 2,500 leeks. This was just the beginning of the host’s gargantuan task of replanting 10,000 leeks over the week(s) to come. We were leaving just in time. The replanting work was tedious, backbreaking and boring and it served as an unpleasant reminder to me of how many of our meals were based around leeks.

Leeks!


Our host cooked many of the lunches for us, but agreeing on eating times was a real problem as she didn’t really eat breakfast and, like most (all?) Spaniards found it inconceivable to eat lunch before 2 pm. After a bit of a confrontation, we all came to an agreement that we would eat at 12:30, though she made a point of telling us she wasn’t hungry when we sat down to eat. Prior to the confrontation, this issue was mistake number 3, where Michiel and I attempted to take our hunger into our own hands and start to prepare lunch at 11:15. Doing such manual labor required more than a bowl of oatmeal at 6:30 am to last us until 1 pm. Though our host had no problem, I was constantly hungry and found the vegan diet completely incapable of satisfying my hunger. I became totally obsessed with food and the fact that we were not permitted to self-harvest or eat self-purchased fish or dairy items in the kitchen made me totally insane. We were only permitted to eat items from the garden that our host put in the kitchen for our use with the exception of currants and arugula, which we could harvest ourselves. These were mostly surplus or unsellable vegetables. For snacking, there was beyond-prime fruit given to the host by the organic shop and white bread and, of course, our own supplemented purchases of nuts, dried fruit and muesli bars. Michiel seemed to do just fine, but for him, it was a bit of an interesting experiment. I had done vegetarian for 16 years and had troubles with my energy levels and blood sugar. I knew it didn’t work for me, but hoped that a new attempt with a new chef (not me) would succeed where I had failed. I’ll give credit where credit due , our host was good with a pressure cooker and beans and lentils, and she did come up with different ways of cooking the same old ingredients.

The market garden was really a family home plus two separate lots, each with their own greenhouse and rows and rows of vegetables. The host’s mother and sister lived in the house and it was clear that the mother didn’t care for us either, which made the place feel quite like a prison compound, complete with iron bar fencing and barking dogs.

One of the greenhouses


Beans


Panorama of one of the garden lots


We gritted our teeth, made the most of our location to do a bit of sightseeing in the city we were in and in nearby Gijon, as well as the beach town of Salinas, lost some weight and vowed to be far more selective in choosing future hosts. On our last day, our host drove all of the volunteers to the bus station and she made a big deal of repeating to the other woman that she was welcome to return any time. We took note of the absence of a similar invitation when she thanked us and sent us on our way.

Gijon


Traditional folk musicians performing for a wedding party...notice the wooden shoes!


Needless to say, this wasn’t the perfect host, the perfect place, nor the perfect vocation – organic market gardening is hard work and the profits are small to non-existent. During this stint we thought back with increasing fondness to our first (quirky) host and appreciated the freedom we had experienced, his incredible generosity and the creative living-off-the-land skills he taught us. We wondered if we would change our opinion of this host during our future HelpX assignments as well (hint: NOPE!) We hoped for better things ahead.

Translate This

For those of you who have been following the blog for a while, you may have noticed a new button in the upper left corner of this site. It allows you to read a translation of the site in just about any language you can think of. Thanks to M-B for suggesting it! I can't vouch for the fact that the translations will always be correct, but at least it's a start and might even get our nieces and nephews to read our postings.

Also...thanks so much to those of you who are reading and commenting. We really appreciate knowing you're along for the ride, too.

Apologies!

To those of you who are in my Yahoo email and Facebook contacts, I’m afraid that some kind of spyware or virus was sent to you. I hope that for most of you, these messages went right into your spam folders. If not, please forgive. I’m not sure how it happened but I hope to have rectified the problem and it shouldn’t happen again, but if it does, please let me know. Please know that I always put a subject line in my email messages, so anything without a subject is spam or a virus and should be deleted.

In the Picos

It’s difficult to know how much to write about the particulars of our volunteer experiences. As I mentioned in a former posting, we are experiencing Spain as volunteers, using the HelpX network to find hosts who are willing to provide food and lodging in exchange for work – usually in a garden or on the land and almost always of a manual nature. The hosts are all (or almost all) individuals (as opposed to companies), who open their homes and who offer a separate sleeping room or building (sometimes a tent or caravan). The hosts often cook for the volunteers, but are very happy when a volunteer shows initiative in the kitchen (this is generally not part of the working hours). As you can imagine, an experience of this type allows for you to become very well acquainted with the host…both with his/her talents and skills as well as his/her foibles, insecurities, lack of management or communication skills, character defects, etc. (of course, you could say the same about the host and his interaction with his guests). Volunteering in this way becomes an intensely personal experience. You may spend all the waking hours of 7 days per week with someone you don’t particularly care for, with the real down side being that you are dependent on the host’s generosity for the quality and quantity of your food, the quality and variety of your work tasks, the comfort of your sleeping arrangements, the amount of knowledge that is shared and any other perks that the host might see fit to provide. That said, writing honestly about our experiences requires us to decide how open to be about the shortcomings of our hosts. But I do realize that these shortcomings make enticing reading. For that reason, we won’t name any names or the details of locations, but we’ll try not to leave out the juicy bits.

Our first assignment was located in the foothills of the stupendous Picos de Europa mountain range located on the north coast of Spain. The Picos are a truly undiscovered gem for hiking (undiscovered, at least, by anyone but Spaniards) and it was my hope that during our free time, we could explore and do lots of hiking. Luckily, our host was an avid hiker…in fact, he was an avid do-er of anything sporty or spiritual, but not eating. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We arrived at S’s home in the dark and it wasn’t until the next morning that we realized how filthy, damp and musty the place was. We did have our own futon in a room downstairs that also served as the storage for climbing ropes, surf boards and lots of books and the bathroom was indoors – just across the dining area, but with the sound of little footsteps above, we discovered that S’s 4 year old son would be going in and out as he pleased. He was only there on the weekends, but his presence made it difficult to keep anything tidy or to get as much work done otherwise.





