Just Like home?

Sunday arrives and brings with it our trip to the Farm. I'd been looking forward to this for a while, the promise of some country air, farm views and the chance to pick apples and peanuts sounded too good to be true.

The coach departed at 8am. Dave, the criple with his broken foot, was excused from the trip-instead he got to spend the majority of the day in bed and then went out for curry-can I stub my toe next please? Anyhow, so we caught the bus to the midde of nowhere. Whilst it was the "country" it was just basically a run down, poor version of where we live. The same shops, the same banners but everything smelt slightly worse than normal. I couldn'y thinking as we passed the many shops, that if things were dirt cheap where we were in the town, then they must be giving things away out in the sticks.



After 2 hours we arrived at the Peanut and Corn farm. We started off by picking Peanuts from the ground. Despite being a Farmer's son I didn't have a foggiest that peanuts came from the ground and was quite baffled when they didn't grow on trees like most other nuts. We picked them and then cooked them on a open fire and ate a few. But they really don't taste as nice when they are not covered in salt, dry roasted coasting or (I'm really pushing it now) Honey.

I picked some corn from the fields hoping it would be sweetcorn. I peeled back the outer layer a and roasted them on the fire using a rake to hold each piece of corn. I did a succesful job of burning the corn and when they were at their optimum blackness we were allowed to start eating. This tunred out to be field corn, which tasted more like popcorn kernals than sweetcorn but still made quite a decent snack.


We then went for lunch in a resturant in the country. We had been told that country was quite different and whoever said it was not wrong, as out of a room of 15 of us, only the chinese people, who had come as guest of the foreign students, barely ate anything. The one dish that did go down a storm was Potatoes coated in Honey and Sugar that you then dipped into water and ate. Superb. Brock couldn't fit in our room at the start, as we were sat with the majority of the European foreign students-italien,German,Austrian,Italien and Icelandic-, so he was carted off downstairs. We thought it was quite funny at the time but Imagine our envy at the end when we find out he's been getting hammered with the teachers-not fair!

We then went to the pear/apple farm. The quick drive gave a drousy Brock a chance to clear his head and take a quick nap. When we got there we couldn't work out why there were little brown bags hanging from the trees. It turns out that when the pears had matured a little, to stop them being ravaged by wasps and other insects, the farmers put these bags over the top so they can be finished off. Supberb-but looks rather strange.

Anyhow so we were told that we had 45 minutes to spend in the Orchard. 20 Students-all around the 15 years old mark-told they could spend 45 minutes in an Orchard. This was only ever going to have one result-apple fight. And after looking over disapprovingly over at the mayhem for they first 40 minutes, Brock and I gave in. The war had died down at this point, but I took an apple and hurled it and hit one of the students dead on the body. This resulted in a massive Foreign Students v Foreign Teachers melee. (20 v 5) We held our own.