(10/23) OLIVE PICKING DAY!!!!! Yeah, so in case you couldn't tell by that, this morning we picked olives. It was great. We went out and laid nets out underneath a few trees and descended on them like locusts. The first tree was pretty small so it was hard for all of us to work on it so some moved onto the next tree. We used little hand rakes and hand rakes on sticks to get most of the olives down and the rest we picked by hand. I soon moved to the larger tree and scaled it like a monkey. It was so much fun. I don't know if you have ever seen an olive tree but they have really thick foliage, at least these did. It felt like I was trying to bushwhack through the forest, only in a tree. It was amazingly hard to see where the branch that you were standing on was which made getting down kinda hard. I got every single olive that I could reach. In other words, I reached every single one on about a quarter of the tree. It felt really good to see my entire area clear of olives. As the morning progressed people got tired or bored and left. By the end Phil noticed that, even though most of our group is Minnesotan (or Wisconsinite), there were only Iowans and Illinoisans (with a person from Washington and one from East Timor). We got a good laugh about that because we knew that if any of them heard that the defensive words would have been flying. Tomorrow we go to press the olives and probably pick more because we only got about 100 kilos today and we probably need more in order to make it worth it.

Next day (10/24):

Pressed some olives today. It was really cool. When we got to the “factory” for lack of a better word, a truck had just pulled in and was unloading its olives. They unload them into shallow boxes so the olives do not bruise each other. We dumped our little boxes into one of the larger ones which was then dumped, along with some other olives (we didn't have quite enough) into a hopper that carried our olives through a sifter, which got rid of the leaves, and through a wash cycle. The olives then shot down into a grinder. Everything was ground up into a paste and the paste went into a centrifuge. The water/ juice and the oil separated and went their different ways. The oil continued on its way to another, smaller centrifuge which got out the rest of the water and pits. The pure oil poured out a spout. It was a beautiful green and smelled amazing (it smelled green if you know what I mean). We bottled it into our 5 liter bottles (to be distributed later) and were surprised to find that we had more oil than the 30 liters worth of containers could hold. I think we ended up with about 35 or so liters. At dinner tonight we had some of it with our bread and it is strong stuff, spicy even.

Next day (10/25):

We finished our project!!!!!!!! A full day of revising, asking the professor to look at it, and revising some more is all it took (it was really not fun). Tonight, however, we are having wild boar. Another odd food to add to my list. I will be home in four days and I can't wait. I love it here and will miss people, don't get me wrong, but I am so ready to see my parents. I don't care that travel plans were changed. I will be just as happy or even more happy to be going home rather than to Sicily. I am ready to go home.