WWOOFing

How did I find a job?  I joined the Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF), an organization that connects farms and things with volunteers who want to be exploited/learn about organic farming.  They have a website that lists all the members, you find farms you want to go to, and then write the owners emails.  It’s that simple.  The place I ended up going was in a city named Kagoshima in the south of Kyushu, the southernmost large island of Japan (You know, not counting Okinawa.  That’s why I said large.  Sheesh.  Fine, here’s a picture.  Satisfied?).  The farm was outside of the city and supplied most of the produce for a café in the city.  A café that specialized in donuts.  A café that supplied us with leftover food/donuts everyday.

Yes, donuts.
 

My days pretty much consisted of waking up, eating a few donuts, they walking over to the fields and picking produce for the café, then weeding, then weeding some more, and occasionally weeding again.

 Sometimes I was afforded the pleasure of doing other things, like removing rocks from a field (yes, it is as exciting as it sounds!), planting seeds or whittling sign posts with a machete.  At lunch time we’d go back to the house and eat a huge meal consisting of rice, miso soup, vegetables, curry and whatever else there was, followed by donuts, and at tea time (3:30 or so), we would have tea and donuts.  At the end of the day we would make another massive meal (sometimes made by me—tacos with homemade misshapen tortillas!),

and usually, just to shake up the donut routine, I would make a dessert (Fried purple yam pies! Rice pudding!), or we would eat donuts.

And this is how I gained ten pounds. 

That was on average how my days went.  I’m sorry there’s not a day by day account of the existential musings that went through my head whilst bent over a carrot bed, but, really, so many profound things go through my had at every moment (Bunnies are fluffy!  Donuts are yummy!) that I’m sure that bits of my wisdom will leach into you through the course of your reading.