26th of August to 15th of September, 2019.
A. picks me up at the gas station. He seems truly friendly and I do not feel anything wrong about him at all. Good! Since the horrible experience in Namibia, to which I had a bad feeling when I first saw the guy, I keep my sixth sense in mode on all the time.
C. is with him and she is a lovely 8 years old girl. Very polite and sweet apart of being a pretty girl.
At the house I am surprise in how beautiful it is. The whole space it is huge, all green around, big trees and field, and a breath taken view on the back. My room is a small cabin outside, simple and beautiful, also with a pretty view. I could not ask for more.
I quickly meet B. because she is leaving to work. Unfortunately about her I have an weird impression. More an impression than a feeling because the way that she behaves it is weird. Very cold for a first contact with a new Workaway and since her messages were very warm I felt weird. Maybe she did not like the way I look?
A. by the opposite it is very friendly and we get along easily. His English is little (but better than he thinks) and I can understand Italian better than I speak, so we stay in between Spanish and Italian.
We have a nice lunch together: pasta! My first home made Italian pasta! Simple and tasty.
At night, talking a bit more with B., I keep feeling weird but I try to be as much nice as possible. I think that I might bring some not very good memories to her, from the times when she was travelling also. Maybe she had some hard times and I now bring those bad memories to her. I think this according to little things she tells me. But she releases also some quite sharp sentences, quite mean as well. Like for example, when I mention not to know about something she says: “Are you travelling around the world and you do not know this?” Excuse me! That is the beauty about travelling around the world plus the beauty about knowledge itself: it is limitless! There are always something new to learn. And it does not matter how ordinary that looks like for you, people learn different things in different situations. Or the way the she judges young people who want to be sustainable but do not want to exchange anything with other people. Maybe they want to be self-sustainable and do not collaborate with this meaningless and horrible capitalist society we live. Let them! Why it is such a big problem if people want to isolate themselves? Society manipulation / control that what it is.
I sleep so well that I wake up in the middle of the night very deep inside a dream.
Next morning, after a beautiful sunrise and a few more hours of sleep, I am ready to start. During the breakfast, B. is a little bit better with me. Maybe she was just having a hard day? First task is help A. with renewing the exterior shutters from the house. We use this beautiful new color, a dark red, which at the end goes amazingly well with the colors of the plants and house.
I am told that we are having guests for dinner and that they are bringing some really nice wine. Yay! Finally wine! I really would not mind if I had not such a good wine more often, like I was expecting to drink wine everyday at least during the dinner, but apparently this is such a wonderful one. And it is from Montalcino, so I am starting in great style. Kind of starting from the top and then going down. B. gives me some tips about tasting just before the dinner. She actually surprises me when she say that she can feels sometimes weird when she talks about wine like that because she remember that at the same time there are people starving in Africa and I bring that feeling back to her. So I was write: I bring some kind of memories to her that might not be that good. She also tells me to be very careful with the wine glasses because they cost 40 Euros each and they are the thinner wine glasses in the whole world. You can actually bite them by accident.
The guests are friendly and simple. We start with a wonderful Chardonnay and some cheese and toasts. B. tells me that the olive oil we are having in the toast it is the winner for best olive oil in the world this year: Anteata Frontoio: Da noi, a voi. Just like that. The dinner is amazing of course but the wines are the stars of the night. Mainly the one we actually have after eating, almost at the end, a 1993 Brunello di Montalcino, from Marchesato degli Aleramici. I am just quiet, listening to everything that B. (who is a sommelier) and one of our guest, Fillipo (the heir of the company responsible for the 1993 wine we are drinking). It is a wonderful wine and the feeling of drinking something which is just three years younger than me it is extraordinary, although I still prefer the second one we have. Of course I do not say anything.
Next day, after lunch, A. decides to come back to work a little later, around 5 p.m., so B. suggest that I go to Montalcino. It is very close from here by walking, crossing through the fields. The walk it is beautiful, full of trees all around.
