Today marks the end of my first week living and working on the farm. It is great, I've already learned a lot and tried many new things!
On June 1st I took a shuttle from San Jose to the farm, along with 18 women on their way to a month-long yoga teacher training at Anamaya. (A little background- the owners of the farm also own a yoga resort called Anamaya down the road. The farm was started a couple of years ago to produce food for the resort). The ride felt like the first episode of a reality show like America's Next Top Model. The women were getting to know the people they'd be spending the next month with, talking about their diets and cleanses and trying to out-yoga each other. Entertaining.
Anyway, as we approached the farm it turned out that the other farm people were at a rodeo in town, so I decided to get dropped off there to meet them. That was interesting. I'm not sure I care to attend another.
I finally arrived at the farm later that night and it wasn't until the next morning that I could see how gorgeous it is. All the photos here (except for the waterfall one) were taken right here at my home on the farm. The last photo is my home.
The casita I live in is cute, but its very rugged and open so I'm getting really good at dealing with bugs, big and small. I'm also washing my clothes in a bucket, taking only freezing showers, and getting used to being generally a bit filthy all the time and having small cuts and bruises everywhere.
Every day, I wake up at 6:15 to the sounds of the 99 chickens which live about thirty yards away bawking as they lay their eggs. Tuesdays and Thursdays we walk over to the owner's house to do an exercise class at 7am, otherwise I make coffee and some breakfast before we start working. There are all sorts of things to do, I'll try to list what I did last week:
-Harvest herbs and put them in a dehydrator
-Pull up a whole bunch of spinach that was getting eaten by bugs
-"Replant" spinach in little cups of water until they grow roots
-Weed whack (manually)
-Replant potted plants into the ground
-Plant seeds
-Turn big beds of soil and mix it with manuer to begin a new garden
That sort of thing. On Thursday we started a brand new garden right in front out my house, with the intent of growing food specifically for us volunteers to eat. It's pretty neat, we collected old wine bottles from the recycling center which we're filling with sand and using to line the garden. I will post a photo once it is finished.
Each day one of us is responsible for making lunch for the group. We eat really well here, fresh produce mostly. On a good day the chef from Anamaya will come and cook for us using ingredients from the farm. That only happened once so far but it was amazing.
I chat a lot with the guys who work on the farm, there are 5 total and all but one are from Nicaragua. It is quite common for Nicas to come to Costa Rica since there is more work here. They don't speak any English so it is great practice for me. The other gringos here don't speak much Spanish so I think they like that they can talk to me. One of them even asked me to teach him English so I started giving him lessons last week.
That's the gist so far. We took a trip to Montezuma Falls and I jumped off a waterfall for the very first time! It was only 10 feet or so but that was a big deal for me :)
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