Hello All,
This week focused on classes, more volunteering with egg sorting, some time with friends, and celebrating Tsiknopempti. Oh, and a weekend trip to Berlin, Germany!
During this week, I continued my volunteering journey with the egg department on the campus farm. I am still boxing eggs, building boxes, and date stamping egg cartons, and while completing all these tedious tasks I started to get very annoyed by the third day. I was getting irritated and frustrated as I felt I should be more active in the production and not processing. I thought about how I was just doing a factory position and I was really tempted to not continue with my volunteering. I was frustrated with doing the same tasks, and not having unexpected moments like there is in the production side of agriculture. It made me realize I prefer the production side of agriculture versus the processing side. During my hours of volunteering, and after a discussion with my study abroad coordinators, I came to realize that production agriculture is not the only important step in getting food to the table. The side of processing is a very important step that has to happen. Once I realized this, I decided to push through the monotonous tasks, so I can hopefully learn more about what the processing side looks like.
(Eggs coming out of the chicken coop; planting some olive branches to hopefully grow roots; the five different soil samples - two of every box were made due to have two types of olive trees)
Class this week had a few interesting points, in one class I learned about how to propagate olive trees from trimmings of a current olive tree. I found this very interesting as we are working to test different substrates so we planted some control branches, branches with a commercial rooting hormone, and branches with a homemade rooting hormone. We did this same combination in 5 different types of soil to see what branches grow better root systems. The hope is that we will be able to see the roots by the time I leave in early April.
(A marching band showed up and played some live music; A small portion of the large crowd; some of us enjoying the celebrations!)
In my Greek Culture class, we had the opportunity to learn about Tsiknopempti, which is the Greek version of Carnival. Tsiknopempti is traditionally celebrated with the grilling of different meats on the street along with street parties and people dressing up. This event is celebrated annually, eleven days before the start of Lent. Along with all of the grilling, there were many restaurants playing music with people dancing in the streets! This event was tons of fun and it was really cool to see people all come together to celebrate.
( A tease of pictures from Berlin!)
After a week of classes, I along with two other ladies, decided to hop on a plane to Berlin, Germany where we spent the weekend exploring! Throughout the weekend we visited the Kreuzberg District, Alexanderplatz, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Wall, and so much more! I have decided to make Berlin Trip its own blog post that will hopefully be up late this week.
- With Love, Cambrie
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