Hello everyone,

welcome to my new blogging style, it's short and manageable and hopefully rather frequent. Here's the latest:

I'm in Jakarta right now. Today, after the ferry ride back from the 1000 islands (like the dressing, same place) followed Feri, my handsome couchsurfing host and Elly, his lovely friend, to a Museum.

They asked, 'wanna go to a museum' to me and Noe (French for Noah) and we were kind like, yea awright, so off we go. and...AND...AANNDD! It was the most incredibly serendipitous thing, turns out this museum was the home of none other than THE Jan Pieterzoon Coen. Oh Mah Gahhh! Like, I was just getting swept along in this torrent of day after Christmas, central Jakarta, kids and teachers and parents, all locals surprisingly, and then there it was, an unforgetable portrait. Jan Pieterzoon Coen. So I'm bad with names, didn't actually remember his name when I saw the *original* work right there (*I'm telling myself it's the original, cause everyone else did, but like, no "no flash" not much written on the plaque, basically, "this guy lived in this house, he was Dutch and enjoyed nutmeg, brutal conquest, and long walks on the beach."

So I'm like jumping out of my pants with excitement, Elly was eying me like, this Bule doesn't even know who this guy is, and then I lay the whole story out as I remembered it: Brutal conquest, stole the spice economy in Europe from Lisbon, not to mention stole the spice islands import business from more mainland-style marajahs, annihilated populations of small to medium sized islands, and did it all with a business like detachment and religious vocabulary in a funny dutch accent.

So now it's all pouring in, I'm remembering my semester in Peru, the way I read "the taste of conquest" over many a lackadaisical turd delivery. I remembered turning over and over in my head, how do I describe what I want to do and see and learn to the Watson people. My fire about food was always there, ecologically we (ecologists) all know that, sorry Monsanto, you and we may survive, but only if massively monocultured tracts of land do not. But that book I read turned me on to the cultural and actually religious impact of the trade and use of food and spice. The Dutch were only able to scrounge enough money together in the first place for that kind of conquest because fast days in Christianity required massive amounts of fish. If the dutch had one thing, it was fish, sometimes in the most bothersome locations. Enter the dikes and windmills.

So all this is like flooding my mind, it dawned on me that the long (continuing) story of the spice trade (think CocaCola and TacoBell 'Fire' sauce) somehow freaking lassoed me, I forgot the epic importance of trade and movement of goods when I finally settled on one formula for a project proposal. Having not been able to describe really where the fire came from for this project about food Watson just didn't understand, but that's OK, cause here I am.

Such is the crazy truth about how "The Taste of Conquest" by Michael Krondl sorta grabbed me, then I sorted through all the directions I could go for the love of food, settled on 4 months Siberia at Magadan, 4 New Zealand, and then 4 in Italy. I had some kind of logic to that I think. That fell through and I said, OK ok, JUST Italy. That fell through cause of the schengen visa and my status as non student, non-well known brand of fellow, non interested in hanging out at embassies, so I said... listen up Hendrix, I'm gonna wait on deciding where to go next. Got a refundable ticket to Croatia, so... yeah might not go there. Then I started Hating Italy. Sometimes I accidentally capitalize a word. It's not random, it just happens when I really mean it. I was so pissed at Italy, mostly I had a magical wonderful beautiful time, but some hard turbulence around week 8 and 9. It was cold and time to get gone. So I took the advice of two migrant essential oil and crystal and heat pack dealers, met them at the Christmas Bazaars of Turin. They did a thing that I was able to remember from what seemed like a long time ago, they looked in my eyes and smiled.

That was welcome warmth, in a frigid land of fashion and pandering. They were like "we live between Bali and Turin, Bali is wonderful, go there and you can for sure work on this farm We know about, there's always young people there and yes, people are less caffeinated there, where the coffee actually comes from" So I was like... yeah

And then I got my ticket and now I'm here and It is friggin sweet.

G'nite


-Ben

Three Weeks in Torino

I was lucky to find this apartment in the center of Torino through couchsurfing. This is the view from the little balcony. Right across the street below is Porta Nuova train station. It wasn't too loud and it gave a nice open view.
Getting to live here was sort of an under the table deal, which I am getting accustomed to in Italy. A girl named Vanessa wasn't really supposed to be subletting it to me, but she had somewhere else to live for the month... It was perfect for everyone.
There were a few students in the building who were fun and welcoming. A friend from the apartment, Fabio, invited me to a lunch with his parents one Sunday




This was my first "real" Italian meal according to Fabio, it was real because it was made by Fabio's mom. All the flavors were familiar, but what surprised me was that a meal-sized portion of pasta was the first course. All the meals I've eaten with families so far have had a course that you are supposed to finish before moving on.

