E-I-E-I-Ooooooooo...

Yesterday Facebook reminded me that May 5, 2013 was the two-year anniversary of the last day of our very first WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) gig.

Which means that basically, two years and two weeks ago, we showed up on a fairly random doorstep on Gabriola Island, British Columbia, and two strangers welcomed us into their home (or in this case, their RV) and started teaching us about farming... And we never turned back.

We'd done our research and exchanged emails with this first couple a few times so we thought it would be fine. Free food and lodging for 5-6 hours of work a day for a few weeks - what could go wrong?

It turned out to be AMAZING. We absolutely could not have asked for a better intro to WWOOFing and we are eternally grateful to our hosts Linda and Peter; their lovely sheep Thelma, Louisa, Maiden Marian and her fellow lambs; their adorable Kune Kunes Tane, Kyra and Moana (who have since had babies!); and all those beautiful chickens!

Big Roo finding worms for his girlfriend

ladykiller Tane

and let's not forget nature's lawnmowers

We learned so much from this first experience alone. We really had no idea what we were getting into with this whole WWOOF thing but after our time with Peter and Linda we were so excited about what was to come...

Canada's and Australia's WWOOF programs were well worth the annual membership cost, and the international work exchange web site HelpX helped us find some additional awesome learning opportunities around the world.  Two years and more than a dozen farms later, we have so many fond memories:

Just Another Weed Patch -

our intro to nut trees,

chicken tractors and bees

Buffalo Horn Ranch

where these gentle, amazing bison roamed

Apple Road Nubians

where our love (/obsession) for goats was forged

Earth's Harvest -
inspiration beyond belief

Richard's vineyard in the Czech Republic

where we stomped grapes by foot 
and made the best plum jam on the planet

 John and Yuki's farm and homestay near Chiang Mai
where almost everything comes straight from the land

Chittering Acres, home to eco-friendly lessons galore and

the coolest RV we will probably ever stay in 

Harris Organic Wines where we learned grapevine tending

and wine bottling from master vintner Duncan

Humpty Doo Apiaries, where Tas taught us
beekeeping skills, honey extraction and knot-tying

Julia and Dylan's self-sustaining farm in Lorrina, Tasmania 
featuring some of our favorite chooks

permaculturist and landscape architect Stuart

who taught us so much about designing our own home

Earth Matters farmer Greg, our first Hawaiian WWOOF host

with absolutely the most - we hope to see you again soon!

and Kula Mana Farms 
featuring "Kona snow" and all the mac nuts you care to eat

Hours (and hours of hours) of amazing experiences and farm-fresh meals intermixed with lots (and lots and lots) of tedious weeding/planting/harvesting/mulching/fence-mending later, we are still so eternally grateful to all our wonderful hosts. We look forward to adding more experiences to our WWOOF and HelpX resumes soon. (Can anyone teach us to make cheese? Will work for food and lodging, just sayin'...)

In the meantime, we hope that our extended families, barnyard friends and gardens are prospering this spring, and we really look forward to seeing everyone again someday!

"Hey, remember when Jen tried to be gluten-free in Central Europe?"

{Ed. note: this is directed at search engines producing results for words in the subject. I didn't really find much guidance online earlier this year, so I thought I'd throw my own experience out there. In other words, if you *can* eat bread and/or don't plan to visit this part of the world, you probably won't care about any of this...}

A year and a half ago I found out I was potato- and wheat-intolerant. So when I told people our first Phase Two stop was Central Europe, the land of bread and potatoes, it was always with a laugh... and also a tiny prayer to The Universe that I wouldn't wither away from malnutrition.

Our first few days in Poland I meticulously avoided everything wheat- or potato-related. Armed with a Polish translation food list, we would carefully scan ingredients on grocery store packages and restaurant menus. It wasn't too different from being back home, actually.

Turns out that "no potatoes no wheat" in Central Europe really is a pretty ambitious endeavor. At first this meant a diet of corn flakes or oatmeal or yogurt for breakfast; a salad for lunch (pre-packaged from the grocery store or from a cafe); rice/rice noodles and veggies/canned tuna/kielbasa for dinner; fruit (fresh or dried), carrots, peanut butter, peanuts, and chocolate for snacks.

our intro to Warsaw

his: pierogies

hers: chef salad

... sooooo not fair

sausage:

welcome to Prague!

... now that's fair

Eating the same things over and over again got kinda boring. One day a guy at a hostel made eggs for dinner, and that opened up a lot of new ideas for us.  But even that got boring after a while.

also boring?

