Yo yo people. I thought I would post a few blogs I wrote about 8 months ago but never remembered to publish. This is from my last farming in Italy experience(I'm about to go on another as well). The third one I didn't finish so yeah the end really is the end. Anyways I wanted to post them just for your reading pleasure. TOODLES

Farming Under the Sicilian Sun: Mosquito HORROR

I’m not gonna lie guys, WWOOFing might not be for everyone. At least in my experience, it could be quite trying. You know this isn’t necessarily from all the work you might end up doing, it’s more from the unforeseen things. I found myself in a situation in Sicily where somehow 2 weeks there made me more homesick or just familiar surrounding sick than I was maybe even all of the 5 months I was in Finland. At least for me, it was a situation I was not used to. That being said, holy crap was it really cool and worthwhile. There was at least a lot to learn, and I don’t know if I learned it all but I definitely caught something along the way. Here’s a nice description of my time farmin aaway.

There were some trials that went on, but there was one menace that blotted out the others in the same way the Persian arrows blotted out the sun in the 300 movie: Mosquitos. This by far probably the worst most horrible thing about my WWOOFing experience. Other comparably laughable problems were introduced by the incredible heat of the sun along with the lack of air conditioning, the inability to find internet, and the distance from town without public transport. That being said, some of the good things about WWOOFing were, the sun, the relief from the internet, and distance away from everything. Mosquitos were just unconditionally horrible though so no positive part about those bastards.

I’m gonna go ahead and say it, I’ve never seen so many mosquitos in my WHOLE LIFE. I think if you added up all the mosquito bites I’ve ever gotten for all time, I got that many in the span of time I was in Sicily. The things were a force to be reckoned with that could not be underestimated. You see apparently we got there at a funny time(no, not haha funny AT ALL though), this funny time meant that there wasn’t so much wind and there was also a lot of mosquitos. About 5 or 6 of the last days we were there the situation apparently turned to normal. The wind was often quite strong. The houses don’t have air conditioning so the farm house was generally with open windows and open doors all the time. The wind blowing around caused the doors throughout the house periodically every fifteen minutes or so to slam shut really loudly and scare the dang hell out of you.

Well usually the idea is that this wind keep the mosquitos at a minimum, but this time it straight up just didn’t for about half of our stay. Of course sure they had mosquitos, but the wind really helped….and really also when the sun comes they tend to scatter as well. It was quite interesting how after it warmed up a bit and the sun started to hit your body you were pretty much almost safe from mosquitos. Okay here we go…..give me a minute……okay….okay I think I’m ready now to talk about the horrors. Generally we thought it was a good idea in the morning to go out wearing things like for instance athletic shorts and a T shirt. It made perfect sense, the temperature was in the 90s everyday(in September!!!) and we had just come from Finland so yeah of course we were going to try to stay cool. I even sometimes thought it was okay to take my shirt off for work – this habit died very very quickly. This was an exceptionally bad idea when we would take a job watering the orange orchard. This job often entailed lots of water and tall grass….very bad. Also there were chickens you needed to feed, which I’ll get into later, and going in that pin at night was pure suicide.

So you would go out there bright eyed an bushy tailed only to be consumed by parasites. That’s right people, here is the monster in the horror you’ve been waiting to see after it’s been talked about so much. You could totally make a horrible horror movie out of this! So you go down to the orange orchard and everything seems fine. You figure you might be getting bit by one or two mosquitos but no big deal. Usually you don’t even see the mosquito, it just bites you then later you notice whoa I have a mosquito bite. Not these bastards, there’s too many of them. As you got to the bottom, descended upon you, and I don’t exaggerate, clouds of mosquitos. That’s right, so many mosquitos that they basically formed a smokey colored cloud approaching you.  As you looked around you could see literally hundreds of mosquitos swarming around you. Repellant only did so much, for every 50 mosquitos there was at least one willing to take the risk. That meant at any given time there could be 30 mosquitos trying to bite you at once. At one point I stopped counting how many bites I had, they’re just now all going away! It’s been two weeks!!! Eventually we gained wisdom and went out there with lose clothing. That’s right lose, if you wore leggings or something(I do that all the time of course) then they still bit you! Even when I had lose clothing, they still tried. I remember just watching one on my shoulder just walking around trying to find a spot. He would dip his little needle in as far as it would go till his face was right against my shirt then pull it out and try again. Little determined crazies!!!

I thought that was bad, and apparently Africa has a mosquito problem…..omg, I seriously can’t imagine. Alright, this is slightly lengthy, so I’ll break it up into two.

