Europe: The Bavarian Farm

The next (and current) stop on my journey was a farm called Laubmühle, in the countryside of Bavaria, where I’ve been doing volunteer work as part of Help Exchange. This place is primarily a biogas plant (that means they make garbage into electricity) and a sand mine, but Michaela and Hans keep a huge garden to feed themselves, their volunteers, and their employees. I am in over my head in rural German culture, which is exactly what I wanted.

The routine is relaxed: I wake up at 8:30 to have breakfast at 9:00: cheese, bread with homemade strawberry/raspberry/elderberry jam, muesli with milk, apple juice, or eggs. The concept of processed food does not seem to exist here. I had to explain to Michaela what canned pumpkin was, and she thought the idea was ludicrous. (In Germany, many people ate pumpkins and little else during the war, so for a generation nobody wanted to eat them anymore.) 

Next we go to work. From picking green beans to cutting up vegetables to weeding to feeding the chickens, there is always a lot to do. Michaela usually helps, and the other volunteer, a Memphis kid named Zach, and I work hard for about four hours. The two of us like to explain things about American culture to Michaela as we work, and learn things from her about German culture.

Lunch is usually a selection of cheese, bread, and cold meats (including a kind of raw bacon that freaks me out a little), along with whatever vegetable is handy. We watch television at lunch and dinner; lately it's been the Olympics. Two days ago, on normal daytime TV, they did a little feature about an Olympic swimmer who is also a porn star. Then, nonchalantly, they showed a completely uncensored montage of her pornographic photos— in between coverage of the race she was swimming! It hit me hard that I’m not in Kansas (Missouri, the United States… you get the drift) anymore, and that difference can be challenging to process.

In the afternoons, I often take a walk. The countryside around here is so stereotypically picturesque, it's hard to believe it's real. Rolling verdant fields, evergreen forests with lush grass carpets, hillocks with little villages tucked into them, with a cliché church spire in the middle of a cluster of clay-colored tile-roof houses. I keep on rubbing my eyes and thinking, "Wait... this kind of place actually exists? How is this actually here?"

The past few days have been quiet and mostly uneventful (aside from the well pump breaking and us having to haul water to all the toilets). I’m absorbing a lot of German culture and learning more about rural life here. Things are slow, and that’s perfectly fine with me.

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