Fabio's dad, Italo, grew all the vegetables in that meal too, which wasn't much of a big deal for them, he grows enough tomatoes and potatoes to last most of the year. When I was there they had just canned all the tomato sauce.
After a lengthy and relaxed recovery from such a feast we went to Italo's garden. I was pretty pleased with my fortune, to already be visiting your normal everyday family garden after just a week or so! Italo's father had bought this piece of land that runs right up to the edge of the train tracks, surprisingly close actually, I'd never seen a fence so close to the tracks in USA. Now the original piece of land is divided up amongst Italo's siblings who all have their gardens there.
Both of Fabio's parents have worked for Fiat since way back when their parents came to Turin to work for Fiat, now Fabio is on more of a academic track and also isn't inclined to garden. I don't know if there is a relationship between those two things. Someone in his cohort of cousins had to step down from the garden or that piece of ground will become a buch of little slivers to small to work with.
The tracks are JUST behind that big wall, the bamboo growing there is for trellises, This is after the harvest, so it's all weeds here, in the greenhouse to the right there was lettuce and chiles and celleriac.
111: I'm pretty sure these are concord grapes, but they are called Fragolino because they taste like strawberries: Fragole
124 & 144: There was this giant fish market, easily the coolest things there were the live eels and the giant clam shells (they were dead already, and probalby more than 200 years old when they died). That's Julietta, she's a foreign students of industrial engineering from Argentina. She was cool and showed me some neat spots, it was good to have a friend who was also discovering Torino.
156: My first day, the first day, of Salone del Gusto was a feast for the senses as well as a feast of samples. Mostly meat and cheese was represented, but the variety was mind bending. It began to dawn on me that I don't know much about meat, raw cured meats and raw cheese is pretty rare in american diets, and let me tell you that that's really too bad.
165: After I tasted new thing after new thing and met some brewers who I will probably visit in Friuli pretty soon I went to this tasting of a 16 year old cheese, you can see the fanfare that welcomed the innards of this crystalized fossil of a cheese. I couldn't help laughing while I joined the crowd of oooh-ing camera holders. I could say more about this cheese... but I was listening to the Italian that the guy was speaking rather than the live english translation. I can report that he turned the cheese over every single day for the first two years of its life and then scaled back to only once every two or three days, without fail, for the other fourteen years. Over that time it lost 60% of its original weight!
I got to thinking nerdy thoughts. This might be the longest "fixed" carbon I've ever consumed, that is, sixteen years ago mountain herbs fixed carbon turning CO2 into sugars etc, then those same molecules traveled via cow milk through time and space without being decomposed and used for respiration (some was of course, by friendly molds and bacteria). The only older carbon I've eaten might be the various food-grade petroleum products, outstripping the cheese's 16 by a whopping 250 million years.
183-5: Not food, but this cigar roller and her spread was the best tobbacco commercial I've ever reverently born witness to...
183: Later, that same day contitions seemed perfect for grappa and cigars. I met this wine importer from New Jersey and the slow food rep from Philadelphia, who was just out of college. We smoked and drank in the most civilized fashion I've ever experienced. I imagined big red leather winged armchairs and rich mahoghany as we talked about things that pair well with cigars and grappa: hunting, guns, the wine business, and american history. there aren't many topics less interesting to me than those, but It was perfect fare for a cigar that burned for no less than an hour. Incedentally I got sick the next day.
I stuck it out for the rest of the salone, three days and it was worth it. The weekend was a madhouse, shoulder to shoulder crowds and the knowlegeble vendors were reduced to sample-giving machines. Still, I met some good people who invited me to see their digs: several olive oil producers, A Polish mead producer and a guy who grows his own barley to make his own beer in Ireland, a shepherd who invited me to walk the transhumance in May, the slow food rep for Kenya was super friendly and welcomed me to come down where I could hang out with the people who make Nzoia River reed salt or Pokot ash yogurt, but I later learned it's on the travel warning list so I can't. A cheese maker in Germany has two interns from Japan now, and I am welcome to visit for a little while too. Looking back and looking at all the cards I have, I feel like I did the salone justice. But while it was going on I just wanted to press pause and gather myself, not only dazzled hypnotized by the parade of samples but also more and more fatigued by a throat cold I felt like the event was slipping by.

To sum it up, Salone del Gusto was freakin' awesome. It will blow your mind.
WELL, SO IT'S OVER... READY TO RULE THIS Fing COUNTRY? (no)
To tell the full idea of the whole story so far, not just the fun bits, here I have to say that the week after Salone del Gusto I just wanted to curl up and eat soup in my apartment. So I did. I wasn't proud of it though, I felt like I was wasting time and falling short of expectations, I was homesick and antisocial and the free trials that came with this mini-laptop I have were expiring. I couldn't even write anything worth sharing, very much in a rut. It was a bad week, but as the date approached for me to travel to the mountains and join Massimo I felt better and then ready. I saw it as the real beginning to my project and I rose out of that funk to have a farewell feast with my friends from the apartment on Via Nizza and trot off to somewhere new.
WAAAAAHHHHHH
*Travel Travel Train Train*
WEEEEEEHEEEEEEE
Yep, I told everyone to wait for me, that I'd be back in a bit after I packed my things. I again felt like I was leaving one of my special homes in the world. I stoically cinched down the straps on my sleeping bag's compression pack and nestled it amongst the heterochromatin of my material capital.
I surveyed the barren landscape. It was just as I found it... Orange walls. Stupid cheap ass dual hot plate, the stunted excuse for a piece of furniture it rested upon. I silently spent five, maybe ten minutes searching the very few nooks/crannies and mostly zoned out. Then, snapping out of some kind of reverie I can not describe yet, I looked at my bags, the pink and the green. They plumply lounged upon one another as if to sagely offer; "hey bro, no need to look at us to see yourself, but... this moment feels good from our vantage point ;) "
I walked down the marble stairs that smell fainly of dog piss for what would be the second to last time. Everyone was chillin in the common unit, different languages blurred, leaving just the faces that spoke them in my memory. Smiling remarks as we raised our 3oz while plasic solo cups. My smouldering dismay was fanned familiarly by the morbid consistency between thumb and middle finger, the trashcan filled with good old petroleum. Everyone chin-chined, Prost, Saluted and generally L'chaimed. It was just a normal night for them, except maybe the French couple couchsurfing with Marco. I was tired and the night was very young. Vanessa snagged a pause in conversation "eh, Darleeng. Reely, please remember us, you know to always have a home, ehh, because we are here in Torino... OK??"
What more can I say? Franchesca and Fabio looked at my eyes in the middle of thier conversation "Siiiihh--Torni, torni, si voi. Va bene, eh" It was a nice goodbye and I didn't think about it one bit on the train the next day.

TRENTINO: FIRST, LEMME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS PARTY

Remember how I was saying that it's common to have a first course at meals? Well I recently had the most outrageous first course yet. On Thursday Massimo had a bunch of friends over who had helped him roast an entire cow (500 people ate it at a big party in June) the first course was: fresh raw beef cut into tiny cubes with olive oil, cured beef sliced thin, and smoked salmon on toast and also Speck, ground into Pate' on toast. It was all pretty excellent. Next came a roast with polenta and mushrooms, the gravy was ourageously rich and tasty. This is a family that knows how to do meat.
Massimo's great grandfather started the business and his son plans to keep it going. Not only that, the guy I sat next to, Angelo, makes his own wine every year. He brought two reds that I'd never heard of before: Groppello and Teroldego (Italy has the widest variety of wine grapes of anywhere). First we drank Gropello. Evidently this is a hard wine to pull off because it tends to be sour. I tasted a little bit of sour and took everyone's word that it was a pretty good gropello having nothing to compare it to. (Also I'm wine illiterate, well, we should say that I'm a lover of all wine, I've loved wine made of Welches white grape juice concentrate and Fleichman's yeast--then regretted it the next day).
The Teroldego was darker and I liked it more, it had narrow legs and left a magenta hue in the empty glass which Angelo was pretty proud of. It's hard to find a black enough grape to do that. (take a Moran moment to note that I like the second cup of wine more than the first more than 70% of the time, also that roughly 30% of statistics are garbled by mt memory I wish could comment more expertly on these wines, but I just don't have the schooling. [NOTE, proofreading this, I should add that I had a Teroldego at the bar (connected to the biulding that I live in incedentally) It was a whole different animal from Angelo's. This other one was just like any other red wine that Genevieve might help pick out based on the label art]

[THIS PARTY, PART II] VOI CAFFE'? UNA GRAPPA?