Farming under the Sicilian sun: the day job

Ciao freaks and geeks! Let’s get down to business on what life was actually like on the farm other than mosquito terror that will haunt me in my dreams well into my 30s and 40s. This is how the day went: wake up at about 6:30 for a nice shower before a meeting at 7. My the room I slept in was part of a long slab of about five rooms away from the main house with a bathroom in the middle of all of them. There was definitely a lizard roommate in my room. You woke up and went to the shower which was powered by solar thermal panels on the roof of the house. That’s one thing you notice in sicily and in general as you go further south, solar panels are quite common. There were many many at the farm I was staying at, they provided hot water for the whole farm. If you look at the power of the sun over the earth, North African countries like Lybia are some of the best places for solar power. Since Sicily is right around the corner, BOOM solar panels.

After your breakfast group breakfast meeting with the farm owner, you would split into separate jobs. Most of the jobs were something like pulling weeds or using different methods to water the orange trees so they’ll be ready for the winter harvest. From where we pulled weeds was a good view of the hilly surroundings, which was very cool. Not to mention that there was a great view of the enormous active volcano which we were about 40km from called Mt. Etna, but that’s for a different blog. There were other little jobs around the house we all took some responsibility for. This included feeding the dogs/cats/donkeys/chickens, watering the plants, turning on/off the irrigation systems, and putting the chickens in their house at night. This entailed the second largest horror of the farm: anything to do with the chickenz.

Of course as usual the mosquitos found the chicken house a perfect breeding ground and loved to ambush you at night when you went to put the chickens in, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the evil birds of death which were fired straight from the depths of the underworld out the peaks of Mt. Etna itself and then delivered to our farm – I’m talking about the damn hateful ass Geese! Now a goose seems like it should be a peaceful animal or at least somewhat funny, but these geese were not swans. These Geese were blood thirsty murderers!!! There were two normal ones and one weird looking Chinese one, and they were scary! They were used to scare off foxes who might try and come to take the chickens, and they were effective at this as well as terrifying people! As soon as you would start to approach the chicken pin, they would know you were coming and begin their intimidating sounds….Honhonhonkhonkhonk!....SCREEEEECH!

It was always the honk honk from the normal ones then a few seconds later came screech from the weird Chinese one. The Chinese one was bigger than the other two and definitely the alpha. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the future with china the US and the EU. All methods of predicting the future using Geese aside(if the Germans can use an octopus, why can’t I use geese???.....you might say I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I think that saying I’m comparing geese and octopi is a stronger statement in the first place), they would get really close to you and flap their wings and chase you and act like they were gonna peck you…..but then never did it. They were geese with a lot of bark and no bite, which is scary in the anyways because I didn’t know geese could do either of those.

The heat on the farm along with the culture of Southern Italy meant we only worked until about 11 or 12 before stopping for a while. This was partly because of the heat, after 12 and until about 4 it go so incredibly hot that doing farm work was just slightly impossible. Also in Southern Italia they have siestas, and it was interesting how much everyone followed the siesta law. Of course followed it on the farm, and it was pretty nice. Thing was that sleeping could be, for me at least, quite difficult in the heat. I would always always always wake up sweating my butt off. I felt like I needed to drink a lot of water after sleeping because it dehydrated me. So even though I would wake up having gotten some sleep, I would feel a different kind of discomfort that was dehydration instead of sleepiness.

The siesta was such a powerful thing at least in the town we were at and in the big city next to us. If you tried to go to do something in town between 1 and 4 you couldn’t because NOTHING WAS OPEN AT ALL. The place seemed just like a Ghost town when this happened, no one on the streets, no shops open, no buses running or even cars. NOTHING. Because of this it seemed like the schedule in this part of the world was quite strongly shifted.  On the farm we ate lunch maybe around 3pm and dinner at something like 9pm. If you went out on the streets at 9, 10, 11pm they were completely crowded with people out doing things and having conversations. I guess it’s just so hot people try to stay out of the sun and out of the anything during the day then at night the temperature becomes acceptable to actually exist.

So this is my nutshell experience as a farmer. Oh yeah I forgot to mention one thing, the farm was a VEGETARIAN farm. Now that’s a surprise. Yup, that’s right people, I was basically a vegetarian for two weeks. I’m so proud of myself, now that’s perseverance! Alright till next time!

 Mt. Etna: What now Frodo?!?!?!?!!

