Yeah we're still here.

A few more activities happening in the last few days....

One of Krishan's friends has a bee keeping hobby, and she offered to show us the hives in the food forest because she happened to have some extra gear on hand. I knew I wasn't allergic, so I took just the netting hat and put on my jacket, and Tessa put on the spiffy full body suit just to be safe, because she is allergic to about half the world.

There are three hives, one recently swarmed. That means when a hive gets too big for the space, and there are too many bees, they start to make another queen, and the new group needs a new place to go. The two hives are now three.

Neither of us are afraid of bees, so it wasn't super terrifying. Certain bees have different jobs, and I think it's the drone ones, they kind of perpetually dive bomb you. But bees are good. And if you talk quietly and stay calm, they stay calm too. Relatively.

The lady (I can't say we ever learned her name, but she was Dutch) smoked the hives and took some slats out to show us the inner workings, and to check the hives were healthy. Healthy hives have a queen (which is hard to spot sometimes) and sections with honey, and different compartments with the larvae. All of the hives he has are doing quite well. And also, before I thought the smoke made them sleepy, but Dutch Lady said they don't like it, and it makes them stay inside the hive because they think something is wrong.

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A baby buffalo was born last night! We were all hanging out near the fire and they brought it down from somewhere, I'm not exactly sure where, but the carrier van came from the hill slash forest.

We didn't see it being born, but I did get some video of it wobbling around. The baby buffalo was still slick and had its umbilical chord. They let it wobble into the pen with others, and its mama. At least I'm pretty sure that's what happened. There were five workers involved and a lot of Romanian back and forth.

Well it doesn't look adorable from this picture today, but that's the best picture we could get, and it's mama was giving us LOOKS. That's her ear to the right.

Sorry for the Tessa's-arm close up. But I wanted you to see the LOOKS we received from the mama.

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After learning Philippe is an artist, we both really wanted him to draw something for us. And he is leaving in two days, so we spent half an hour yesterday interrupting his yoga-ing in the back garden, trying to figure out which medium he prefers and what he needed. Considering we couldn't get much, Krishan found some water colors and we both managed to scrounge up some small pieces of paper. Something simple, that is all we ask for....

We concluded bribery would be our best hope, and so came up with some ideas. I gave him a small earbud rubber thingy, since he had lost one of his, and I brought two pairs of earbuds. And Tessa fixed his murse (man-purse) by sewing a new zipper for him. This was a pretty fair trade, for backpackers on a farm.

Philippe's murse below. He wouldn't let me take a pic with him wearing it, and it took some convincing to even get it alone. "Why? Why would you want to take a picture of that? Well if you must."

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Our zucchini is still...growing. Way too much. But, Krishan is leaving tomorrow for Bucharest again, and will bring a bunch of them to his restaurant.

Ah. His restaurant! I haven't mentioned it yet, have I? Well. You'll have to wait till the next post.