Next Angelo busted out his Grappa. It's illegal to make grappa at home in Italy just like in the states, but I get the sense that Angelo has plenty of company in the illicit production of excellent spirits.
Grappa is like Tequilla in that it has a tremendous range between really bad and really good. Vodka is on the other end of that spectrum: As far as I'm concerned vodka is just vodka, if it is kind of gross, you can put it through a brita filter a few times and it becomes really easy to drink. Try it. But Grappa... Angelo's Grappa was definitely good, like really good.
What you do is this: Get all the grapes and smash them up. Let'em sit somewhere for a while. Siphon off the liquid into a barrel or what-have-you, this is wine, but you should wait a while before you drink it (even though its drunkness-bestowing are mostly as they will be once it's seasoned (aged), the residual sugars and that shit that settles out over time makes the wine "Molto Bruto" (very ugly)... Bella/Bruta--opposites.. Also, Angelo says that the moon has a lot to do with the fermentation and also the settling-out and seasoning of wine. Says it's common knowledge.
So now you have you're wine resting off somewhere, and also a buch of wine-soaked grapeskins. Just throw that slop into the still, do a primary distilation and keep all the distilation, heads tails and if you have to run and errand and you get a ton of water too, meh, I don't think it matters as long as you don't let it burn. Then you have all this grapeskin free liquid, pretty rich in alcohol. Put that back in the boiling end of the still along with maybe some moscato wine or any other strongly flavored aromatizing entity if you wish. Now, the art: carefully collect small batches of the first stuff to come out and save them, a bunch of varyingly toxic and tantalizing molecules start to march out in order of vapor pressure, or some such chemistry term. Then comes our friend, ethanol, then some mostly harmless but varyingly awful tasting 'tails' (Booty grappa, anyone?)
You need a very finely tuned piece of equipment for this process. It is called a nose. For example, I've got quite a snout, but it would be irresponsible to trust my nose at his point in my life for such a delicate task.


Well. Seems like that brings us to the present moment doesn't it??
Right now I'm in a village called Coredo at the top of the north side of the Val di Non in Trentino Italy. I've been doing apprentice stuff around this butcher/salami maker's workshop/storefront. Nobody speaks english so I'm learning Italian really fast, which has gone from difficult and isolating to exciting and fun in the past few days. I'm on the other side of my first bout of **oh shit what I am I supposed to do!--I can't just mosy around this foriegn country where nobody speaks my language and ask 'hey, mind if I follow you around and and watch you make food for a few weeks??' ** phase and now I feel really good again.

I'm past half-way through a three week stay in the labyrinthine 4 story complex that houses the business and most of Massimo's family. This little apartment on the top floor is my domain for now. At present I'm sitting in my little kitchen with its east-facing window. I just saw a flatbed pickup roll downhill on the street below loaded with about 15 or 20 5-gallon stainless milk canisters and then a few minutes later saw it roll off back up the road, unloaded. This little apartment that's mine is usually vacant they told me, also indicated by the abandoned stationary bike from the '80s, the dormant behemoth dehumidifier, and various ice chests sitting in the atrium.

It's a cozy affair; just the little atrium, one bed, one bath, and one kitchen with one Six range gas/electric convection oven/broiler and all the nice cookware one might need including an array of perfectly sharp knives. Yes, somehow after a yearsworth of dreaming and planning and hoping I have landed in the realness. This is a family that knows about food.
COWS TO BEEF
Well, wasn't really bargaining for it, but I got a heaping helping of realness on monday. Turns out that Massimo's joint is a slaughterhouse. That's pretty sensible isn't it? I mean, there's tons of farmers around here who very much understand that the couple of cows that mow thier unused (that is, un-appled) pastures for them are made of meat of a high quality, meat they'd like to eat. It's very very rare to find a slaughterhouse/butcher storefront in the USA. I've seen one though, in Arkansas. The demand is growing now though because of the desire to eat one of the cows you own, but also know what its last moments, or in the case of our great nation, days or weeks of crowded soy and corn based existence (shoutout to all the cow-owners out there).
Massimo killed four cows, three veals that he bought from two different people, and one old cow that he did as a job for its owner. He was really tired as the final cutting and hoisting was finaly at hand. So that meant he let me take a whak at some of the heavy lifting.
I know it's not my place to do any of the skilled slicing, if they took the time to teach me they's get behind and besides it's really skilled work that takes a long time to get the hang of. The only two people who cut meat are Massimo and Michele. Michele's been doing it for ten years and of course Massimo was bound to be a butcher from birth. His brother is a butcher too, the generational business started about a hundred years ago when the demand for one started to mount in this neck of the valley. Before that, slaughter and dressing meat was mostly task for whoever had the animal and whoever was willing to help.
Massimo was thinking "Ques'animal e' troppo veccio per mangiare, Ostia! Gli ossi sono troppo bruti per tagliare, dificile' la vita del macellaio." He certainly wasn't thinking, "damn! I just killed, gutted and chopped three cows in half lengthwise," I sure was though when he handed me the long handled bone cleaver and sat panting against the railing of the hydraulic lift platform. "Voi provare" yeah, I did for sure want to try. But shit, This beast was mooing an hour and a half before! And I had just spent twenty minutes with a hose on full blast hydrating its steaming aromatic stomach contents enough to flow down the floor drain! (OK, don't freak out, but the heaping bulk of humid grassy bits... actually started to smell really good, not at all like cow poop or barnyard days... more like vigorous beer fermentation with some kind of extraterrestrial hop meets freshly mowed wildflower field) Gross!! Nope.