When Maija and I were looking for farms, we didn’t have incredibly strict criteria. We wanted a place that wouldn’t work us like dogs, seemed like they had at least some of their ducks in a row(too bad we didn’t make criteria for geese..), and were near one of the places Ryanair flew to from Tampere where we were staying. It was a very interesting twist when we realized the farm we ended up choosing was positioned near an enormous 3.5 kilometer(2 mile) tall active volcano that on a clear day can be seen from over half of the huge island of Sicily. This volcano, named Mount Etna, is the largest volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world. Sicily is home to some mountains that can be quite huge and many many many almost bald or completely bald hills. Visibility can also be quite good, so the area around Mount Etna was always very interesting. The towns and cities basically revolve around Etna, and so when you drive to the next town, you can see that you’re just driving part of a hug huge huge circle around Etna. The landscape of small hills makes it so as your driving or even walking you can just see easily the neighboring towns, even if they’re 20km away and specially at night.

If driving a circle around this volcano to get to the next town didn’t make you notice that’s there for some reason, there’s still absolutely no missing or ignoring the thing! It’s no wonder that the ancient Greeks associated it with gods and so on. Apparently in Greek Mythology, Athena got super pissed at a titan and threw it in the ocean then threw Sicily on top of it. As the legend goes the titan still gets a bit agitated to have an island on top of it, which I imagine can be a bit annoying, and causes earthquakes which lead to eruptions etc.

Etna is huge huge huge and dominates the view of the landscape completely if you happen to be within half of Sicily of it. The hills around it are not very big at all then all the sudden there’s a huge volcano. The volcano actually at least at the base has a gradual slope so driving a circle around it heck might even take an hour I imagine. Very big!

It soon became obvious that we should take advantage of this very unique piece of landscape we just happened upon, and boy was that notion worth it! On our day off we decided to ascend this beast! We took the bus to the guide centers which were at about 1900 meters. Already you could see that you were way way up! The clouds were much closer, air much cooler, and there was forest. Now I found the forest interesting. It’s about 95 degrees at the bottom of the volcano with almost nothing except very small trees and bushes that sparsely covered some parts of the landscape. Mount etna was barren at the bottom like the rest, forest in the middle, then barren again above 2000 meters with lava stone covering the ground. I think this showed that the forest developed as a function of the changing climate due to the altitude. In short, perhaps the temperature dropped low enough for there to be forest on that particular mountain. Something like that, don’t wanna think too much.

Anyways, the point is there was a very strong difference between the temperature at the bottom and at the top. At the bottom it was something like 85-95 and at the top it was between 50-60 Fahrenheit – very interesting. So we decided to do the tour which took us up by cable car and off road bus 1 hour then a 4 hour walk down by foot. After the cable car we were even with the clouds. One interesting thing about the area from what I noticed is that generally there aren’t many clouds at all – except the ones that gather around Mount Etna. Sure there are some here and there, and on this day we could see some in the distance. But really any large amount of clouds gather around Etna. My entry level degree would tell me this is for two reasons. One is that Etna, as this happens with other high mountains as well, is so tall that the clouds that are there are generally floating around at an altitude lower than the peak crater of Etna. Etna is so big that the clouds have trouble going around so they just gather in masses around Etnas peak, unable to scoot by. This phenomenon causes mountainous places to become quite polluted sometimes because the pollution rises into the air but can’t spread out cause it’s stuck on some mountain. The second reason why this might happen is that Etna smokes constantly and probably emits small particulate matter which is what tends to cause the formation of clouds. Water droplets condense onto little pieces of stuff that float around in the air due high moisture levels in the air. This is more likely to happen if there is more particulate matter in the air, ie stuff from the smoke. So there it is folks, could be wrong but you should probably think it’s true.