"English" breakfasts in foreign lands

I was thrilled to find rice cakes, rice vermicelli, bean noodles, dried soy products, and of course peanut butter in Polish grocery stores. Up until we got to Turkey these items were actually pretty easy to find in all the countries we visited (though for some reason the rice products got more expensive the further south we went, and peanut butter was more scarce in Romania).

sometimes the labels
were even in English -

neat!

A chain called Carrefour - kind of like the Safeway of Central Europe, slightly overpriced with a decent variety of food - carried everything I needed and their markets were in all the major cities. Even tiny markets in Bialowieza and Nemcicky had rice snacks and dried soy.

Bialowieza makeshift dinner by tea kettle:

rice noodles, rehydrated soy, mystery spices

Fruit stands were also easy to find; plums and apples during fall harvest season were fantastic.

Krakow fruit stand:

part one

Krakow fruit stand:

part two

Nemcicky rule:

pick one, eat one

After a few weeks in Poland I got curious and tried bread. Nothing terrible happened so I continued to experiment. Turns out that for whatever reason, wheat has not been as offensive to my system here.

the first offender:

thanks, little old pastry shop lady

it was all downhill from there

It could be that the wheat strain here is more pure. But my guess is that it's everything *other than* the wheat, yeast, salt, water and sometimes egg that goes into packaged wheat products in the US that caused me the real trouble. (I'm talking to you, potato starch, guar gum, xanthum gum, and everything I can't pronounce!) Here, I can't always read the ingredients but when there are just three or four listed on a package, that's a good sign that the product is not going to have too negative an impact on me. And bread is baked each morning, sold so fast that it's not even individually wrapped, and stale by day three.

we must've eaten 847

of these fresh-baked rolls

in Central Europe

Wheat products are not always fun on my system but they are almost always tolerable, and this has made life so much easier. Leftover hostel breakfasts of bread, cheese and meats became free lunch.

whereas pierogies become

not free lunch...

... so did dumplings

Cheap eats from doner kebap stands became viable snack options.

our first kebap -

thank you, Olomouc!

our 53rd kebap -

thank you, Bucharest!

So did bagel carts and pastry shop snacks, which ended up being lifesavers in some cases. Like that day in Budapest when we were starving and a two-mile walk from any signs of a supermarket. Of course, they weren't exactly the tastiest options...

best when purchased at 6am -

otherwise, for them there birds

... or the healthiest.

as the was the case

in Brasov

and Olomouc

and Krakow

But with all that walking it really didn't matter.

Pasta (which I can mostly also eat) became dinner. And garlic bread was often involved too.

Budapest hostel livin'

Lisinia farmstay livin'

Bucharest homemade pasta livin'

And all these lovely cheeses and jams now included bread accompaniment!

homemade cheese: even better

And beer was back on the menu!

Prague beer

Olomouc beer

Brasov beer

... you get the point.

Sometimes I even got to make AND eat bread made from scratch - something I have really missed.

There is still the mysterious yeast/potato connection... But I'm not doing a science fair project, I'm just trying to eat pain-free. So whatevs, we'll just roll with it.

Have not tried potato yet... Not intentionally, anyway. It's hard to avoid in soups and for some reason doner kebaps often include a topping of "chips" ("fries" to you US folks). I definitely know when I have had it and I still suffer afterward. But it's much easier to explain a potato allergy to a new volunteer host or restaurateur than to rattle off the list of things I can and cannot eat.

I shouldn't eat bread with every single meal but I still do. BECAUSE I CAN. But less bread and less sugar (mainly via honey in my yogurt and tea) are in my future - I'm starting to need less weight so that I don't need more pants.

luckily, we are past Krakow's zapiekanki

unluckily we are still in the land of pide

(OK, this is not exactly a bad thing)

However. When we get to Vietnam, I dare say all bets on "less bread" are off... but at least I will be able to counter the bánh mì with loads of delicious vegetables!

Romania costs: $16/day. (Yep, you read that right.)

Romania on $8/person/day... wait, that can't be right.  I know we volunteered for two weeks, but EIGHT DOLLARS A DAY??  Wow.

Initial budget: 14 days at $1204 ($86/day, $43/person/day)
Actual cost: 21 days at $340 ($16/day, $8/person/day)

I really don't know why more people don't volunteer while traveling.  Here's the breakdown with some details...

these pie charts need some serious help

• Lodging: $185 - 6 dorm rooms at hostels and one night for a private room averaging $13/person/night.
• Transportation: $55 - trains from Brasov-Bucharest and Bucharest-Sinaia-Bucharest, nominal dollars spent on public transportation in Bucharest.
• Groceries: $42 - again I say, if we never eat bread again after Central Europe...
• Meals: $14 - most of this is lunch one day in Old Town.
• Tours: $22 - Bran Castle (Bran), the Village Museum (Bucharest).
• Alcohol: $13 - hooray for rotgut village wine!
• Gear: $0.
• "Misc": $10 - laundry, public toilets and various other randomness.
• Gifts: still $0.

