13 juillet

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hey everybody!
i am in italy! totally crazy. here i dont really know any of the language but i feel like an jerk to always be saying "do you speak english" so instead when ever people talk to me in italian i respond in french hoping they wont think i am just some lame american that has no care to learn any european language but still insists on traveling here. who knows is this is really working. normally they respond with "do you speak english" so then we move to english because they ask to so that seems better. it is beautiful here. lucca is lovely. there was a train strike in florence when i arrived yesterday and thus every train that i was supposed to get on to head to lucca was canceled. the poor station workers were totally fried from dealing with all the chaos from the strike that when i got up to the front of this totally rediculous line to ask if there was a chance that any train would travel to lucca or in that direction today the man turned his face away from me as soon as i walked up and when i said hi he just turned his face the other way. he definately needs to take some satisfy and delight classes : ) its nice to be free for a few days. i think charly and chelsea are scheming (sorry, cant spell:) to take a train to pisa tomorrow and see the leaning tower. that should be pretty fun. i am going to head up to their farm this afternoon. it will be cool to check out a farm and not have to work there :) my last farm was pretty great though. different because all of them are. upon arrival i was asked to not include names of any person or place, etc. that could give away where i was and who i was staying with, which to me sounds like you are trying to hide something scary, but i will respect it. thus i will call the woman of the house donna and the man of the house lester. this place was so incredibly beautiful. it was high up in the mountains and there were rivers coming from every direction. just gorgeous. i have some pictures but they really could not do the place justice. at this farms they do peaches, chestnuts, cherries, apricots, veggies and things. i just wanted to metion peaches because everyday i ate like a DILLION peaches frech from the tree. millions of peaches, peaches for me. millions of peaches, peaches for free...if i had my little way, id eat peaches every day...my wwoofing partner, Sky, and i sang this song quite often. so, donna and lester had multiple properties all over within a 40 radius of where they lived so we would head out at 8am stopping here and there to turn on the water or turn if off somewhere else and then settle on a specific place and work till noon at which time we would head over to one of the near by houses and have lunch with that family and then take a break till 5 at which time we would go back to work and work till the sun went down (9ish) and then head home to have dinner between 11 and midnight. crazy. it was really nice though. the farms were all next to a river so after lunch we (sky and i) would head over to the river where he would swim and i would hang in the shade and write in my journal. the last day i got it in my head that it would be fun to walk down the river (crazy). i dont have a swim suit here thus i rolled up my pants and off we went. we ended up slip siding across the river (thankfully i didnt end up falling in but i did end up wet all the way up to my thighs so i might as well have at that point :). it was a lot of fun though. there we were trapsing through the river bank trying to find a way back to the road barefoot and trapsing through blackberry bushes and such. good times :) i havent adventured like that since i was a kid :) speaking of blackberry bushes sky and i decided that we were going to make a blackberry pie being that we found this bush that had some ripe berries. after a lot of searching it turned out that the bush we found was the only bush with ripe berries :) but the pie turned out great anyway it was just a little small. donna was a bit of a cranky bitch that insisted on helping you with things but then would carry on for long drawn out lectures on how much you are putting her out and such and lester was a handsy creep but the food was good and it was super fun hanging with sky cause he sings and plays guitar and loves to perform and i love to sit and listen so most days when we got home from work we would take turns in the shower and then i would chose songs from his song book and he would play and sing for hours. it was really cool cause there were a few songs that i knew so we would sing together and such. good times! all in all a very good, growing experience and i am happy that i stayed there. so, i am in italy and life is amazing. i love you all so very much and it is so wonderful to hear from you :) i hope you are all great and cant wait to see you all and hear of your summers when i get back in three weeks. crazy how fast time flys. sometimes i feel like i could just do this forever. i just need to find a way to bring this home with me. there is such peace and believe it or not realy minimal stress. even with the train strike and no trains i was frusterated but not stressed. there were quite a few people camped out with all their crap and sleeping in sleeping bags in the station already (and no they werent homeless people they were other stranded travelers) so i got to the point where i was like, okay, so may be i stay in the station tonight and hopefully the trains are running tomorrow. at which time a man i had asked a quesiton of earlier walked up and asked me where i was going and directed me to the bus station (this was another traveler not a station person :). everything always works out and there is just no reason to stress. also here i am living every moment for me and what i want and that leads me towards really thinking about what that is and so much more and...well i really dont know how to explain it and i dont know that it would make sense to anyone but me anyway. enough of the heavy stuff, just know that i think of you all always and love you so much!
a bientot!
amber

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