Montalcino it is curious. Very peculiar. It is a medieval town surrounded by a wall like others I already saw but once you are inside, it becomes a completely different thing. It is very beautiful with all the old buildings, with the windows colored in contrast with the rocks, the churches, the walls itself, and in particular one point with such an extraordinary view of the fields and forests. But there are so many enotecas and small fancy restaurants that in the end it seems like a fake town, like a scenery for a movie. Later when I ask A. about the people and how they behave / feel about it, he says that it has been always like that so for them it is normal. Like nothing different. I cannot imagine how it would be to live in such tourist place.
Another idea also crossed my mind: at some point I see this big complex of apartments, all looking like the same, same size and etc. But the difference of this complex to the rest ones out in the world is that here, they built it in a way that looks like the old buildings, the rock and colors and etc. But in the end is still just a lot of apartments all together, to middle class people. I think that take out the prestigious of the place a little bit. I mean, it is a very specific town, not just another one out there. It should not be allowed those kind of constructions. What is built it is built and that is it. Finito. Another thing is, when I see this very nice house on the edge of a hill, with a beautiful view and a big production of grapes and olives in the back, I m thinking: what if you do not want to cultivate grapes and olives? You still have to? It is like a rule of the farm houses in this area?
One day, something weird happened: so, as soon as me and A. spend more time together, more friends we become, so we are now making jokes and laughing easily than three days ago, of course. Plus, he is also trying to be nicer with me since we are working so hard everyday. For example this afternoon, he needed quickly go to town to buy some products and instead of letting me here keeping the work, he just said I should come with him, to refresh the mind for 10 minutes, out of work. From the house, which is some good 50 metres, B. asked him why he was bringing me with him. What? What kind of question was that? When he explained to her the reason (and I was in between the car and the working area at this point, not knowing what to do) I do not know what was her reaction, but she did not say one word and A. just said: “Andiamo!” It is possible that she is jealous of me? I hope not.
A. and B. are so different from each other that I cannot understand how they ended up together. He is like a simple person and he is fine with that. She used to be a simple person, but now she became, in some how, more sophisticate, even though she will never lost that simplicity of someone who grew up in a countryside place. In my opinion, all the she aimed to learn it was to prove herself. And even that she learnt a lot of things, she did after she was already an adult, and that changes everything. The time to develop your intellect it is when you are a kid, otherwise you can never get it back. Remember I already talked to you about this before…?
The other day she went even further in her comments about my lack of knowledge: “It is funny, there is so many things you do not know.” It pissed me off so much.
They keep fighting the two of them. Just keep confirming my theory about the majority of marriages: people are unhappy. How come you fight so much with someone, to hurt that person with words so much, and still keep together? That it is a fictional idea of what is happiness and what is love. At the beginning I was thinking that she might be the biggest problem, what in some how I could understand since she is allergic to so many things. It might be such a foot in the as have to control every single thing you eat. Of course there is an easy solution: you have the majority of your diet from natural things (fruits, vegetables and in some cases meat) and the rest of stuff with carbohydrates you prepare at home by yourself. But it is probably sucks have to avoid some easy snacks and “just by and eat” products. Anyway, the other day, I realize that Michelangelo is also not an easy person. Everything it must to be done in his own way (something that they have in common) and his over reaction about something I did it was crazy. I took the bed clothes from the B&B apartment and should put to wash. Now, there is a washing machine in the kitchen (which I was already told in how to use) and another similar one in the bathroom (which I saw it being used before but was not told anything about it). I suspected, for some reason, that that one it was just for the B&B stuff and the kitchen one for us. So I simply disposed the dirty clothes in the bathroom one and waited for Michelangelo to told me how to use. When he saw the clothes in that one he came to me in a such shocking expression: “Why did you put the clothes there? Have you washed then already? Because that is the dryer and those clothes are dirty you can not put them there!” And believe, his eyes were like jumping from his head. I very calmly answer him that I did not know, I thought they both were washing machines, but I did not do anything apart of put them inside. Even Alexandra it was surprised with his over reaction and defended me.
My bigger surprise it was one day, when I went upstairs to help C. to find her cat, so I was looking at all rooms. Oh, Loki! It was such a mess! Things all over the place. All the places. Chaos! How come someone live in such a mess? And then what pisses me off is that downstairs everything it must be always organized, each thing in its own place and always clean. But than upstairs, where nobody goes and see, they can leave it a mess like that. Shocking. Plus all the most expensive products of the world in the kitchen (the best coffee, the best green tea, the best wines…) when their real personal life is like someone who lives in a shed. Maybe even those people are more organized…
The other day a butterfly kissed me. I was just about going to collect some blackberries. That it is another wonderful thing about Tuscany: the fruits. At least the Montalcino area it is full of them. If I was just walking around I could have fresh fruits everyday: Apples, Pears, Figs, Blackberries and some grapes. I love to go and pick some blackberries. People simply do not eat them. And I bet they buy them in the supermarket while there are tons of the fresh healthy ones outside, being eaten by the animals or getting spoiled. Such a shame! Not for me!
We had a few guests coming around the house, right? Just today, for example, a couple who five years ago staid in the B&B, came back for a wedding and we had lunch together. Two things I realized during these events: first, B. behave in a such lovely and kind way that no one would imagined how mean and rude she usually is in normal day life (now I understand the wonderful comments people left to her in the website for her wine tasting business: they do not know her at all! Just those few hours, during the tour, make they thinking she is a great person. Plus, she will treat them much better than anyone else because, as she told me when we first met, she works just with “very important “/ renominated people”.) I think she believes rich people with interest and some knowledge with wines are better then the rest. Much better than someone like me, for example. Second thing is that she always put less wine for me than to anyone else. She obviously believe that I do not deserve to drink too much of those great wines because I cannot truly understand them since I am poor and without “the knowledge”. It is so ridiculous! She really do not think I would notice?
In my last few days I suggest that me and A. renovate the sign for the B&B. We restored an old carriage, but a tiny one, and I wrote Fonte Aulente with flowers all around. The work itself it was very nice but the colors did not word out pretty well together in the end. In my opinion it could be much better.
Nothing much more happened. I mean, they told me that the older daughter of B., from her first marriage, it was smoking and probably having more other problems. So young, just seventeen. In one of my last days, B. also told me about Astrology. In how she believes and if you find the “right” person, it can tells you a lot of things. I still do not believe. She also showed me this two pieces of metal, looking like bronze, that “answer” you when you ask some questions. They basically move by themselves in your hand and point to where it is the answer to your question. It is quite interesting and I still need to search about that.
In my last day, A. offered to drive me to Buonconvento where I could hitchhike to Florence, my first stop after Montalcino. I made a sandwich, brought some fruits and after goodbyes I left. Unfortunately, I had not a very strong connection with C., even after the three weeks I spent there. So different of my beautiful connection with Sam and Tom in Cape Town, South Africa, which it happened instantly and just grew stronger with the time. Anyway, in somehow I think B. noticed that when I was saying goodbye to her before she leave to school. I noticed that because of the questions she asked me just after. It is amazing how people really underestimate my intelligence. So I told her everything I could about my other kids and how great we did together. Unfortunately it did not happened the same with C. and I do not know why.
It was a very curious time I spent in Montalcino. I wish I had done more things, going out to visit more spots, going out for more walks, but unfortunately time ran out of my hands. The location was nice and my place (apart for the always present spiders, sometimes three per night) it was very cozy. The energy of the family it could be a little weird sometimes and unfortunately I did not fell a great connection. I am glad that nothing bad happened, though, and I know I could do my work, or everything that it was asked of me, very well.
