Day 7- Olives, oil and much much talk of italy!

If you've ever been to southern Italy, especially the east part of Italy where we live you might have noticed that outside of the towns there are fields and fields of olive trees stretching as far ( and I mean as FAR) as the eye can see. Well the months October to January are olive harvesting months… yay!!! So some of our friends from the next town over have found this great family owned olive press, and on Sunday they were having a small harvest festival. So like total Americans who have to get to everywhere on time we showed up about 2 hours before the actual festivities started, but we got a special tour of the oil pressing process , from the son of owner who told us all about his philosophy of life… very insightful!

Here’s all the olives piled together ready to be de-leafed

This is the de-leafing machine, kinda hard to see the leaves flying out, but they're there.

Pile of leaves!!!

Crushed pits! This place uses all of the olive!

While we were having the tour there was the most beautiful sunset!

Ok I know what this looks like but I swear this is a pile of left over’s (pulp, skin, residue and

so on).

Ok it was pretty dark, and it turns out our camera is really sucky at night but this was a truck that drove by us during the tour and dumped a whole pile of freshley picked olives- the smell was amazing!

Then we went inside to see the great big olive crushing stones!

This is how it works, you add the olives

grind them up real good

so it looks like guacamole!

then turn them into  even finer mush.

There are some more steps but practically this is what comes out, this is virgin olive oil, which means that it is pure olive juice and what we tried was the youngest one!

Here's dad trying to taste it without havin his throat burn, he takes his work so seriously!

We were also shown some of the Puglian ( region of Italy where we live) wine and got to celebrate with some Nocino which is a nut liquor, not as good as lemoncino in my view but definitely hardy!

For the fest the news was there and they wanted to interview the non-Italian visitors ( so I promptly ran away as fast as I could) instead our brave friend Amory went and did the interview in Italian, she's was so cool about the whole thing, I thought she did Great!!!

All Tests should be like this!

Ok so here is a little insight to the wild, wild ways of the Italian schools (not that I’m complaining!): So the other day we were supposed to have a science test – normal enough – but I should give you some background! My teacher just happens to be the vice principle of our school, and therefor most days she doesn’t come to class at all. Since Italians don’t believe in substitute teachers, we just mess around for that hour. On the days that she does come (rare occasion at that!) she is constantly being called out of the class to handle problems or sign registers for classes to get out early (the normal duties). So as you can image not a lot of work gets done, but it’s getting to the end of the semester and she needs to get our grades so last week she came in and announced that we were to have a test the next Friday. Now, being students and most of my class (except for me) being Italian, studying for this test was more like a suggestion – I mean, why worry, it’s only a test and who’s to say the teacher is even going to show up! There was no rush and I could think of a least a hundred other things I wanted to do (it’s the Italian mentality). So Friday rolls around, we get into class first thing that morning; we’re all mulling around talking when one of the tutors who works in our classroom comes in. And guess what, he met our teacher on the way up and she gave him the tests because she doesn’t know if she can make it! Well thank god because I didn’t study! So we sit down, read over the test and slowly and very discreetly (by which I mean in plain view) everyone takes out their books or notebooks or paper that they were going to cheat off of anyway and starts doing the test, copying from their notes! Now the tutor who brought the tests doesn’t seem to mind and things are going pretty well until three fourths of the first lesson is done when the teacher comes in. Of course everyone stuffs their books under the table so she won’t see them, which resulted in a grand crescendo of paper stuffing going on as she walked in! To which, of course, she heard, though she didn’t seem to really care. She stayed for a while walking up and down the row of desks and answering people’s questions, until the end of the first hour when she just had to go! Picking up her stuff she left saying something along the line of “well, if you’re going to copy, at least you have to know where to look, so you must have studied some”, as if that were a good enough answer, and she left! And all the books came right back out! Needless to say I think the class will have a pretty high average for that test! All I can say is that this is SOOOO ITALIAN!!!


Here watch this video about the difference between Italy an Europe, and just know from somone who is living in Italy, this movie speaks the ABSOLUTE truth!!


http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7ADBF_en&um=1&q=the+difference+between+europe+and+italy&ie=UTF-8&ei=ThQIS-WLKoOfsAa62cH6Bg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBAQqwQwAA#hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us%3AIE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7ADBF_en&um=1&q=the+difference+between+europe+and+italy&ie=UTF-8&ei=ThQIS-WLKoOfsAa62cH6Bg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBAQqwQwAA&qvid=the+difference+between+europe+and+italy&vid=116376988743603264