Anyways so at the end of the cable car we were at the same level of the clouds, then we went up more. Ears were popping and popping and popping. These freaking buses were hardcore, huge wheels they were like heavy artillery or something. We got to the top, it was something else to be up there. It had taken a long time just to get up there with bus+cable car+badass bus! We were finally up there, the view was absolutely magnificent. In front of us and up was an enormous smoking crater, to our left were the towns and hills we just left to come up there, to our right were clouds in the distance we were above, and behind us was a huge huge cloud that was slowly creeping up to the peak of the volcano. One of the craters in the distance had snow on it! Crazy, it was like 90 degrees at the bottom! We were unable to go up to the main huge crater with snow on it because it was too active and there were all kinds of bad things we didn’t need to be near. We did however go up near the crater where the last eruption was, and where they thought the next one would be. The last eruption, which was 2 weeks before we got there, blew the side off one of the craters and the lava flowed down the side of the mountain. You see, this isn’t like a volcano like one thinks. Usually one thinks of a volcano as one steep steep mountain with one huge huge hole at the top. Well I would say it’s safe to use the analogy of a heart on this one. The symbol of a heart <3 doesn’t actually at all look like a heart. Hmm, I think that’s the situation here. This volcano had something like 10 craters all over in different spots on  the mountain. Right now there are about three that show activity either in the form of continuous bubbling or periodic eruptions, but the eruptions of yesteryears were in different places on the mountains. There are at least four other ones that are recent and something like 2 that are from eruptions hundreds of years ago. Generally it seems like it’s been from a different crater for every activity episode lasting maybe weeks or years or days etc.

We came at an interesting time really, because the volcano was so active. When we stepped out of the bus the guide immediately started telling us interesting things about the volcano, for instance about the volcanic rock we were standing on. The whole top of Mount Etna is seriously like a volcanic rock desert with many hills and mountains even on the volcano itself. The top is huge, don’t think of the peak here as something you stand on the tip top and it’s straight down on both sides. You could probably place a moderately sized town or a very small city on the area at the top covered by volcanic rock and sand. Apparently this landscape resembles the moon – either way it’s enormous. So the guide starts telling us interesting things like for instance that there was a meter thick layer of lava rock under our feet, but underneath that was snow…and furthermore that snow covers the top of the mountain the whole year, it’s just covered particularly in the summer by this lava rock. We then started to ascend by foot up to the crater of the most recent eruption. It was longer than it looks, the landscape lends itself to messing up your ability to judge distances. Haha within the first 10 minutes a couple people started to already have to stop and catch their breath. At this point I thought it was gonna be a long walk but luckily that was the most of the up hill climbing we did.

Although we couldn’t see it, the lava was quite close under us as we got closer to the crater, and you could start to really feel your feet get hot. It was really strange, your feet began to be too hot and quite uncomfortable while the upper half of your body was a bit cold as it was used to 95 degrees instead of 55 degrees with on top of that. If you held your hand over some cracks in the ground you could feel really hot air coming out. It was  also really interesting to see the cloud up close that had at this point gathered around one side of the peak of Mount Etna. The motion of the clouds up close is really cool, I wish I could describe it. If you see little pieces of cloud up close, they move around a lot. When the cloud would start to blow up against the mountain, it would begin to swirl around – really neat.

So we inspected up close the crater of the last eruption, which was on august 29. This was strange to know it was so recent. The guide casually then mentioned that they expected an eruption that day or the day after……!!! We were like uh haha yeah right. Then he told us if we started to feel the ground shake a bit to stay with him and not to just start running. Still we were like hmmm yeah noooo way. Then at one point we were waiting for the other group to go far enough ahead of us and we were all just chatting away…then he told us all to be quiet for 30 seconds and he seemed quite serious. He said he thought he heard something and he needed to listen for a sound that you hear before there is an eruption. After 30 seconds he said okay let’s go….haha still we were like suuuure sure. Hah well I’ll tell you in a bit why he was not joking at all!

So we moved away from the main crater to an overlook to have lunch. As we passed the main three craters at the top so close to them it was really strange to realize where I was….just like where am I and what am I seeing right now…..did I ever guess I would be here? So we go sit down and eat a pizza or two and look at the absolutely amazing view of the clouds and the hilly landscape below. We were about the height that you jump out of an airplane when you skydive. We continued after this down the hill a bit and to two of the old craters from 2001 and 2002 eruptions. They were quite interesting, as one of them was still steaming a lot. The steam was of course from water in the mountain, but it was from water which was being vaporized by lava that was running really close to the water. On the right also was this huge huge clearing of just volcanic rock, it really looked like a dark gray desert!

So we walked on the edge of this crater which was circular.  It seemed like the only way down was the path we came up, because both sides of the crater were just almost straight down. Confused I asked which way were would go next. “That way” the guide says and points down. I’m like WTF there’s no way. Then the guide continues to show us a way of “running” down the hill. If you lean back and are afraid to fall, you fall. If you accept the gravity, lean forward, and run then you do pretty well because you shoes sink so deeply down into the volcano stone with every step. Confused and afraid we did it, it was a pretty long way down! And it worked! I took a video while doing it, and on the video it looks like we’re not moving at all almost but we were really going fast! It was absurd.