So, It's not like I havn't chopped up dead animals before, but only on special occasions and never one ton ones, right down the middle with a fifteen pound axe. I gave it all I had, got down throught the upper thorasic vertebrae, past the shoulders, and then the curve of the neck started to act like a shock absorber for my hacking. Massimo had caught his breath, so he took up the cleaver and laid a few more chops down before finishing the job with the saw. He told me to push the sides of beef down the rail off to the side of the room. It's just this greasy rod that these flat-faced hooks easily glide across, but not so easily when they have a riddiculous load on them. I think Massimo had a private chuckle while he watched me inexpertly wrestle the former cow around the curve of the rail. I didn't mind, I'm sure it was hillarious to behold.
In short, once the're on the rail, animals are just meat to Massimo. That's on a good day. On a bad day they're just Euros, money that has to be ground, spiced, dried, smoked and aged just so before it can be redeemed for legal tender. I say "once they're on the rail" but maybe even before the're on the rail, I don't really think so, but it was tough to tell. Michele doesn't like to do the deed though, he did the last calf, he was quick and precise with the gun and the chain and the wench, but he told me that "E' bruto fare cosi' i vitelli, non mi piace, ma cosi' e' il lavoro"
Well, that was my cow experience. Maybe you'd like to know just how they meet their end? It's a special pistol. A normal pistol with a bulky looking barrel that has this three inch long (9mm diameter) cylinder that shoots out and then goes back in, it looks like a power drill with no bit in it. You load a blank into this thing and shoot the cow in the head. It falls to the ground as if it were held up by a string and the string just broke with the same crack as the pistol. Then it's hoisted up by a back leg, kind of flailing dangerously with knee-jerk aftershocks of having its brain ended in a flash. Once it's upside down it's important to cut it's throat quickly. It's heart is beating still for a little bit and this helps to get all the blood out, also when both jugular veins are cut it means that what little brain is left is getting no oxygen. Massimo didn't tell me that particular tidbit, but it is the idea behind kosher slaughter. Matt Youngblood put knife to neck for the sake of a party we had at my house one time and the guy at the little goat farm in Austin told me most of what I know about slaughter. It was really helpful to have this understanding before coming here. By the way, try pushing on your own jugular veins and see if the world doesn't immediately start to slip away.
IN CONCLUSION
So yesterday I started to get sick, and strange thing, it really was a huge stroke of luck. It's Saturday, Shabbat, and I really needed this day to gather myself. Not from slaughter five days ago--changing the subject--much more because after having arrived here nearly two weeks ago my head was just spinning from the newness. Each day Massimo thought of something for me to do, not just loading carts of sausages and vacuum sealing, but also tagging along to his other sattelite location in the next valley over, going to the mind-bending apple-sorting and distribution center that sorts and packs world-premier quality apples to UK, Algeria, Russia, and the rest of Europe. (Each apple is photographed sixteen times and then the software guru lady, Eva, applies one of many different computer programs to sort it into one of about 22 grades. The program she chooses depends on the overall quality of the apples of the 300kg load contained in each crate that comes from the independent orchards who belong to the cooperative called Melinda. Ooof I could go on about this apple sorting factory! one super interesting anthropology note: it's only women iwho work in the packing room, recieving computer sorted apples and loading them into various boxes, giving the finest apples a final inspection. I asked Eva why it was only women, 200 people, all women. I mean this is like fertil ground for the type of guy who goes to pilates classes for the chicks! She just laughed and said something like, "yeah, I know! no men want to sort I guess, it's not like they couldn't, we have the same thing on this side of the factory, all the forklift operators are men. except for two women! I don't know why it's like that." Then when I asked Mauro, the distributions office guy that Massimo hooked me up with, he said it was because women have the right eye for sorting pretty fruit. Women do the shopping usually and women are more discerning of what looks nice. I tend to agree, I also know a few men who would be excellent apple sorters!)

Where was I? I really have to be selective about what I write about from these past days or this will go on forever. The point is, my brain's in qiute a state from all the firsts it's been given back to back. It's been wonderful and also exhausting. Just to maintain any knid of inner normalcy is a task when there's not much opportunity to take a respite in the familiar, you know what I mean? I havn't had a conversation, phone, IM or otherwise with another person in my native languge for this whole time in Val di Non. It's called immersion, but I didn't know it was going to feel a bit like drowning! (in a good way) So, I think that's mainly why I got sick. I didn't realize how much mental energy it was taking to do easy day to day type stuff, and my body fell victim to bacteria that decided to GO ROUGE!!

SO today everybody is careful to avoid me and they urge me to eat medicine and soup and chill out by myself. I don't even feel that bad and I'm in a really good mood. All I want to do is write and breathe through my nose and I'm not disappointed to say that writing is coming more easily. I'm feeling that huge sense of gratitude I wrote about in a previous post agian. I mean, this, right now, writing this blog is a requirement for me, one of the very few stipulations I have to worry about. And I've sipped broth, looked out the window, daydreamed, and thoroughly enjoyed this day of writing and stitching together all the scatterd bits of writing I've accumulated since I got to Italy. It's pretty backwards that this was the perfect shabbat, just what I needed, and I've done two weeks worth of work!

Thanks for reading, lots of what I put up here is copied right from letters to friends and family. Somehow writing for "the blog" has a feeling of emptiness about it, I know that a few people read this, but if I don't know about it, I may as well be writing in my journal (a very different writing style that has no business on the internet). SO, Please, please, please, if you have a question or anything--any comment at all, go ahead and comment it. Or email, facebook, couchsurf, snail mail... shout really loud into the jet stream... whatever. Any questions or thoughts that crop up for you might help me take advantage of this opportuniy a little bit better!

Ciao!








PS, listen, internet is in short supply here, I'm keeping my fam awake now!. This is the test of the post. Any numbers refer to pictures. I will refine this post later. think of this as a sneak preview.

Life: Bitet to Bidet nel Italia

That's right folks, my junk has never felt this clean! 'I thought this was a food blog' you're thinking to yourself 'That's disgusting.' Well, sorry. Just telling it like it is.

