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Here are some videos of sheep being herded.
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On Friday, we went to Acqui Terme to eat dinner and to watch the potential boyfriend of a friend of friend play piano. This was all we, and our friend, knew about the situation.
We ate some pizza and then went to the train station, which is where the piano was supposed to be happening. We were very late.
We entered and found that the potential boyfriend of the friend of a friend was playing piano for a presentation titled something like, "The best and most well-known arias and duets from light opera, with comedic interludes."
Notice the empty seats.We left the opera before it was half-finished and relocated to the local trendy bar. The place seemed modern in design, but the music was a little outdated. We entered to the beat of Tupac's "California Love."
I was by far the worst-dressed person in attendance, if you judge quality of dress on cost and stylistic touches. I may have been the only person not wearing black or white, and my clothes did not feature nearly enough leather, zippers, or patterned stitching.
From left to write, this is Amanda, an Irish woman who teaches English; Robbie, her sheep farmer husband; and two American kids.***
On Sunday, we went to Alba for the 78th International Truffle Fair. Our farm host was purveying her goods there.
Among the events was a parade where each of the city's neighborhoods dressed up in medieval regalia. Some neighborhoods wore costumes and marched together, while other neighborhoods tried to spice things up a bit.
Truffles are a delicacy, and we sampled some foodstuffs that included them. However, we couldn't afford any truffles themselves, since they range in price to well over 3,000 euros a kilo.
The one in the middle weighed 117 grams and was priced at 450 euros.***
Monday brought another grape harvest, this time the barbera. In eight hours, six people can pick enough grapes to make nearly 3,000 bottles of wine.
Afterwards, we went with friends to a fancy restaurant. We got a discount on the meal because Robbie provides them with their lamb.
The food was good, but not quite as good as I expected, though the desserts were fantastic. One of the specialties of the restaurant is homemade ravioli. One of the options for serving is called "napkin." This means the pasta is served plain, no sauce, on a cloth napkin instead of a plate.
On Wednesday, we had another day off.(As a brief aside, we were working very long hours at the beginning of our stay. Eventually, I complained. The result was that our last week was amazingly easy. Is there a moral to this story? I don't know.)
We headed to Asti. There was a giant market where I bought a belt for 1 euro. Other than that, we just wandered around town looking at the architecture.
After much walking, we needed a break and sat on a bench in a park beneath a chestnut tree. We decided this was a bad idea after a chestnut fell within a foot or two of Rowan's head.
In the grocery store looking for some refreshing beverages, I saw this box of cereal.
I don't know if I would feed a kid anything with "choke" in the title.This one is for my dad.
Notice that this is a Lamborghini tractor.***
For the grape harvest, we received help from some other WWOOFers, so on Thursday we went to their farm for a little work trade. Our main project was picking pears.
This stick has a basket on the end which catches the pears. Sometimes we just violently shook the tree and collected them after they fell to the ground.For lunch, we helped make gnocchi, a delightfully chewy potato pasta.
They also had puppies.
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The next day, we went back to Vedano Olona. We switched trains five times and it took well over five hours, but we made it safely.
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