This blog post is already a few days old, but life on the farm is so busy that I haven't had time to post it until now. Another post about life here will come soon.
***
The cow that comes down in the night is huffing and blowing and making a kind of snorting sound. There's a rough sort of baa coming from the goat shed and some distant tinkling bells make it sound like maybe there are reindeer somewhere hereabouts. These are the signs that I most certainly am not in Tel Aviv any more.
I had my last Abulafia's beef shawarma last night, and this morning bid a fond goodbye to the Abraham Hostel breakfast, always a sociable affair. After buying some last-minute panic items for the great unknown that awaited me, I checked out for one last time and made my way to the train station.
Over the last few days since H left I've made the journey twice to the middle of nowhere in the hills around Nazareth to visit a couple of volunteering opportunities. The first was a beautfiul olive oil pressing workshop surrounded by gardens with donkeys and chickens wandering around. The presses were working when I arrived so it was a very noisy and busy environment. They said I could come but that I'd be the only volunteer, since they usually have most people around for the picking, which is earlier in the year, and the pruning which is later. The hunt continued.
The following day, I came back to the area to visit the goat farm. It was a very confusing arrival because the goat farm is also a rustic restaurant and I arrived at the same time as two posh Israelis who had come for dinner. I didn't realise this and assumed they were also volunteers, and asked lots of questions which bemused them while their answers bemused me equally. "Are you friends with Dalia?" I asked, she being the person I'd been communicating with about volunteering. "Sort of," they replied before striding off towards the farm building. "Wait, let me get my phone," I cried, assuming we'd all arrive together for a happy volunteers meeting. They hesitated for a few moments, before looking at each other then proceeding on their way, as I hurried to rejoin them. They arrived and were immediately ushered to a table and brought drinks, which I was pointedly not invited to join them at. The penny finally dropped once they disappeared into a private ante-room and I was left to sit at the communal table in the kitchen with the cast of characters who had coalesced around these guests' arrival.
These were Dalia herself, a woman of maybe around 60 with huge and tumbling hair and rustic hippy attire; a possibly older man who didn't introduce himself who was similarly dressed like someone who has lived in Tibet, possibly in a yurt; and Daphne, a woman in her thirties who turned out not in fact to be Israeli as her amazing Hebrew suggested, but Greek. Dalia busied herself with finalising dishes which Daphne took through to the secret back room and the man, who I know now to be Dalia's husband and co-founder of the farm Amnon, poured himself coffee and generally seemed to get somewhat in the way.
I was left standing around, trying to convince myself that I wasn't doing so awkwardly (this is actually possible if you concentrate on it: you can just be standing around, rather than standing around awkwardly), or feebly helping out. Dalia asked me in Hebrew to stir the tahina and I roundly misunderstood and put it on the table. I felt like this was a foretaste of the many such interactions that were surely to come.
After a brief meal which included the opening of an ice cream tub which turned out to be full of outstandingly delicious goats cheese (inevitably) I got back on the road because I'd hired my car by the hour, not by the day and it had to be back in Haifa in less than an hour.
The fact that I'd turned up to see the place, and stayed for lunch seemed to be confirmation enough of my credentials to come and volunteer, so it was generally agreed that I would come back the following day.
***
My arrival at the farm today happened in some of the most bizarre circumstances imaginable. So much so that it already feels like a weird dream as I sit here in not-very-glorified barn in the dark writing this on my first night as an Israeli farm hand.
I caught the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa, and then two buses into increasingly wild-feeling countryside, both of which were full of young soldiers going home for the weekend. I had my giant wheelie suitcase with me again, which felt especially out of place as I waited in the increasingly low evening sun at a bus stop by the side of a highway in what otherwise seemed like featureless scrub land.
I eventually arrived at the final point of civilisation on the way to the farm, where I'd been told to phone for a lift the rest of the way along the dirt track. At this point I realised that I was in a signal black spot that continued for at least a few hundred meters in both directions, so I decided to walk. Wheeling my giant suitcase down a steep unpaved road felt extra incongruous, but I was somewhat encouraged by the fact that vehicles seemed to be coming the opposite way. As I reached a levelling off of the slope I realised that the vehicles were in fact coming from the scene of some sort of accident. A leisure buggy of some kind had clearly come off the road at some speed and police and ambulances were there with flashing lights. Still without signal I stood dumbly by as people came and went from the scene of the accident and a woman arrived in a smart car and immediately started remonstrating angrily and tearfully in Arabic with a man at the scene. I clutched my giant suitcase close to me, and waited for a lull in the proceedings in which to ask someone for a lift to the still-distant end of the increasingly unpassable dirt track.
Finally a man in a beaten-up SUV turned onto the track, and went slowly enough that with whistles and shouts I was able to flag him down. He knew almost no English and only Arabic, but knew enough to respond excitedly when I said I was English. "England is a great country" he cried with glee, and we were on our way, my luggage and guitar bouncing around in the back.
We arrived and everyone was immediately ushered in for a meal at the Japanese-level sit-on-the-floor low dining table. The Arabic speaking man turned out to be an associate of Amnon, the man of the house, and the two man spoke animatedly in a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic throughout the meal while Dalia, the chef, homemaker and wife of Amnon, and Daphne, the Greek volunteer with the excellent Hebrew, listened quietly. I sat in total bemusement and ate my salad and tahina, chewing quietly like someone eating Monster Munch at a wake.
Wow! Quite an adventure!
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