A day in Villa Matilde

We are now in Villa Matilde, 20 minutes away from Andujar, in the region of Andalucia, south of Spain. A land known for it's Olive production in the world. It's hot and dry, so dry the wind picks up sand and dust on the ground as it weaves it's way through the hills.

This is our first HelpX host of the few more to come in the next few months that are spotted around Spain, Portugal and Italy. Following this will be our adventure to get to all these hosts in different countries in an attempt to experience life by working the land and living from it.

Villa Matilde, a typical Spanish villa in the province of Jaen. It's white washed walls are decorated with orangy yellow 'gathers'- as found in curtains, at the inner side of it's roof. There are plenty of rooms on ground level and below which I didn't bother keeping track. This 3 acre land is surrounded by old olive trees, dotted with many fig bearing trees, almond trees, mediterranean pine with it's cones the size of my feet, and many off season fruit trees such as the apricot, pear, and plums.

And of course, a Spanich villa without a pool especially in the South is never up to it's use. Therefore, this one comes with a the pool the swim length of my 4 full freestyle strokes and the width of Jenn's 3 katak puru (breastroke) stokes nicely situated right above the aula (Spanish for classroom).

This is a strange and interesting place to be especially when we were placed in a caravan left under the shade at the back end of the house. We loved sleeping in the caravan under the moonlit night that casts shadows from branches outside while the breeze soothe you to sleep in the cosy outdoor surrounding.

Jueves the psychologically disturbed male donkey, beats the rooster by faithfully waking us up every morning at 7.30am just when dawn breaks. And looking out on our left would be Ross, the foal fooling around with his mum, Plata. Besides these equins,

We now moved in to a room in the villa due to the heat in the afternoon and our work starts from 8.30am in the morning after breakfast in the vegetable garden weeding and preparing the beds for seeding or cleaning the pool for me. Today, Roland got us to give him a hand to fill a trailer load full of Jueves's manure. Boy was that tough work! Imagine scooping and gathering in a cloud of crispy dry donkey's shit dust. We emptied bucket loads of partly decomposed shit one at a time and each time walking up the steep slop in the donkey's kandang. What great cardio! We then hooked up the trailer onto Roland's Korean 4x4 with it's French diesel powerplant and drove to another part of the property to have the manure emptied and spread out as fertilizers. All in all, we got ourselves covered in donkey's dry pooh and began to glimpse the physical work involved in a farm.
By the time we got back to the vegetable farm to continue our weeding, the sun is already flexing it's muscle and we only lasted 3o minutes trying to get rid of more stubborn roots before we head into the shade to continue picking seeds of Parsley, Cellery and Carrots we collected the day before. All these while, waiting for lunch to come as our 3 halves of french loaves and coffee we had for breakfast was long gone by then.
Lunch today was Sardines, homemade loaf, leftover pastas from 2 days ago, some beef chunks from god knows when and more cheese. But we had a stomach full and went straight to wash off our dirt before returning to siesta off the afternoon heat.