Other fun Romania facts...

• Cities visited: 5 (Brasov, Bran, Sinaia, Lisa, Bucharest)
• Awesome provinces visited: Transylvania!
• National parks visited: 0
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites visited: 0

Now we say goodbye to Central Europe's impending grey winter and countless loaves of inexpensive white fluffy bread.  Hopefully, Turkey's cheese is just as good though...  To Istanbul!

Late Friday five: what we will remember about Bucharest.

Five things we will remember about our long weekend in Bucharest, in no particular order...

• The Village Museum - an open-air ethnographic museum featuring dozens of actual village homes transported to the city for display.  Most were transported back in the 1930s and 1950s.  So interesting to see how the different regions built shelters over the centuries and more impressively, how simply they lived.  

taking advantage of the earth

(in a good way)

ceramic fireplaces/stoves
the center of the home

• The funky Old Town area.  Bucharest doesn't seem to want to pretty up its historic center so you find beautiful churches and buildings intermixed with modern but dilapidated storefronts, scrappy pubs, trendy shops, cafes, and adult venues (one apparently in the former location of a library).  Very gritty, kind of bohemian, sort of reminiscent of NYC.

Stavropoleos Church backed by modern decay

• The sunsets.

amazing what a little smog will do

• Bed bugs at the hostel.  Yep.  It was bound to happen somewhere and at this point it's fitting that it was in Bucharest.  We didn't get bit but Jen found three by her pillow just before falling asleep (and immediately requested a room change).  Another guy in that dorm room got eaten alive.  This is the guy who started talking at 6:30am every single day and never, ever, EVER stopped, no matter how much everyone ignored him, so we can't say we had too much sympathy.  

• Awesome Romanian people.  We got harassed by bus ticket checkers on the way to our last hostel - a common scam we'd read about but had yet to encounter.  We had scanned the ticket twice as instructed by the ticket seller (who also tried to keep 5 lei of our change - a whole other bullet point for this list but "Friday six" just doesn't have the same ring to it).  For whatever reason the ticket didn't validate, but the automated fare validator gave us no indication of this.  So we thought everything was fine until these two menacing bus ticket checkers got on a few stops later and after a bit of an exchange, tried to scam us out of 50 lei for an invalid ticket.  At that point about six helpful Romanian youth, men and women who had seen us scan our ticket started to yell at them and continued to do so until they eventually got off the bus.  We didn't have to ask for help, these folks just gave it.  Lesson learned: Question authority, trust your fellow man.  (And woman.  And teenager.)

Food notes:

• lunch at Dristor Kebap - a lot like the Soup Nazi place, pay up front and know right away what toppings you want or NO DELICIOUS KEBAP FOR YOU!

we made it through the line alive

• homemade (well, "hostel made") pasta! the Aussies made some in Lisa so we were inspired to give it a try one night after looking up a Mario Batali recipe... a few more batches and we will have a winner

a little chewy

but we'll get there

Lodging notes:

• Umbrella Hostel was fine for three nights...  Except for the bed bugs.  To their credit they moved us immediately, apologized profusely and shut down the room shortly after we reported the issue.  We had no other issues during our stay except for the tiny coed bathroom with absolutely no privacy.  (And the aforementioned-annoying-bed-bug-bitten-nonstop-talking guy who ended up moving to our dorm room our last night due to aforementioned bed bugs in the other dorm, and our dormmate Sir Snores-a-Lot Sergio... But those are not the hostel's fault.)  The kitchen and common areas were great.  Breakfast included bread, meat and cheese (we call this "lunch").  And the whole place was kept pretty spotless.  Except for the bed bugs.

• Vila Gabriela for our last night, because it is close to the airport. So far we are the only ones here, the owner is really nice, the garden is pretty, there is an adorable kitty named Kitty, we can hear roosters and pigs off in the distance, and we have our own room so unless one of us spontaneously starts to snore, we may actually sleep well tonight.  For once.

soooooo comfy

Bed bugs and stupid men on buses aside, we did not love Bucharest.  But we didn't expect to so it's all good.  We would love to come back to Romania someday and when we do, we will avoid this city as much as possible.

This time tomorrow we will be in Istanbul (fingers crossed).  Crazy.  Just crazy!