Today is my third day here. Let me begin.... please... Prego prego. It is so hard to start... how can I capture the beauty of the food and the people, the sound of the language? My first night, jetlagged and rested, feeling like four in the afternoon I'm standing on a candle-lit mezzanine with fifteen young Italians, average age about 27, celebrating Giada's birthday, standing around a table. Close your eyes and imagine a cheap but splentid centerpiece of a raised bowl full of flowers and grapes surrounded buy little things to eat, pastries, roasted zucchinni wrapped around mozzarella with such fresh olive oil all over, speared with a broken off bamboo skewer. Damn! There were beers on the table and a little sable to the side with all kinds of liquor and liquer, lit by a single long taper candle. This is a 31st birthday part put together by a girl who works in a restaraunt and and lives in a special appartment for elderly and autistic people. This is not lavish, this is just a party for young students, kids like me (whose professors are incedentally on strike at the moment). That night I met the owner of a butcher shop, an employee of Italy liasing farmers with environmental government extensions, a girl does environmental cooperation work between Italy and France, and a girl, Eliza, who works for the Time Bank (LOOK THIS UP!) who wants to trade me Italian lessons for massage. I've been giving a few massages and word has traveled fast that there is a Texan who gives good massages and is visiting to eat food in Torino for a month! Anyway, that night, I was feeling nostalgic for that present moment (a strange thing, nostalgia in advance) because the beautiful sound of good friends speaking Italian was just a beautiful sound. I could begin to pick out shreds of meaning from that music, but it was nicer to just listen to them like you listen to the ocean.

Let's seeeee, let me just check in. (Ecohouse knows what I'm talking about) OK, So I woke up at 1pm, needed to sleep off the wine. Luckily I know how to drink enough water. After a cold shower I stretched, and rolled around on the floor (to stretch my back) and thought about things for about an hour, drinking water the whole time. Then I ate a long lunch of leftover cheese (soooooo goooood!) from the party with all the kids in the apartment. After my third foray with the bidet I found my way to an internet cafè. So now that I'm here I feel pretty good, but the coffee I drank (not used to coffee) has got me feeling fidgety and weightless. :) Va bene, tutti bene. Oggi voglio asaggia il formaggio e pane della zona un pò più. Mi piace quello lengua perche ha ritmo è musica, più è casi a stesso al Espagnol.

Ah. I always feel better after checking in. Here's one last thing for ya'll, I don't want to spend my day writing a novel! Last night I went out with the kids in my apt to an aperetif bar, where you get a cup of wine or beer and then help yourself to whatever little noshes that they have out on this table. That was (like it sounds) pretty wonderful. Then we all went back to Giulia's apartment where a few other kids live too, including this Macedonian girl. She talked about how Macedonians drink (a lot) and then she proceeded to drink a lot (of vodka) along with her friend visiting from Macedonia. It was like 8 of us all in this little kitchen listening to songs on Youtube, drinking wine that one kid lifted from his restaraunt job (shame on him). But when in Torino... So of course, I strike up the old SNL hit "I'm On A Boat." Straight Up. It was perfect, the whole room was bouncing and hanging on every word on the screen (they wanted to undersand). That reminds me, It was fairly euphoric to be in a little room (eating olive oil from Puglia that one of the kid's dad harvested and pressed himself) where four or five languages were being spoken-English, Italian, Spanish, Macedonian, and a little French.

There are more incidents and accidents, hints and allegations (only in the best sense) to report. But I don't have the stamina, I hope that this conveys a bit of how I feel. I'm glad to have gotten this down, because Dr. Goldberg says that the first notes you take are the best because you have a keener sense of what is foreign.

Ciao Belle!

Ben

Late arrival, Late morning & good news

Here I am at last in the great industrial center of Torino! I'm thrilled to report that nobody speaks english, and those who smile and say 'yes I speak english' with excitement in their eyes, speak the worst english. I have plenty to tell, even though I havn't done anything outside of my apartment yet. But I have to keep it short because net cafes are more expensive by far than Peru.

Last night it was already very dark as the plane began its descent into turin. Out of the plane I bought a bus ticket for the train station downtown conveniently located across the stree from where I live now, 17 Via Nizza. Dad, thanks for looking that info up for me, strangely I didn't have to fill out one single scrap of paperwork to enter Europe, and nobody was hanging around trying to ask me if I'd been on any farms abroad offering to wash my shoes... Seems sensible... My mind is wandering.

Well, so it was nighttime, I borrowed somone's phone in the airport to call vanessa, she had made plans with friends to party all night and she was across town somewhere far. I'm a zombie and numbly write down directions to use the metro to get to where she's gonna be. Only then did she specify that it was going to be a out-till-dawn type of thing in the same breath as scratching all those plans, 'Oh darling, you are very tired of course, you want to sleep very much. I will come to the train station and let you into the apartment, you go to bed, that's it.' The zombie lucks out. I would be in such a bad mood if I'd tried to stay up late last night, not least in a club.

As it turns out, I slept until I couldn't sleep anymore no matter how hard I tried, took a shower, did some stretching, ate sardines from a japanese grocery in NYC for breakfast, wrote a bunch, and generally organized my mind. The whole time I had no clue of the time. The sky is gray and it's looked exactly the same as when I woke up all day. I only just learned that it's 5:30pm. So I probably woke up around 2:00.

As far as my neighborhood and the place I'll be living for the next month, I really really like it. I had to warm up to the apartment, but this morning I had to warm up to life. After breakfast I was feeling warmer towards life than I can really remember. And I was ok with my digs. The neighborhood is pretty remarkable, there are tons of Africans that live here, a guy from Somalia sat and chatted with me last night helping me call Vane and get my bearings. He's one of sixteen kids, between three moms, his dad has a lot of kids in a lot of place to keep track of. He's a refugee. Everyone--Everyone--I approach is so so friendly, noone speaks english, and everyone hopes that we'll meet again perhaps.

That's all I've got for now, I just walked two blocks down the street to this internet cafe and that's all I've done outside today. I'm just going to keep walking east on this street until I want to turn around, that way I wont get lost, but I might branch out. Someone gave me a tourist map of Turin today which was hella refreshing after buying a map for $4 in NYC.

