The Olive Cycle

Thursday, as some may have noticed, I traded my day of internet for a day at the olive mill! After breakfast I gathered myself and hopped in the lorry with Mathis. We drove into town to grab some nosh for the day and headed first to Johan's farm. This is the olive farm we harvested when I first arrived and Mathis and I rolled there. Rolling is done to pick up olives that have fallen on the ground and because of strong winds over the past several days many olives had fallen. We spent an hour pushing around these little contraptions with rollers covered in little spikes and a basket to catch the olives stabbed by the spikes. Very dull work. As we were packing up everything we helped ourselves to a whole crate of fresh oranges! Johan was gone and we grabbed the nice oranges that had already fallen down. Then it was off to the mill! The ride was much shorter than I expected but we had to wait because the mill is first come first served. So we munched on bread, chocolate, and oranges until our turn. It was fun to chat with Mathis and have some one on one time with my host. When it was our tuen we backed the lorry up next to the chute and dumped our boxes in. We must have had around fifty boxes! Then the olives were conveyed up to the washer that had a fan to blow out the leaves and then rinsed them with water. They were then taken up again to where they were weighed (ours were nearly 1700kg, which is how you are charged). Then they sit in another machine where they are heated and ground, pits and all. The heating takes a while and I wandered into town alone to explore. It was about four in the evening and everything was closed for siesta so I sat in front of the church and read for a while. I went back around five and watched as all the hard work I'd been doing over the past two weeks was churned and separated and made into a beautiful river of tasty olive oil. I even tasted it as it flowed into a large vat. And I sat and filled all seventeen, five liter jugs with our finished product. It was really profound. So, batting trees I made olive rain which I watched form into an olive river: the olive cycle!