Crumbs were her favorite.  After a loaf of bread or bag of crackers had been finished off, Maja would pour out the specks of grain into a small bowl and stir in a little marmalade or milk.  It was her special treat since we were devoid of sweets, so people learned not to throw things away too hastily.

One day I was walking through the nearby town with a fellow from Hawaii, and he stopped us for a moment to check the dumpsters of a nearby supermarket.  I had never felt comfortable looking through a garbage bin before.  There have been times where I was curious about what goods lie inside; “one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.”  But I’d always felt too insecure to even take a peek over the ledge, should someone see me and think that I was a homeless person scavenging for a half-eaten, half-rotten sandwich.

My Hawaiian companion walked right up and drooped his lanky neck over the bin walls.  I followed apprehensively, but what harm could it do to look?   Inside he found a few clean unopened bags of sliced bread loaves.  And after shifting a couple boxes around, he uncovered more.  With complete unabashed confidence he pulled seven bags right out of the dumpster in a public parking lot.  I offered to carry some, and we walked 20 minutes back to the farm swinging bread bags in each hand, proud of our newfound cargo.  This was my first “food rescue” experience, and to be honest, I felt good about it.  We had accrued food for our comrades (bread, a luxury that we rarely had at the farm), we had saved something that would have otherwise been carelessly wasted, and we didn’t spend any cash in process.

Resourceful alternatives and simple lifestyle practices are what I took away from the Can Pipirimosca Farm.  Sure I learned about terrace irrigation, tending to plant nurseries, uprooting blackberry weeds, and even some supernatural lunar harvest theories.  Every day I spent hours under the Spanish sun doing manual labor in the dirt.  The work was exhausting and made me feel productive, but what really mattered in the end was what I learned from the people and their outlooks and practices.

For the past two weeks (which felt much longer at the time) I’d been living in an organic farm; it was my first experience with WWOOFing, World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.  I was hoping to find a nice simple farm to spend the rest of my time in Spain until my visa days ran out.  I wanted something to keep me physically occupied all day outside, working and leaning about self-sufficient organic living.  In a sense, I suppose I found all this at Can Pipirimosca, but according to my WWOOFer housemates, this particular farm was quite unlike most WWOOFing farms.  Pipirimosca was more of a commune than a productive farm, and its habitants learn more about self-reflection than about organic farming.

The residence was a musty house shared by about 15 WWOOFers and a couple puppies; I slept on a lumpy top-bunk with a sherbert-colored duvet in a room shared with three others.  There was one compost outhouse and separate shower shack outside.

Plenty was to be done on the farm since the owner’s brain buzzed with more projects that he could manage, but he was seldom around to ensure any real progress.  People split into areas of watering, weeding, organizing, cleaning, cooking, or various construction works.  I took part in nearly everything, but preferred working on my own projects like organizing a tulip garden around a natural pool and clearing out pesky blackberry bushes.  In the evenings everyone gathered together in the cramped stove room playing instruments (guitar, tambourine, accordian, jar of dry beans…), cracking almonds, and feeling sophisticated.

One would expect that living on a farm we would be constantly self-supplied by fresh vegetables and fruit, but Pipirimosca simply wasn’t that kind of a farm. At this time of the year, basically the only thing we could harvest was a local onion called a calçot (pronounced: “cal-thot”).  Somehow we devised ways to create three meals a day with only pasta, rice, flour, sugar, salt, almonds, calçots, and garlic.

Pipirimosca ticked to its own time, standards, and appreciation of life.  In just the short time I was there, the farm was a constantly changing tide of diversity from indie Hawaiian rockers, to a Southern animation artist, to a penniless Italian gypsy, to an autistic Spanish chef, to an Alaskan nordie.  There was no discrimination; anybody and everybody was welcome.  Sometimes I honestly wondered if I had stumbled across a reclusive society recently unfrozen from the 1970’s Peace and Love movement.  We hosted dance parties on the weekends, dressed for comfort not for style, took walks into the mountains, picked onions in the moonlight, and shared life.

Time passed beautifully for me in Pipirimosca, but of course things weren’t perfect, and coping with such a large unorganized group of people wasn’t something I could withstand for long.  Plus my animal allergies and weathered skin couldn’t take much more abuse, so I opted to backpedal a bit in order to prepare for my next adventure.  Since yesterday I’m back in Barcelona, living with my generous Au Pair family as a stepping-stone before moving again.

One day I’m living on a farm shared with free-loving gypsies wearing herbs in my hair, and the next day I’m baking cakes and practicing my finest baby talk in a furnished apartment.  Adaptability is a key characteristic to life of a wanderer, a nomadic chameleon.

I have until April 20^th to legally stay in Spain (and in the entire “Schengen” area...grumble, grumble).  Since Morocco, and the possibility of touching African soil is so near, I’m hoping that will be my next stop.  But after this recent simple-life epiphany, I may not get there by general public transit.  For a while, I’ve dreamt of a traveling via bicycle.  After tossing around prospects with a fellow Swiss WWOOFer with similar ideals, I started to get really pumped up on the idea.

I’m not in shape and have no bike, but I’m nearly convinced that I can forage some 2^nd hand equipment around Barcelona, and make do with whatever I find.  The more I think about it, the more set my heart is on bicycle touring.  [An inspirational site of people biking around the world: http://www.tour.tk/links.htm].

But before I can even consider thinking about biking around the world, I need to start with a smaller goal.  Actually I need to start with a bike in my hands, but I’ll get to that soon enough.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

Bike from Barcelona down the coast of Spain, sleeping on at any floor/couch space I can find (via couch surfing, global freeloaders, hospitality club, WWOOF farms…).  Supposedly some people have covered that distance in 14 days, so if I miraculously do manage to reach the southern tip of Spain before my visa date, then I can cross the Gibraltar border into Morocco.  From here I can take a super cheap Euro flight into Ireland (not a Schengen country, and therefore safe territory for me), and hopefully do some more bike touring around those parts for a while.

Valé (the Spanish word for “Ok”)…

Firstly, I really didn’t intend to write so darn much.

And secondly, I know that this bicycle travel in Europe sounds like a far-fetched possibility.  It’s not an impossible feat, and I believe that if this is something I really want, then I can do it.  Nobody knows where I will be tomorrow, so I will push forth with my hopefully-never-ending journey and will try to continue updating about my progress.  Take care all & ciao for now--