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.

~~~~~

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.

~~~~~

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."

~~~~~

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.

The Spoon Man

I promise I didn't forget about blogging. (Or globbing as Tessa calls it.)

Workawayers usually get a day a week off, so we took our first free day to go touring around the area. Cathryn has her car that she shipped overseas (after literally filling it all the way up with Trader Joe's groceries) so she took us to a few villages nearby.

Viscri

The name may sound familiar. There's one UNESCO site, an old church. It was one of the coolest churches I've ever been to. There's a tower in the middle and then a wall full of rooms surrounding the area, with a courtyard too. It's all very quiet and accessible. 

(I forgot to take a picture on my phone.)

Prince Charles owns a few houses in Viscri but apparently his wife doesn't let him stay there because it's not super fancy and she's kinda spoiled like that. At least that's my interpretation. 

We bought some local honey:

Sighisoara 

The Spoon Man.

At the top of a hill where a famous church stands, we hung around for a little while to take pictures. Soon we spotted a crafter's booth with a bunch of spoons on display. They were very beautifully crafted and the guy sitting there started telling us about these spoons. Only two countries are known for their spoons, Romania and Wales. And this is when I notice he is actually carving one at the moment. His explaining wasn't at all trying to sell to us, spoon wittling is just a family tradition of his. His whole air was just so genuine and he got really enthusiastic in telling us what all the designs mean...

I couldn't help but buy one. It's about 10inches long.

Let us hope it makes it home all right...!

(Made of linden wood and glazed in beeswax.)

His website is thespoonman.ro and it's all in Romanian. So if you want to learn about any of the stories or meaning behind his spoon designs you can just use google translate or something, maybe recall your Latin studies.

We got ice cream at the bottom of the hill. All natural yummy. Tessa got black vanilla (we still aren't sure exactly how/what that is) and coconut. I got strawberry and kiwi. The day was a hot one, so this refreshed us!

Back at the farm, look at this awkward adorableness! (Baby buffalo: "what the hell are you doing at my fence?")

And this evening a new volunteer is coming to the farm, a guy from Puerto Rico who is cycling around Europe. Yeah. On a bicycle. 

Now there will be five of us! Cathryn, Philippe, me and Tessa, and soon Puerto Rico.

Krishan's still in Bucharest, we aren't sure if he is coming back today.

Our first work trade

We're leaving the nice village of Curtea de Arges today. We stayed longer than originally planned (well because we weren't sure where to go yet) and went to see the one last tour attraction here. Actually since Poenari castle is in the neighboring village...the only tourist attraction. Really, if you google image search "curtea de arges" this will pop up:

It's very pretty and detailed, worth the half hour walk across town. 

So now we are heading to another small village, Rupea, this time outside the city of Brasov. It's about 5 hours away from here and north. (Red dot)

A few months ago Tessa and I signed up for Workaway.info which is a site that's sort of like helpx, which is older I think; people looking for work trades, and visa versa. Since we signed up and sent out requests, we have gotten two "already full" (five months in advance) and the rest didn't even respond at all. Finally as we tried to figure out something to do after Curtea de Arges this post popped up.

"Help out at a permaculture farm in Northern Transylvania."

Right up our alley!

I didn't know what exactly permaculture was, so I looked up an exact definition:

"a system of cultivation intended tomaintain permanent agriculture orhorticulture by relying on renewable resources and a self-sustaining ecosystem."

So we contacted them right away and they responded a few hours later saying we were more than welcome to come stay and help out at the farm. We got really excited; finally, something more than touristing around big cities! Work! Experiencing rural Romanian life! Anyway. Maybe we got a little too excited. :)

But of course getting there was much frustration as usual, and after a whole day of traveling and figuring out these Internet timetables for busses aren't actually accurate (I'll spare you the details because you've seen my previous getting-lost posts), we found our people...

We googled the guy's name, actually. Because we were curious to what this farm actually is. It was a very new post on the site, and had no feedback or anything yet. Here is what we found:

http://youtu.be/hhI0jogl-B8

If the link doesn't work, YouTube "Krishan George tedx"

So yep, we are staying on his farm now, with him and a bunch of workers who differ every day.

Right now there is only one other volunteer, an Italian guy staying for the month, and then another lady who is staying here indefinitely to help with everything in general. Our host Krishan, the farm owner, is Indian but he sounds British and speaks a number of languages. I can tell by talking with him and looking at him that he has great visions for this place, and I can't wait to see what happens in the future, if we come back. (As you can tell in the video)

Oh, and a few camera guys. They're making a documentary about Krishan and this farm idea, hopefully to pitch to the Discovery Channel or something. I'm not sure details, but they're really nice people too.

For now we are staying here for....who knows how long. As long as there are projects to keep us interested. Right now a few items on the list are: making some curtains for the bathroom window, creating a visual list for composting the right foods, and coming up with a way to recycle our glass, paper, and plastic, when it can't be repurposed. Since we are in the middle of nowhere there are no recycling facilities within a reasonable range, its a task.

I tried some fresh (raw, unpasturized) buffalo milk, butter, and cheese today. And it's really rich and delicious. They have 150 water buffaloes on this 500 acre piece of land, and they employ some nice gypsies to take care of them, milk them, and also deal with the horses which are not broken in yet.

It's raining outside now, and we are chillin inside from working in the fields this morning. I've already learned a bunch about plants and my brain is still processing it all, but I love it.

(Not sure how this panorama will show up on the computer. It's a view from our dorm door from when I got up this morning.)