One week down, three and a half more to go.
To summarize our first week, I will just say: we pulled a lot of freaking weeds (see before/after picture below). We also dug furrows between plant beds, planted some seeds, picked (and got stung by) a LOT of stinging nettles (whoch are used as groundcover on the plant beds because they are high in nitrates and because the soil is very clay-like and just bakes in the heat), took a lot of naps, exchanged stories, opinions, and ideas with our fellow WWOOFer Michael, who is an agriculture student from Austria, watched a cow get slaughtered, biked ten miles to the nearest "big town", visited a local wine cellar/seller, hitchhiked to a music festival, and stuffed our faces with blackberries.
BEFORE: all that greenery? Those are ALL weeds.
AFTER: hoed, weeded, and ready for planting
There are a few things in that list that I'm sure you want to know more about (COW SLAUGHTER?! HITCHHIKING?!? What the heck do you mean by Cellar/Seller? What did you do for Steve's birthday???) and lots of things you probably don't care about (naps), so here is some detail about the finer points of the week:
Wednesday: Steve's birthday! Yay! We actually had plans to go to Lake Balaton with the farm family, who were having some sort of cousin's reunion, but some light early-morning rain changed those plans - instead the cousins all came to the farm and Steve, Michael, and I were all told to GTFO (not really). We did have to eat our meals in the guesthouse *gasp* instead of the main house, but that was alright. The three of us took the (not new, not tuned up) bikes for the 7-8km to the nearest town, Tapolca, which actually has a supermarket (a few of them, actually), a real train station, and (most importantly) a pub that brewed local beer. One silly thing about Hungary, or at least the rural parts: everything here comes in a recycled (read: washed out) two-liter bottle (formerly soda, juice, whatever). Beer, local wine, local milk, sometimes juices and oil... Basically everything you get locally comes in a recycled bottle. Cool idea - but confusing to those who are used to U.S. Food safety regulations.
Right. So for Steve's birthday... We biked ten miles. And drank local brew from a two-liter Coca Cola bottle!
FRIDAY: we started off the morning with my first cowherding experience! It was time for the cows to move from one pasture to another, but first they had to be herded into a small corral because the veterinarian was coming to check one of the cows to see if she was pregnant - if not, she would become dinner.
When Steve worked at the cattle ranch at school, they artificially inseminated their cows twice a year so that calfing season was only in the fall and spring. Here, the bull runs with the herd and if he does his job correctly, the family expects a calf from each of the cows about once every 18-24 months.
***WARNING: these next two photos are not for the faint of heart.
DEMON COWS! Creepy eyes.... Ahhhhhh!
Yep, that's the vet. And YEP, he is shoulder-deep in exactly where he looks like he is.
The cow was not pregnant. (But she lives a happy twelve years of grazing the fields of western Hungary.) hungary has, for the past two years, had far-below-average rainfall; the grass is not growing enough for the cows to eat now and for Peter to bale for winter feed, so the family has been thinning out the herd. This cow was headed for the slaughterhouse.
Except, as it happens, the slaughterhouse came to us.
We were told a very entertaining story about a previous incident where one of their cows was taken in a trailer to the slaughterhouse as per veterinarian's orders - but the Hungarian Grey are very independent and thus are only handled a few times a year; this cow was so freaked out at the new situation it found itself in that IT KICKED THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE'S TRAILER APART. What a bill that must have been.....
Anywho, so the slaughterhouse guys are happy to come out to the site when necessary, and Steve, Michael, and I were all invited to watch if we so chose. Which, of course, we all did. I expected it to be messy - I imagined blood everywhere and the animal screaming - but I am very relieved that it wasn't. Basically, the cow is bopped on the head with a device that looks (from where I was standing, a few feet away) like a big sledgehammer to knock it unconscious, and this bop apparently does enough damage to the brain that it is basically dead after that. Then the throat is cut (with a small-ish incision at the jugular, not a huge slash that would half take the cow's head off, like I for some reason imagined) and the heart, which is still beating at this point, pumps the blood out of the body. A few long minutes, some involuntary muscular jerks, and two bucketfuls of blood later, the cow is dead in all senses. The horns were then sawed off and I asked Aaron to make me a drinking horn out of one! :D Hopefully the process won't take too long and I'll come home with the coolest souvenir ever!
Later that evening, Aaron and his sister Naomi took the three of us into Hegyesd to meet with a family friend who sold wine. Barbara had mentioned that there was a wine cellar in the village we could go to. I thought she meant it like that: a wine cellar. But when we got to Perger's place, it was really just an evening sitting in his backyard while his chickens scratched around the picnic table and we tasted (and by tasted I mean he kept refilling our glasses for two hours) his two homemade wines and tried (really just tried this time) his homemade pálinka, which is basically a clear brandy made from grape must (the grapes after they have been pressed for wine. The pálinka was so strong it probably burned all my nosehairs off and his little puppy kept trying to chew my shoelaces off, but with all the wine Perger gave us plus his homegrown sweetcorn and his wife's cookies.... There wasn't too much to really complain about. :)
SATURDAY: There are many different pastures on the farm, and on Friday we had moved the cows into one of the upper pastures, which we discovered was next to a field of blackberries. Steve, Michael, and I went up after breakfast to pick some - which ended up being me picking blackberries/stuffing my face with at least half the bucketful I picked while the boys threw tiny wild pears at me and reclined in the grass enjoying the scenery.
We also hitchhiked for the first time!
The farm is off the one main road in the area (maybe a highway?) and in one direction is Tapolca; the other direction, about 8km away, is the village of Kapolcs. Kapolcs is one of the vullages that hosts the Valley of the Arts music festival, which lasts a week. So we ventured out with Naomi, her boyfriend Barney, and their friend Balas. And we hitchhiked there!
Apparently hitchhiking isn't a big deal (ie, not illegal) in Hungary and in fact very common during this festival. After about ten minutes of waiting on the little road leading to the farm, we were picked up by a guy with a cargo van that we all piled into the back of and made our way out to the vendor-filled streets of Kapolcs. We ate langos (MUCH better than the huge greasy ones we ate in Budapest) and wandered to the tune of a man covering Rolling Stones songs.... In Hungarian.
SUNDAY: After lunch, Steve, Michael, and I decided to head back to Kapolcs and see what it was like during the day. We figured it would be easier to get a ride with just three of us instead of six of us. Indeed, two minutes later we get picked up by a BMW (no sketchy cargo van for us!) and we are on our way back to the festival. This time, however, we were only able to look at some of the little vendors before it started raining and we figured we should probably head back. Two minutes after we get picked up by a couple around our age who don't speak any English, the skies open up. It starts pouring, then it starts hailing. We got dropped off at the Hegyesd bus stop since we couldn't figure out how to tell the driver that the farm driveway was about a quarter mile before that - and as we drove by the farm, we saw Barbara waiting in the Land Rover for traffic to pass. Praying that she is heading to Tapolca and not to Kapolcs to pick up Naomi who had gone to the festival earlier in the day, we run out of the bus stop shelter and into the pouring rain onto the road so Barbara would hopefully see us. What great timing - she was just heading to the bus stop to pick up another WWOOFer! Yay - no quarter-mile run back to the farm in pouring rain!
Here is a picture of Steve and Michael moving the two lambs from their outdoor pen into the open half of the pig pen. Beware of those creeper pigs.... Also, beware of sheep, because right before I took this photo, the lamb Steve is holding started nibbling on Michael's fingers. And a few days prior, when Michael and I moved the sheep back into their pen after another drizzly evening, one of them started eating Michael's shorts. :P nom nom nom.
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