Later!

Quickly, just to catch up

It is too easy to get way behind, I want to lay out the picture of what I got into after getting to Twin Oaks. I'm going to consider this up to date after writing this, but please leave a comment asking a question if something is especially interesting and you want to know the whole story.

So, I left off with my arrival to the community. The week to follow was electric, I was fueled by all the new folks I was meeting, the first weekend was the Federation of Intentional Communities conference. Everyone there was fresh and excited about their visions of living in community, I kept that going after all the conference-goers dipersed when I stayed at the commune living in Aurora, the building where the visitors stay. The six people I joined were pretty starry eyed like myself about the notion of living in community even despite the "not utopia yet" assurances. Twin Oaks was amazing, look it up, do a visitor period, and we'll live there together in about a year.

On monday there was a women's gathering dispersing and I got a ride with a woman, Karen, going back to her home in Pittsburgh. I went there to try to catch my grandfather there. He was visiting and I wanted him to show me the significant spots and tell me some stories about raining my mom and her siblings. I'd never been to Pittsburgh. But I missed him, he wanted to go home early and I didn't want to tell him I was going to be there and get his hopes up until I knew I could get a ride. Well, sometimes you just don't going to know whether you're going to a place until the day it happens. So Karen let me stay in her house for three nights (or as long as I wanted) and her daughters took me around. It was fun, then I met up with my aunt's sister, Dianne, who lives alone. I stayed two very quiet days with her and finished my last post. Thought I was going to make it to a homebrewing festival about an hour north of Pittsburgh, but nope. I was ready to jump into something dynamic and unpredictable so I had Dianne take me down to the opening night of the "New and obscure games festival" I brought my things and had her leave me there. The even had been getting buzz on Couchsurfing.org, so I was fairly certain I could find someone who would invite me to their couch after a night of zombies VS humans and other games.

I was right, I stayed with a guy named Skory who was helping to put the games event together, and imagine the chances that his roommate is Ben Salatin, nephew of the famed Joel Salatin of Polyface farm. So I got to drink water from their well that Ben imports in OJ jugs, and I got to eat some meat from there too, it was definitely good, tasting like the grass-fed beef I've had in Arkansas. After reveling in a weekend of games I pushed of to Philly.

I stayed in one place only while in Philadelphia, Dana and Michael's house, Michael is my oldest cousin and they have four kids 4 to 8 years old. I just stayed at their house for about a week without leaving at all, completely blissed out just cooking (some chicken of the woods mushroom I found in their backyard) or making paper airplanes and playing with the kids. I considered my restlessness after just a day and a half at Dianne's in contrast with the way day after day I was satisfied to go to bed planning to indulge in the same idleness starting in the morning.

I decided to leave there because I was too comfortable, my intention is to put myself out of my comfort zone... I wanted to go to another eco-village like Twin Oaks, there are a few nearish to Philly, but I would have had to just crash one and ask if they'd let me stay (similar to what happened at Twin Oaks, but without an event to attend) I reasoned that I ought to be turing around anyway, making my way back towards Austin by that time, and that I may as well go to Acorn. Acorn is a commune that diverged from Twin Oaks in the nineties. They are about seven miles apart and I hadn't seen it yet. Well, I emailed Wizard from TO and he agreed to pick me up at the Amtrak station. Once I got there I ended up rationalizing that there was so much I didn't know yet about Twin Oaks I would be justified in staying. So I did.

Many happy swims in the pond, dinner preps for 80, saunas and batches of bread later I said good bye, see you in a year I bet to that whole crew and I made my way to Raleigh where I spent the night in the airport for a morning flight back home to Austin. I got home last Thursday and I've been reveling in the homeness of it all, mostly in an attempt to distract myself from the pretty wild truth that I will leave this place for a year on Friday morning.

Ask for details folks! I'm thrilled to have a total of 15 followers, that is pretty sweet, I mean I haven't even left for Italy yet. By the way, lest you be confused, my departure for Italy is actually October 7, but until then I'm going back to Hendrix, then to Tennessee for a storytelling festival where I'll meet my parents and brother and sister-in-law and nephew, nieces etc. I'll go to NYC after that and wait until my big departure.

My last word here is a big old challenge to all the next Walker folks. I challenge any of you guys to stay abroad for as long as I do on the funds they give. I am going to stick it to the chumps at the Watson and shoot for a year-long travel. I'm kicking it off with my one-way ticket, NYC -> Turin. How much? $474. Watch out fellows.

The Journey is getting there

As I write this I am sitting in an oak forest. The purple picnic table that this tiny laptop is propped on was probably made just a few hundred yards away right here at Twin Oaks, the intentional community famous for its hammock and tofu businesses. Twin Oaks is the most well known secular income-sharing community in the USA. It's one of the several communes that outlived and transcended the reputation of communes as haphazard collectives of worthless hippies in the woods. These people are very worthwhile hippies in the woods and they've proven that socialist village life can work really well. Passing through the place any time of day I see infants and elderly people, young elders and young adults. And everyone looks fit and healthy, no surprise because most of the jobs around the place are pretty physical and all of the food is made from scratch, nearly 100% from the gardens this time of year. This atmosphere had me electrified, I danced and cleaned carrots from the garden for about an hour and a half one day. Lucky they have a woodfired sauna.


So how the heck did I get here? I am wondering that myself. It all started with the idea that, having dropped-out of my internship with Tara, I really ought to find a good way to prepare myself for this one-way ticket's date of October seven. What could be better preparation for leaving home than to leave home? I decided to pack as if I were going to Italy and instead go do whatever the heck I want in this country! (If I must...) Well, I wanted to go back to Hendrix. I had been a bit uneasy about my sense of profound loss at leaving Hendrix.

A quick aside: I hadn't been prepared that I might not be ready to surrender the ease and comfort of college life. Everyone I ever talked to was ready to move on, but my senior year left nothing to be desired. I had arrived; classes were fascinating, I had full access to the ceramics studio, I had lots of wonderful friends, and every Friday we ate shabbat dinner and drank fabulous homebrewed beers together.

