There is really no sense in getting on the internet after a day of work outside in a setting like this. Not much reason and not much motivation to do it. I couldn't care less what my friends on facebook are talking about; sorry guys, what I'm doing is more than enough to take my full attention every moment of the day. But I do want to write a quick note to say what I did today and Dehlia and me wanted to look up a recipe for soap (seeing as there are only a few tiny pieces to be found around this house full of people), and recipes for higochumbo, the fruit of a huge cactus that we harvested a bunch of today, after our morning olive picking.
Homayoun said that a lo mejor, the higochumbo aren't any good but we can make stuff out of them if we want.

Last night I managed to attach my castanets onto the hands of a rather large German dude, danced bulerias for them, and sang too.

Today we "milked" the olives off the branches - in Spanish they use the same word as for milking a cow. I tried to stay out of the way of Homayoun as he waved around a chainsaw on the end of a long stick, to prune several trees. We picked fallen ones off the ground, stripped the olives off the pruned branches and then climbed up to pick them off the tree. All of this happens on a steep slope, with stunning views, if you take time to look up for a moment. Diego, a visiting farmer from down the road who stayed over last night and got drunk along with some of the German guys, helped make a fire to burn the unwanted branches. Homayoun told us we'd be doing a lot of burning. The boys got to take a break from picking to just burn stuff this morning.

I can't believe our good luck to end up in this place. What happened was at the other farm when we got the very clear signal that we were not wanted around there any more (they were weird - we aren't sure what was wrong but there were several obvious possibilities), we sat upstairs on a rainy day with their pitifully slow internet and started making calls to different farms of interest that we found on the list. When we couldn't get ahold of any of interest or they didn't want workers at this time of year, we just started checking any in a warm part of Spain that would take 3 workers at once. This was the only one that had work and told us to come. The atmosphere in Pepi and Manolo's house was such that none of us felt we could stand to stay there another day.

This afternoon we were on another slope, below a tree loaded with granadas (pomegranates). We are doing it much more by hand than normally is done these days. People in Sevilla (besides telling me that picking olives was incredibly hard work and that I should by no means attempt to do it), told me that they shake the tree with a machine to make the olives fall, nowadays. They used to use a pole, but you have to do it carefully enough not to make the olives burst and start echar-ing their oil, and wreck the tree. Diego did a little bit of that with a pole in the morning. I don't think he was totally expert at it though. He is a mulero (a mule driver). While we were working this morning he heard his team coming somewhere in the distance - they come to find him even if he goes into town and doesn't leave them tied up, I guess. He also traps wild boar and has sheep and goats.

I ended up picking all the olives off one particularly loaded branch, which took some acrobatic work. Some was looking into the lowering sun, and the whole time was balancing on the end of a cut branch and hanging by my left hand, while stripping olives off with my right.

Anyways, Dehli has quit cracking walnuts and we are going to look at recipes. Bye for now.