Around the world in 10 days!
Who knew that a skill such as tree climbing would ever come in handy?! We have been harvesting olives for about a week now and it still seems like there is so much more to do. It has been a dry year so the olives are not as plentiful as they could have been but what is there takes time and work to extract from the trees. We talked about Ryan trying to train monkeys to pick the olives for us, it seems much more natural for them to be hanging from the flimsy branches of an olive tree then for a clumsy human to be. We use a few methods for removing the olives. One is to whack the tree with a long stick. This method is effective but also brakes a lot of branches off the tree and ends up pelting the other workers with hard, little olives. Another method, my favorite, is using a small hand-held rake and combing each branch. This is the cleanest method but is hard for the out-of-reach branches. The last is to prune the branches off the tree with a small saw and use a combination of the first two methods for removing the olives from these trimmed branches. You may wonder if there is an alternative to human labor, other then monkeys, to getting this job done. There is...a machine was invented for doing this work but has been know to harm the tree. Also, Armenian workers have helped in the past and we are told they are much more productive then the current American worker.
We are leaving Greece on Friday and start a 10 day journey to Australia via London, Dublin and Chicago. We are excited for the beach and the sun but sad to leave this wonderful little village of Antirrio. Two nights ago Dimitris took us to the local fish cafe and ate octopus, calamari, anchovies, sardenes (the last two are surprisingly good here), beet salad and chacolate cake for desert. We washed everything down with couple of small bottles of Ouzo. All this only set us back 41 Euro! Everything was very fresh and Dimitris said the owner of the cafe is a grilling genious, we agree. Tonight, we will grill in the fireplace the two meters of sauges Yannis purchased and watch the Champions Futball League on television.
