Leaving Andalusia

Already it’s time for us to say goodbye to lovely Andalusia.

Our core group of people here at Casa Montecote has been spotty recently. Balti, Gisela and Rainer’s son, was at scout camp for a week, and the day before he returned Pedro left for Milan. Pedro is the guy who keeps popping in on Skype conversations saying one of his only English sentences: “I am the Italian cook.” Which is true; he has been cooking most of our lunches during our time here. He lived in this area for thirty years, but went home in the past year to take care of his aging mother. When he came back to Andalusia he could not find work, so he was crashing with Rainer, but now he has given up and gone back to Italy, at least until December. I’ve grown kind of attached to Pedro and was sad to see him go.

Pedro with the last meal he cooked here, over-roasted meat and potatoes.
Pedro's biggest fault is that he does not have very creative names for his dishes.

Gisela will be leaving the house the morning after we go to do the Walk of Santiago. In some ways it’s probably inconvenient for our hosts that their volunteers are leaving at the same time that they’re losing Gisela’s and Pedro’s hands. In any case, we’re leaving Casa Montecote on this evening (Wednesday). We’re busing to Cádiz and then taking an overnight bus to Madrid. Our flight to Rome is on Saturday afternoon, and then we'll head to our next hosts in Corvarra, Italy on Sunday afternoon.

I know that I haven’t mentioned too much what we’ve been doing during our work week around Casa Montecote. That’s because it hasn’t been terribly consistent, especially for Alan. The first part of my day is always the same: I sweep all of the sidewalks, cut up food that guests have dumped in the organic bin, feed the scraps to the chickens, and clean the kitchen. That all usually takes 2-3 hours. After that, I tiptoe around Gisela or Rainer and wait for them to tell me what to do. I push for my last hour to be helping Pedro make lunch.

Alan sticks with Rainer almost all of the time. They do lots of random things like mowing the lawn, cleaning out the septic tank of a rental home, watering the jungle of plants around here, and taking care of any other general maintenance that pops up.

This is the area that Alan cleared out to make a terraced garden.

While Balti was at camp, the big project that everyone was working on was renovating his bedroom. A window and footboards were added, and the walls were repainted with chalk.

We knocked out this part of the wall so that a second window could be put in Balti’s bedroom. 
Usually we had our eyes open.

We’ve had a nice time here, but are ready for some Botticelli and tortellini. Bring on Italy!