thank god we are finally in Naples

Casa Larocca, Napoli, Italia

we spent the last two weeks at a goat farm that was more bad than good. I will take the risk of sounding complainy and write some highlights and lowlights from the fiastra goat farm.

- we slept on the ground outside in the rain and thunderstorms and lightning without a flashlight, until the cat destroyed our tent and ripped it to shreds, then we slept in the cats room with the cats
- the sheets were not changed and we got scabies
- they had a tv and dvd player and a lot of good movies. Sophie and I watched grease 3 or 4 times. That movie is my new favorite.
- we herded goats for about 2 hours on hte first day around the lake which was beautiful and funny and funand i ate some wild blackberries, but then we never saw the goats again. Instead we weeded and for 2 days straight we lugged huge bales of hay around in the 100 degree heat until we were blistered everywhere.
- one time each sophie and i rubbed olive oil on the goat cheeses that were in the cold brick cheese room downstairs. It was very rustic and beautiful.
- we woke up at 5 every day and took naps in the afternoon which were usually interrupted by one of the kids trying to forcefeed the cat in our room.
- the lake was beautiful, turquoise, warm, and so lovely. we swam in it every day after work. THe scenery was all very sound of music.
- the 4 year old girl Gioia went into my room and took my birth control pills out and strew them all over somewhere we still don't know. the mom refused to pay me in full for them and said it was my fault for not putting them away.
- we pretty much ate only zucchini and rice and bread and jam for the whole time.

The family is so poor that they are just barely scraping by, so i felt badly asking for food variety, or private time, the dad works from 5 am to midnight and the mom has 5 crazy kids to take care of and on top of it they are trying to do everything all organic. we were there to volunteer and to have a social and cultural exchange, but there was no exchance because they had no time to spare and no time to teach us anything new. We had to work on the things he didn't have time to do, like hay and weeding, and unfortunately that meant that we did a lot of the grunt work that took less skill. It wasn't out of their malintentions that we had a bad experience, it was the lack of time and space they had to care about what kind of an experience we were having. I wish we got to learn about goat cheese. I just learned that it can be very very pungent and flies love the smell.

AH i am glad to leave that place behind and never go back!!

one thing that was great was truffle hunting. WE met this older, maybe mid 60s man at a restaurant. He was sitting near us and not talking but just looking so i said hi and after talking for a while with him we eventually decided to go truffle hunting with him in the forest. He does that for a living!! His name is felice which means happy.
He picked us up on sunday morning at 8. I felt a little bit weird about going with him because i found him strange and then stefano, the farmer, didn't say anything to relax me. He just said, oh he is a strange man. i really wanted to go truffle hunting,n so q tried to subdue the feeling that i was going to get murdered that day and Sophie and i got in the car. I immediately started scanning the car for a possible murder weapon and when i found none i felt a little more relaxed.
Felice barely spoke, and when he did he didn't look me in the eye. HE has very awkward social mannerisms and kept looking at me like he was going to eat me. Then he said that we are parking at a place that is not very beautiful but it is a good place to park. I asked him where, and he said, in the cemetery in the middle of the forest. Then we parked there and he went into the trunk and got out this huge ice pick style gardening tool, perfect for a murder in the middle of the forest, and i really felt at this moment that i was going to get murdered. Granted, i expect to get murdered more than most people probably do, but that is always only a crazy fear. This was tangible. I was staying far behind him as we hiked through the forest and trying to figure out ways to escape.
Well instead of killing us, he took us on a lovely series of short hikes in the middle of the forest with his 3 little truffle finding dogs and we discovered maybe 20 truffles and drove through tiny tiny forest towns with the narrowest streets and he bought us cappuccinos. Not only that, but he brought us 3 bananas and cake and was very pleasant through all of his awkwardness. Then at the end he drove us home and gave us 7 of the maybe 20 or so truffles that we found.

We took the truffles with us in Sophie's purse on the train to naples and the whole car was filled with their smell. Then we gave them to my aunt Marilena when we got to her house in naples. It was probably 150 dollars worth of truffle mushrooms and she grated them all over some buttery pasta. We have been eating like queens, my aunt is the best cook, and we have been sleeping a lot. We are like big fat sleepy queens. This is a lovely break from the farm work, especially the hay days, when one of the days we came home and no one had saved any food for us, this is the exact opposite. No one feels at peace until we are stuffed with primi, secondi, salad, fruit and wine and bread and then a sweet and then a digestivo.

Which is exactly the state I am in right now. Stuffed with wonderful food after a day out with my cousin Simone and his very sweet friend Rolando and Sophie in Positano which is one of the many places here in italy that looks more beautiful in person than the postcards of it. It is a bunch of beautiful colorful houses squished onto the sides of lush green staggering cliffs over the ocean, with lots of bouganvillia (sp?) and lemons lemons limoncello lemon cake and lots of lemon paraphernalia everywhere. I tried to buy a bathingsuit because sadly i left my really nice really well fitting one at the fiastra goat farm and all the ones here only cover maybe 5 square inches of my butt, no matter what size i try. So i don't know what to do about that.

thanks to this queenlike treatment, i think my scabies are gone. Also, my uncle who is a gynecologist fixed the birth control pills problem for free in 5 minutes, such a magician. and he got us the scabies cream and we did maybe 5 loads of laundry and steamed the scabies out of everything we couldn't put in the washing machine. I could do with never having scabies again. Luckily the words thing about it is the name and the idea.