The two story home was located in a remote part of a small town up a steep road paved in scored concrete. Strangely, the owners of the property next door decided to put up a home not 10 feet away from his front door. This home was rented out to Spanish tourists (always with their irritatingly yappy little dogs) by the week. Around the house was a chicken coop with 2 chickens (until one was taken by a fox), an herb garden (totally overgrown with weeds) and lots of stinging nettle. Further down the road, he also had a decent size garden and the beginnings of a little orchard.

View from the garden


The garden


Working in the garden was a treat. The views of the surrounding hillsides were beautiful and every time we stepped outside, we were treated to the soothing tones of cowbells from the surrounding valleys. Our host wasn’t the greatest communicator but he was open to what we hoped were delicately worded suggestions and ideas so we were often able to suggest tasking that we felt to be necessary. There was a huge amount of weeding and clearing, treating the blighted potatoes with copper spray, harvesting and pickling radishes, lots of bread baking (I’m now an expert at whole wheat herb bread), removing snails and slugs (they are a real nightmare here), preparing vegetable beds and planting beans, etc., etc. But none of this work could be done with a clear conscience until Michiel and I had a good go at cleaning the house, which wasn’t a particular priority of our host but was made possible by his leaving the house for a couple of days.




Despite his shortcomings as a communicator, a decision maker, a housekeeper and an eater, after about 4 days (which seems to be the magic amount of time it takes to fully adapt (come to terms with?) to a new living situation), we learned that since our host was so amendable to our recommendations, we would simply do what we needed to do to make ourselves happy. If we wanted to work 7 hours one day because the weather was cool, we did so and worked fewer hours another day (we agreed to work 5 hours per day, 5 days per week) or if I felt like I wasn’t getting enough to eat or eating often enough, I would bake something or request that he buy certain snacks. He was terrifically generous and even though he is not a drinker, bought wine and beer and anything else we requested from the (very limited selection) in the supermarket.

The real benefits to this situation were the living off the land tips that he shared with us. We got to play around with his solar panels (testing our toothbrush chargers to see how much energy they pull and checking to see whether the laptop uses more energy on start-up than coming out of hibernation mode (yes)). In spite of the fact that we think of ourselves as somewhat environmentally conscious, this gave us a whole new appreciation of how much energy is used by electrical equipment. We also learned much by working with his faulty water system, finding the eggs the free-range chicken laid and about cooking with nettles (very high in protein, vitamins and minerals), comfrey, elderberry flowers (in pancakes and flavoring drinking water). We also greatly benefitted from his desire to do active things after work like late evening hikes. He also did us a great favor by letting us use his car to go exploring on our off days and even filled it with gas for us! For all of his generosity of spirit, there was a great deal of uncomfortability being in the house with him. I often had the feeling of being with someone who was slightly unstable. Perhaps it was the combination of extremeness (hours of yoga, not eating much or totally fasting in the springtime, world-class level mountain biking marathons, camping trips without food or a stove (surviving completely on what he found to eat), shyness and the desire to please others that made him feel a bit like someone you might read about in a newspaper tragedy story. We weren’t the only ones who felt this way. While we were there, his brother and a friend came to visit. His brother confided that he came once a year just to make sure that our host was ok. We enjoyed the company of these two guys and did some hiking together. From them, we received great insight into the mind of our host.

Just when we had a good routine going, S informed us that there were more volunteers coming – 4 more, in fact - young women (19 – 24) from the US. We were pretty shocked to think about 7 of us in the small house, using a finite amount of water and electricity (the cloudy days and old marine batteries meant that panels didn’t provide much power for us), but we ended having lots of “romantic” evenings cooking with headlamps. Once I decided to think of the situation as upscale camping, I was just fine.

The girls provided lots of distraction and a couple were even pretty hard workers, but they did a lot more talking and planning than executing. We did all have a fun evening out at a local sidreria (cider pub). This province is particularly known for its alcoholic cider which is imbibed at lunch and in the evening. Sidrerias offer bottles of cider (you can’t order a cup at a time because of the loss of fizz, so for 3 euros or so, you get the whole thing) and tapas (cured meats, cheeses and salads). The real attraction is the method which the waitstaff and bartenders use to pour the cider. To add fizziness and aerate the cider, they hold the bottle up in the air as far as their right arm can extend. They hold the wide-mouthed glass in the left hand low to the ground, sometimes over a bucket or a drain in the street. The art is for the pourer not to look at the glass except at the very last moment when the liquid hits it. This accounts for some spillage but no one seems to mind. The streets with several sidrerias have a distinct aroma that is unmistakably alcoholic.

When we left, the girls were still planning on spending another 2 weeks there and our host begged us not to go. While driving us to the bus station our host almost did more talking than in all the previous days and sincerely thanked us. He made sure to say that we would always be welcome. We needed some rest and time with each other so we got on the bus and headed to the big city - Oviedo - capital city of Asturias.

So as we are on the quest for “that perfect place”, was this it? Well…the mountain scenery and cowbells almost clinched it, but the gray and damp climate is a significant downside.

Here is a sampling of photos from the terrific outings we had in the area.

Hiking between the layers of clouds




Photos from the Cares Gorge hike and the gorgeous little town of Cain at the end





We started this all-day hike to the lakes of Covadonga from the house









The seaside city of Llanes


The surfing beach at Torimbia


The cathedral at Oviedo, which is on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimmage route