Ware's Jewellsy?: From the sublime to the ridiculous……..

So, just to recap, at the end of Feb we were just leaving the land of muck and magic and the strawbale house with no mod cons. Now we seem to be in our own private gite with a dishwasher, central heating and a splendidly speedy internet connection. We spent most of last week asking ourselves how this happened!

Actually, we know very well how this happened, the place we are at now is back in France, near Toulouse and we arranged to come here back in September before we even left the UK. This isn’t the only WWOOFing host that we pre-arranged to get to on a given date (we organised about 50% of them before we left the UK). It is however the only WWOOF that we have arrived at on the date we said we would! And so far no hitches, although a few surprises (where would we be without those!?).

The deal here is that we have to pay for our own food in exchange for our own separate house. This is in fact very anti-WWOOFFING and frowned upon by most people but the reason is that the family we are working for had a lot of WWOOFERS up until the end of last year and wanted to have more space for themselves by putting us up in a separate house opposite theirs. Because they have to pay for the heating and electricity for the house, we have to pay for the food. We also thought that after 5 months of living with other people it would be nice to have our own space, so were happy to agree to the plan.

One of the surprises was that the host only actually expects one of us to work and so last week felt more like a holiday than anything else! Andy and I shared the work so that whoever wasn’t working was generally looking after Tegan (although she did manage to get herself involved in a few activities). There is also another WWOOFER living with the family, who eats with us every other night, and we have eaten all together a couple of times. We are all living on a sort of country estate owned by the host’s parents (complete with iron gates with an electronic thingy to open them!). All a bit of a catapult from one side of the WWOOFING world to the other.

There is actually a rather interesting question about us sort of paying to do less work, as Andy and I have previously worked all the time and managed our time to fit in around both the demands of the hosts and Tegan’s needs. We would actually both like to work, but this doesn’t seem to be an option (not unless we want to be doing much more than our fair share since we are essentially only receiving free accommodation not food). I am sure however that not that many people would turn down the offer of a gite in the South West of France for just a few hours work a week! There is also a great opportunity for us to learn French here as the host and her husband are very patient and keen to help us learn. Of all the places we have been it seems like this is THE place we might actually get to gain some real French language skills!

The work itself has been mainly planting seeds and harvesting veggies – not as fascinating as some of the places we have been but a great opportunity to learn a bit more about growing veggies – something we hope to be doing more of when we get home.

Tegan inspecting the quality of the work

Tidy mud!

And playtime – of which there seems to have been a lot has meant that we have been able to travel around a bit and see some of the local sights, and even some friends from Bristol! Our friends Helen and Tom, and their daughter Lucia just so happened to be having a holiday in Toulouse last week so we went to see them. It was really nice to see some familiar faces and chat about home, other friends and sit in their garden and eat cake! It was great for Tegan to have a playmate for the day too as the kids here are much older than her. It is quite a stretch for our poor old brains to have to consider going back home in just over a month, so it is good to be reminded of the good things, like all the people we can catch up with when we get back!