Scrap Paper Tigerthe online home of Sonya Hallett

Melk, moocows, midgies and more

I looked up at the cow.
The pile of hay I was moving had slipped off the prongs of the piyhfork again, flurrying down in a shower of stalks and grass seeds across my shoulders, arms and boots.
The cow stared back unimpressed, then calmly, with complete bovine nonchalance, flicked out a surprisingly long tongue to sweep up the hay from my forearm, leaving a glistening, slimy and slightly green trail of cowdrool.

Day one on the farm in Aichau, and I’m apparently already popular with the animals.

***

I’m writing this in Vienna after three amazing, sweaty, hard-working weeks at the farm. I’m not quite sure how to catch up on the blogging as there’s so much to tell, but I guess I’ll just start with writing a bit about my time in Aichau and see where it goes from there.

I arrived in Melk, the nearest sleepy town to the even sleepier tiny village of Aichau (population roughly 45 people in 6 farms) on a sunday, which meant that the town was even quieter than usual, with nothing open save an old cafe/patisserie where all the old couples taking their afternoon coffee looked up and said ‘grußgott’ (hello) when I came in, lugging my rucksack and dripping from the rain.

I met my host Christine up the hill in Melk Abbey, where she works as a guide for part of the week. Christine immediately presented me with a huge apple, saying ‘eat’, in a friendly yet authoritative voice, before striding off to her car at a cracking pace, gesturing me to follow.

‘We are very disorganised,’ said Christine as we drove, ‘we just do things as they’re needed, so just feel at home.’

Willi’s Bauernhof, Christine’s farm, is certainly homely, and the family wonderfully easy going, but I’d certainly not call Christine disorganised. Along with work at the Abbey, she somehow juggles the routine farm work every morning and evening, looking after the fields, doing laundry and cooking for any guests staying at the guest house, making jams, juices, liquors, bread, cleaning, picking up after her teenage kids, and a gazillion other things that need doing.

I arrived in the kitchen amid a flurry or flour. Oma (granny) was preparing dough for a batch of sweet plaited loaves, gathering the dough and plaiting it with a lightening-quick flourish, while giving me a grandmotherly smile. I was immediately set to work helping to me a strawberry sponge from a giant basket of fresh strawberries.

“Now we feed the guests, then the animals, then we eat,” said Christine briskly, setting the table in the dining room then leading the way to the cowshed.

The next weeks followed roughly the same pattern, my job being to get up between 6 and 7 each morning to feed and muck out the horses, sometimes helping with the cows and pigs, some other jobs during the day around the farm (mostly epic rasperberry weeding), then the same animal feeding routine in the evening. I soon got to know the two big horses, Willi and Jonny, pretty well, with Willi defending me jealously against any possible attention from Jonny, even to the extent of ignoring me for a day when he caught me petting Jonny and giving him a carrot. Sandi the pony proved to be a bit more of a challenge, eating the ends of my jumper and trying to bite my legs at every given opportunity – apparently that means she likes me.

time running low in this internet cafe. sorry this is so badly written. I’ll continue properly next time I get a chance, but to get up to date, since leaving Edinburgh I have:
- Mucked out pig pens
- Been bitten by a pony
- Won over a pony
- Been licked by a cow
- Tried to count an infinity of cats
- Been nibbled by a goat
- Cycled the whole Wachau valley (both banks) in a hurry
- Learned to make traditional Austrian cakes and lots soups
- Learned to say ‘I’ve eaten too much food’
- Weeded 20 rows of raspberries and been eaten alive by nettles
- Sold a painting in Melk market
- Got lost in a thunderstorm up a hill I didn’t know existed
- Promised myself ice cream

speaking of which, I never did get that ice cream…

later

The journey begins…

I feel like I’ve been packing and re-packing for weeks.  Condensing, eliminating, stuffing, re-ordering and generally squishing four years’ worth of university life into boxes and suitcases so that I can actually move out and get on with my life, and most importantly get on the road.  I’ve been planning for some time now to take off; travel all over Europe, Asia, the World; help out on farms, couchsurf, hike, and all the time put all the things I see and experience down in words and pictures, leaving a generally inky trail wherever I go.

But first, there’s still the packing.  I mean, seriously, where does half of this stuff even come from?  When did I get a rainbow coloured boat-kite?  What do I do with so many black and red t-shirts?  Why do I have a sequined sparkly pink Chinese dress at the back of my wardrobe and whose is it?? (it’s definitely not mine)  More mysterious are all the unidentifiable odds and ends lurking at the bottom of drawers and under the bed: weird-shaped screws, bits of circuit board, keys for forgotten locks…  I’m beginning to wonder if someone had actually been sharing my room for the past few years without me noticing, only sneaking in to deposit random objects and steal my biscuits.

In the end I just decided to give as much of it away as possible.  Some of the useful stuff I kept of course, but I don’t like the feeling of my possessions beginning to own me, demanding to be sorted and packed, jostling to be organised – especially things I didn’t even know I had and definitely don’t need.  Back when I lived in London, we lived next door to an old man who owned a sinking narrowboat full of stuff: old books, moulding toys, curling copies of the National Geographic circa 1953…  At least once a week, he’d rescue a mouldy box-load of stuff from the subsiding barge and deposit it along the doorsteps of all the nearby neighbours depending on their interests – our house got anything on China for my dad, plus tons on natural history, wildlife and biology for me.  I don’t know if the old man ever managed to rescue all of his stuff from the sinking boat, but as it got closer and closer to the day I was supposed to be leaving Edinburgh, I began to feel increasingly like I was racing against time trying to work out who to give what possessions to, what to keep, etc, before… how can I make this sinking boat analogy work? …before I had to chuck all that remained into the dark waters of Leith.  Ok, maybe not. (but you get the picture)

Anyway, so here I am now in the big house in Shropshire (where my grandparents once lived and auntie and family now live), rucksack finally packed and heading off for the airport in the morning.  I was going to finish this post earlier but there was a tiny puppy attached to my shoelace, a big hairy dog that wanted a walk in the hills and hyper kids wanting to hide said-puppy in a filing cabinet, so I was a bit preoccupied.  The last couple of days I’ve spent mostly out walking with Arty (big hairy dog) around the woods and Long Mynd, revisiting all those walks I went on in the school holidays as a kid, the early-summer flowers blooming so hard they look like they might strain a petal.

Up on top of the Mynd yesterday, I saw a row of trees in the middle-distance, all standing in a long line.  They were so out of place and huge that I was sure for ages that they were giants queing for something over the hills…

I’m going to try and update here fairly often with pictures and new of my travels, but for now I’d better sleep or I’ll miss my flight in the morning and will have to spend the next few months making up adventures here instead to avoid embarrassment.

- Sonya