Well, I blocked out five or six weeks of time for travel and made about a week and a half's worth of plans. The plan was to take a greyhound up to Little Rock, stay with my old roommates, then get to Hendrix where my friends were back early, planting and expanding the garden that I spent so much time tending, *sigh* back in the golden days. I'd chill there for a few days and then drive with Emily, a friend from school, out to her sister's place in Asheville NC. Then I imagined I'd find a farm to work on out there. Little did I know...

Well, all of that happened as planned. Seeing the garden unfold into something so much greater warmed my heart and the thrill of being on the road eased my separation anxiety for Hendrix. Then the real adventure began.

Emily and I were in Asheville and we wanted to go visit a friend of her sister's. This girl is young, recently married, and they are homesteading a small biodynamic dairy in the mountains by the river north of Asheville. I was pretty thrilled at the chance that I might be able to help out there.
The day came that we hoped to visit and, like good little children of the information age, we called them that morning. No answer. So we decided to go to Warren-Wilson College and keep calling in the mean time. Warren-Wilson had been described to me several times before as a magical paradise of sustainability, a place where everybody is a wood nymph or benevolent lumberjack, all standing in a united front against a culture of consumerism, shortsightedness and waste.

Well we got there (after a missed turn that took us to a trail to a pretty bald filled with wild blueberries on the blue ridge mountains) judging by their pastures and gardens, their recycling sorting yard and 20 foot compost tumbling drum (homemade on site), their free store and their healthy hippie glow of real food and hard work--at first glance I judged that the descriptions were true. Emily and I agreed not to speak on how great it would be to be a student there (Emily has a few more years left at not-so-progressive Hendrix). More magic was to follow...
We went up the steps to the garden cottage, artfully banistered with finished twisted tree branches. There, over a plate of empty honeycomb we found Davey Bar-Shimon and his friend. We introduced ourselves etc. It turned out Davey had finished his summer forestry internship (benevolent lumberjacks) and was already moved into his dorm with two more weeks before classes. He said he was thinking of going to an intentional communities conference. I said "take me with you". Laughing it off he asks if I'm 25, I'm not, so that doesn't help with the price of a rental car.

Well, Emily and I mention that we'd planned on getting up to this dairy homestead, shockingly Davey not only knows the couple, he also knows how to get to their farm! So he packs a backpack in about 5 minutes and we launch in Emily's car heading to the homestead.

Davey continues to impress us like crazy, he knows the circuitous route out to this place and next thing we know, this good looking young couple is showing us their six cows (three giving milk), their milking room, the winter squashes still maturing in the garden that are an heirloom of their friend's family (big beautiful elongated pumpkin-looking fruits with creamy peach colored skin). They take us on a walk past plunging vistas over the river, by towering cliffs, we see a repossessed house once owned by a weed-growing Columbian (busted) and his Swiss wife (or some such ethnic pairing)its stuccoed walls match the color of the heirloom squash, we see an "earthship" a house built from local or rejected materials (tires). It is completely off the grid, the temporary electric meter used for construction still stands, its wheel motionless. We also pass a Hindu retreat center and meditation station, it's a building of conjoined domes upon a bald hill with a little community garden on one side, mostly left in the hands of Vishnu to preserve.

Well, the professionals were laying block for the homestead house when we got there and so I would be of no help for a few days were I to stay. It was time to go and we all got back in Emily's car. On the way back down we're considering our next step. Davey had already told some stories about his adventures with hitchhiking, including that he had hitched to work every day for two months this summer. So I was psyched when he proposed that Emily pull over that very moment and drop us off to begin our hitching journey to Charlottesville VA.

It was late afternoon then, our first ride was in the back of a ladies truck, her two little girls were in the cab. She was so nice, she drove us right up into the development where Davey's older friend was living. He let us stay the night and dropped us off at the interstate onramp the next morning in the wee hours on his way to his job as manager at Starbucks. We lounged until the light, Davey in his camping hammock, me on my backpacking bedroll working on Rosetta Stone Italian.

When the sun came up over the interstate we roused and got our thumbs out. Ten rides later we are surrounded by lightning in Marion Virginia, searching for an alleged shelter in a city park. We find it, and a comfy port-o-john to take a dump, I unroll my bedroll by a picnic table under the shelter but Davey prefers to pitch his hammock in the trees, foolishly believing the locals that "that's just heat lightning, we probly won't get any rain tonight."

Well, I didn't get any rain, just some wind whipped mist. But poor Davey comes running into the shelter butt ass naked having frittered every possibly scrap of dryness under his hammock's rainfly. Lucky for him I have a microfibre towel and another hammock just like his that I bought earlier that day at an AT (Appalachian trail) hostel. We both get a nights sleep only briefly interrupted by a cop who shined us awake to ask if we were coming off the AT, "no, we're hitching to Charlottesville" we explained groggily. He quickly lowers his light and lets us know that he'll let the other police in the area know we're here so they don't bother us. True story.
A guy who picked us up the next day told us that once Marion had made national news because the cops heckled a guy who was riding his horse across the nation for some cause. That may have had something to do with our luck.

Well, we scored a lucky ride on Thursday, saved our butts. This guy Wyatt, a skilled woodworker, resident of a craft retreat school in Tennessee where master craftsfolk give workshops, picked us up and took us all the way down I-81 and even detoured one exit north on I-64 to get us pointed the right direction. Then two carnival workers picked us up and dropped us on the shoulder by an exit for Charlottesville where we were in walking distance to a shopping center and bus stop.

I met some refugees from Bhutan and then we bussed into downtown. We got a call back from a couchsurf host who picked us up from down there and showed us around downtown a bit. We picked up some local beers and heard about his doctoral work on trees' response to atmospheric pollutants (their pores get stuck open and they basically become unregulated wicks putting water from the soil into the air). This guy is named Eric and he was a tremendous host (but a skinny guy incedentally).

The next morning we bussed down to the library on the freebus and met Wizard from Twin Oaks to pick up the shuttle out to the Commune. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! This life is outrageous! I don't feel sad that I'm done with Hendrix anymore!

