What Alice Found

Oh my.

I've been in Italy for 4 days now, and have decided that if one desires to speak Italian, it is best to pretend to battle a wasp inside your mouth. If you have a real wasp, all the better. As you progress, close your lips little by little, so as to not let the wasp out-- this is how the natives speak, and the one with the least amount of room between his or her lips while talking is allowed to talk the most.

The farm where I am working is called Orti Di Mare, which means Something By or On or For or From the Sea. The day is two days-- We wake up, eat, and work for 5 or so hours (3 of which are under the oppressive Tuscan sun) and then I usually go to sleep for the next two hours; the next day today consists of reading or writing or going to the beach, working in the fields again for around 2 hours as the weather becomes more hospitable, eating too much, and then going back to sleep.

I am the only WOOFer here, and the only person under 30-- though most everybody is 40, 50, 60, 70, or 80. Very very little English is spoken, so I am making my best attempts to master the Italian language with a poor excuse for an English-Italian dictionary. Luckily, I can speak French with two of the workers. I will post pictures sometime soon, if I can figure out how to do that--I only just found the apostrophe key today.

Strangely, I was not overwhelmed by the beauty of the countryside as I was expecting. It is beautiful, but does not affect me in any tangible way. I am in a state of neither happiness nor despair, more neutral feeling than anything...strange. Vedo una strada lunga avanti.