Life the past few weeks hasn't been as bad as the title sounds, trust me. At a point when I was mere hours from 100% deciding to leave to hostel to go nanny for a family for a month, word of mouth in the kitchen landed Sawyer and me a job starting the following day at a vineyard. I'm still thankful everyday that it happened so easily and suddenly, because it is quite a cush job, other than the rotten grapes ;). Even in the middle of the day when the sun is burning onto my neck and the job has gotten so monotonous that I might fall asleep, I'm still thankful because I am making money and there are much worse jobs for the same pay.
The job is much less monotonous with the addition of podcasts, music, and conversation to stimulate the brain. Our job varies between three tasks, one being clipping up netting over the grapes on each row with mass amounts of those little plastic clips you'd find holding a bread bag closed. This prevents bird damage. Another is pulling off "second sets" which are second generation bunches of grapes that are small, green, hard, very bitter, and thus unwanted in the wine-making process. This absolutely destroys your hands if you don't have gloves; which, none of us did for the few days we performed this task. Grape stems are much tougher than you'd imagine, so after each day the skin in between our fingers felt very raw and sensitive. The third task is thinning the grapes, which means going through (again) with clippers to remove big green bunches with no color and patches where the grapes are too bunched up to mature properly. The best way to perform the latter is hacking vigorously at the grapes with your clippers while sticky grape juice runs down your hands until the whole clump just drops on the ground, and simultaneously trying not to touch the rotten middle. We work from 7:30-5:00 most days, or nine hours. The day is broken up by two paid "smokos" and one unpaid lunch break, so its bearable and I never end the day too exhausted. Our boss Lou is quite the character; his life includes having about three teeth, speaking eight languages, and living with six Vietnamese women who bake him aMaZiNg coconut buns that he sometimes shares with us. His managerial style is quite lax, so as long as my pace is relatively normal I'm never worried about getting sacked like the twelve Fijian guys who just didn't care about the work.
Nights at the hostel are spent for the most part socializing until one by one people drop off to go to bed in preparation for the next five or six AM morning. Being here long enough, it turns into a little community, almost like a college dorm for adults in their mid-twenties... which is a weird way to put it but the place feels much more homey when I return from work and am able to stop at every other person I walk by to ask how their day at work was or what's for dinner, hostel gossip, etc.
This is our second full week, and Sawyer and I hope to get at least one more full week in, but work varies depending on the plants of course. There are six proceeding weeks of hand picking which we are sad to miss but we need to see the rest of this beautiful country!
We've both learned a lot; the Rotten Apple will be quite an unforgettable experience.
(It's hard to tell from the photo how dry yet simultaneously pruned and raw my hand is..)
(ps - it's nice to be able to go barefoot as well :))