There is more, but at this moment I am in Pittsburgh and I'm expecting a call from a guy named Peter who I found on a hombrewer's message board. I called him yesterday and he's gonna give me a ride about an hour north to Slippery Rock where there's a big homebrew festival at a campsite this weekend with outdoor brewing on Saturday and a tasting tournament on Sunday. Who knows, perhaps I'll be a judge, I'm going to volunteer to help out wherever there's a need.

For now, enjoy these few pictures and know that the story is coming of how my weekend workshop at Twin Oaks became a week-long stay, also how I got to Pittsburgh. All routine is obliterated on this travel and it's all I can do to jot a few notes each night. I know I started by saying that I'm at a purple picnic table in an oak forest, but I finished writing this at my aunt's sister's house in the Mt. Washington area of Pittsburgh. Such is life on the road when laptops just don't want to fit into the day, no matter how small and endearing HP makes them.

Pax!

Foundation Farm: No Till Organic

After deciding to leave Rattle's Garden after one month I was spending the weekend in Conway seeing friends. Madeleine accidentally came to visit. She is a great friend, we lived together in the eco-house last year and it's is totally true to form that she would leave her farming internship a weekend early to meet her parents in Memphis for 4th of July plans. Realizing she was a week ahead of schedule she just decided to take the opportunity and visit Conway for the weekend.

So Madeleine's explaining the farm that she works on: they never till the soil, they have grass between the rows, there are six interns that only work six hours a day, three days a week, and the head intern lives in a yurt. It sounds kind of like a fantasy make-believe world. So I decided on the spot to go up to this farm with Madeleine. I had to scoundrel out of three days of work at Rattles garden and also dinner plans with Britt Murphy which hurt, but it was worth it to see Foundation Farm. By the way, Britt is the librarian at Hendrix, my link to Hendrix while I am traveling and studying food. She helped me all along the way to this fellowship and I really hated to cancel dinner plans with her family.

Madeleine and I drove out to Rattles Garden on Sunday morning and packed all my crap into her car, then we headed north to Eureka Springs and this no-till organic farm. This sight greeted me upon our arrival:

It was only when I beheld this kitchen/veggie-washing station/cold-room/greenhouse/classroom that I realized I had been suffering a lack of clutter. To me, an 'in-use' looking sort of place like this really says "make yourself at home". (Potential wwoof hosts, please know that I can keep space neat too). After we walked around the farm, it was time to make dinner so we ate this: Greens from the farm and white pumpkin that launched out of the compost piles at the Hendrix garden. I met Andrew (the arm) and learned that he had been on the farm for over a year and he had built his yurt from scratch. He went to a lumber mill and picked out the cherry trunk that the wall lattice is now fashioned from. I liked Andrew a lot.

That evening a really windy thunderstorm blew Madeleine's tent to pieces so I we all slept in the yurt that night... we still had to carefully pick out the dry spots in there though.

Monday is a work day so I got to see what 6 interns could do before lunch. I also got to

meet Patrice, the owner of the farm. He's from France, made his money in finance or computer

s or something and now he spends his time doing things like spearheading the creation of the farmer's market in Eureka Springs, getting the local highschool to build a full kitchen and offer cooking classes in which students prepare lunch for the school from fresh ingredients, and working with the local time bank (You need to learn about this NOW! http://www.timebanks.org/). Patrice is a really cool guy. He is saving the world. He was telling me that he tries so hard to teach people how to appreciate real food, but the showing at the farmer's market has plateaued, some people get it and others don't want to it seems. So he was saying that he is getting tired and sometimes he wants to just give up and move back to France. Just above, that's him mowing the grass in front of the hoop-house. On work days he zips around mowing and checking on teams of two and three toiling on their different tasks. One moment really draws Patrice well: Madeleine and I are harvesting yellow waxbeans and Patrice comes up a neighboring row of fennel "Now this I love." We look to see what he's on about. "This cucumber, I did not even plant it here, it is like the umbrella and the fennel, they are like the people on the beach, they like to be near the umbrella so they do not get burned"..."Next year we will have to do fennel and cucumber together because this is beautiful... I love this"

Lunch was a pretty joyous affair. Something about cramming too many people around a

table that's not quite big enough is a nice feeling. I think it reminds me of shabbat at the eco-house. We ate tons of greens out of the garden that day and laughed a lot.

After lunch on Mondays it's class time. Patrice's interns are also students, they have about an hour of class a week during the whole March to October term that they commit to. After the work and class sessions they are supposed to understand every facet of the operation. The day I was there Patrice explained the chart he uses to record and compare the planned cropping to the actual dates of planting and harvest. It is a good system but looks like gibberish in a grid if you don't know how to read it. I wish I had a picture of the big white board by the sink that was the running log for that season.

Alright, I'm finally going to tell you how this crazy notion of no-till works (and believe it or not, it does). The key is straw mulch, tons of it. They pile the mulch on the beds like crazy, there's no such thing as too much unless the plants are getting covered. Look at the very first

picture to see us dumping bale after bale of straw on that row that's been lying fallow. All this stuff decomposes and the bugs create

networks of tunnels through the soil this is an important part of "soil structure." When it's time to plant you rake the mulch aside, sprinkle some fishmeal on the soil and plant starters (lettuce in this case) If the plants need wider spacing you just move the mulch aside where the plant will go. The soil was amazing, it was obviously one piece, not friable because it is sandy or recently tilled, but friable because it was full of organic matter and riddled with all different sizes of tunnels and decomposed roots. When you prepare a spot to put a transplant, you don't dig a hole, you just slide the spade into the ground upside down. That creates some chunks that the seedling can nestle between without turing the soil into tiny pieces that would compact together. Weeds come out easily and are thrown into the center of rows on top of the mulch so as to become mulch themselves and in time their nutrition goes into the ground. Why the grass? Doesn't it invade the beds constantly? Patrice says "why walk on mud?" But more than that the grass holds the soil (prevents erosion), creates habitat for beneficial beetles and other bugs, and when it is mowed it gets sprayed onto the beds for a little nitrogen boost. It actually invades the beds less that the stray wheat sprout whose seed did not get threshed off the straw.

The bottom line of this farm is this: half an acre of bed space is farmed by six interns paid 100 dollars a month for eight months and the gross sales last year was $50,000. The only farm machinery is a lawn mower. Britt, we'll have dinner one day, but thins time I'm glad I seized my chance to see this farm.