the provence pooper scooper

coucou mes amis!

Les Arnoulds

This weekend, Olivia and I went WWOOF-ing in the south of France! 

WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) is an international organization that links organic farms with adventurous souls who are willing to work in exchange for food, lodging, and an incredible cultural exchange. Its a pretty cool system, google it! Each country (and some states state) has its own site. Here is the link to the USA one if you wanna check it out: http://www.wwoofusa.org/

So for the weekend, we worked at Les Arnauds, a farm just outside of Aix-en-Provence, which happens to be my new favorite city in France.  Les Arnauds, they have a small grove of olive trees and several rows of lavender, both of which they make into oil in the fall (separately of course). They also have a little organanic vegetable garden, a TON of rosemary, a Bed & Breakfast, and last but not least - a pool. 

the view from my window, looking out over Aix-en-Provence

This pool is where I spent the most of my time at Les Arnauds. Over the winter Justine (the family duck) had become unsatisfied with her pond and decided to take over the pool. Ugh-oh. Haha, with scrub brushes, a pump, a powerwasher, and some plastic tupperware for scooping out the remaining leaf/duck poo sludge, Olivia, Tess, Fumi, Aya, and I gave the pool a major spring cleaning!

scrubbing da pool

clean pool!

It sounds really gross, and it was, hahaaa but we had a lot of fun!

there were lots of little critters in the (pardon my french) merde de canard.
Big icky worms like this one, and a cute little frog!

Normally, wwoofers at Les Arnoulds do agriculture oriented things like pruning the olive trees, building compost facilites, and planting/weeding the vegetable garden. Since we were there on the weekend, they were taking a break from normal farm work. I dont want to scare you away from wwoofing, haha most people don't end up scooping poop out of pools! Anyways, it was such a wonderful experience, we met so many people...its just wonderful to get to know people from so many different places and walks of life - culture. Pretty cool. I would do it again in a heartbeat, duck poo and all.

On Saturday morning, we headed into Aix to go to the market. 

Tess and Olivia in Aix. Yay for spring and green leaves!

yep, thats a lot of asparagus.

One man band. Notice the sunflower. and banjo. and if he turned around, you would see that he had a rubber chicken that hit the drum on his back every time he pressed a button. YES.

Oh and we ate so well, and SO MUCH all weekend!  Lots of veggies, very fresh, all organic, yummmm.   Fumi and Aya (two other wwoofers) are Japanese, so one night they showed us how to make sushi!

Yes, I ate RAW salmon. And fish eggs. And it was realll good.

Then one night, I made a yummy quiche which we ate by candlelight on the porch. In her former life in Oakland, CA, Tess was pastry chef, so she made us an AMAZING pear tart on the last day!

one of the neighbor's fields, so gorgeous. 

Yes, Ingrid, I agree - "lets get rich and buy our parents homes in the south of france."