Olive Oil- Part 2

Olives from the farm are brought to the factory and dumped into a big metal pit. This is sent to a bucket where it is held for as long as needed. The buckets are dumped into a siv like thing that rinses the olives and the leaves, then blows the leaves out one tube and puts the olives into one other tube. The leaves get blown outside, and the olives follow up a plastic tube until they reach the cleaning chamber.

Once throughly cleansed with water, the olives are deposited into a pipe that brings it to a machine that mashes the olives up. Then the mush gets spun and all of the waste product gets sent into one tank, and the olive oil get sent to another one where it sits for a while. When ready, the oil gets pumped into a container to be sent to the packaging room, where they bottled and stamped it all. The leftover waste was then used later to make industrial oil, not for consumtion.

Olive Oil- Part 1

You have probably never thought about olive oil in detail. It just sits beside the balsomic, canola oil, sesame oil and sunflower oil. Here olive oil is used for anything, seeing as butter is considered unhealthy (compared to the French who worship butter).

At the beginning there is a tree. A small, beautiful silvery-green tree. When the trees grow older (like 200 years older), they can get to be quite big, which is what all of the furnature and stuff come from. They plant all of these trees in straight lines along the side of hills and it looks quite stunning when you see fields upon fields.

First, they lay a net along the bottom of a section of trees. Then a person comes with a shaker machine which literally places its hand around the trunk of a tree and shakes it until most of the olives come off. I would think that would harm the tree, but apparantly it works quite well. Finally another person comes along with something that looks like a pitchfork that vibrates back and forth. This is used to get rid of all of the final olives. The net is then rolled up, leaves and olives together.

I expected there to be old-fashioned hand picking, and there was. They save the hand picking for the really big trees that cannot be shaked, and for the olive trees that are on a hill with such a slant that the machines can't get down. The people that I saw picking were all retired men. According to our tour guide, getting manual labour is becoming harder to acquire seeing as young people dislike this type of work because there is no electrical devices used. They used mainly elderly men and imported workers now. They use things that look like mini rakes and something that looks alot like a hair dryer

The two guys who use the machines manage to harvest over 80 hectares in a period of about 3 weeks. I think that that's pretty amazing.

Villa in Tuscany

Space, at last! In our delightful villa we all got our own room and we had room to spread out! The villa was a building that had several apartments in it, and we got the largest one.

We were surrounded by fields of grapes and olives, and beautiful cypress trees. At sunset the entire landscape seemed to be glowing.

Our local town was called Dinini, and the bigger town next to it (Pontassieve), had one of the best pizzas I've ever tried. Mushrooms, cheese and ham- no tomato sauce. SO GOOD!!!

The Tower of Pisa

In you head, the Tower of Pisa probably seems like some mythical building a thousand metres high, somewhere very far away. In reality, its just a tower 55-56 metres high with a bad foundation. Out of all of the other towers that must be in the world with a tilt, I'm not sure why this specific one is famous. Nonetheless, it is still pretty cool. When we got there, they had just finished some major renos, so the whole building was clean.

By the tower, there is a beautiful church and a huge basilica with amazing acoustics ;D

One of the most funny things was all of the people taking their pictures of their friends leaning on the tower. We did the exact same thing, of course, but seeing 5 people in a row doing it is pretty amusing :p

Piece a Pizza in Pisa

In Piza, our B&B was really cool. We got a family room, which was pretty much a twin bed and two single ones, separated by a half wall. We also got a sweet bathroom, which had something called a bidet in it, which is something I haven't seen it before. It looks like another toilet, but theres a tap on it that sprays so you can clean your butt.

Pisa is gorgeous! It isn't the biggest city in the scheme of things, but what is there is amazing. All of the houses are merely several hundred years old, and all of the stones in the street are worn down from the centuries of people walking on them.

There are tons of tents all over the place, all full of various products like scarves and sunglasses, all with men who are very eager to sell you their cheap wares. There are also men who wander the streets (all of them with coloured skin) who will stop you to attempt to sell you 9 Euro watches for like 150 Euros. One guy even stalked us for several streets until we got rid of him once and for all.

There are artists mixed in with the people selling you cheap products. Our personal find was someone who we now call 'The Fork Guy' who twists forks to make jewlery. He makes mostly bracelets which are made from either a fish fork, a dessert fork, or a spagetti fork. They are really quite pretty, but best of all- they are dishwasher safe!

In Italy,almost all of the vehicles are tiny. They have way more smart cars than at home. They are many more motorcycles than at home. There are also some ingenious inventions, such as a motorcycle with a roof on it, a vehicle half the size of smart car, and these adorable trucks that look like some little boys toy with only three wheels. All of them look like they are way too small to be on roads, and they probably have the power of a mower.

And of course, there is the pizza. The ones that we sampled were one that had halves of cherry tomatoes, and 0ne with several types of cheese :D To accompany it, we got salads which actually had odd things in them, such as tuna and artichoke hearts.

McDifference: France

France McDonalds has a large collection of different things in their menus. There are potatoe wedges, in addition to the frie option. The have a panina burger. There are frappes (vanilla, mint, orange and rasberry). There are thin pancakes which I personally call crepes. There are gourmet McFlurries (ex: cappichino). What I found the strangest though, was a series of mini desserts, of which you could choose as you desire: mini chocolate muffins, a mini piece of brownie with whipped cream, a mini cup of mousse, and a mini piece of chocolate crumble. Yum :p
The colours were all light ( off-white, tan etc.) with woven or meshed chairs, nice mosaic floors, and colourful abstract art on the walls. Amazingly enough, the McDonalds looked.... tasteful.
The McCafe was quite like a Starbucks, consisting mostly of: muffins, cookies, cakes, pie, pastry etc. They also had every imaginable coffee-based drink, like lattes, cappichinos, and frappechinos.

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower was build in 1900 (hopefully I remember correctly) for a World Expo, and since them has become the symbol of Paris, and rightly so. The tower really is quite impressive. Too get to the first look-out tower you can either climb over 200 stairs or get into a elevator that moves sideways. We opted for the latter. To get to the second look-out tower you can only use the elevator.

On the day we went it was extremely cold. We were all huddled up as we waited in line to get to the next elevator. I would definately not want to go to the Eiffel Tower in summer. It was packed, cold as it was, and it would not be fun if there were 3 times as many people, and much, much hotter.

The view from the top was incredable. It reminded me alot of the top of the CN tower, except for the fact that all of the buildings were centuries older. We could see the Reine and the Arc du Triumph.

When you were at the bottom, there were all of these men crawling all over the place, all of them with coloured skin, trying to sell you stuff. You coud buy like 5 mini-towers for a Euro each (I bought mine legally, don't worry). The funny thing is, that whenever a police officer would bike by, all of these guys would tie up their mat of merchindise, and completely book it down the street. They laughed.

Notre Dame

We went to the Notre Dame for a Sunday service. The Notre Dame is gorgeous! The outside is covered in millions of carvings of the aposles, angels, people, and gargoyles. I kept having flashbacks to 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.




But if the outside was amazing, the inside was much more impressive. There are huge arches and even more carvings. There are immence pillars and dozens of windows all filled with ornate stained glass. It was at least 4 stories high inside the main chapel, and I'm sure that there were bell rooms on top of that.






What I thought was really odd was the tourists! They had put ropes around the around all of the chairs making up the pews, because otherwise the tourists would over run the church. Everywhere people were taking pictures. I have no clue how the priests deal with that.


For the service, the main guy at the front spoke in both French and Latin depending on what part of the service we were at. There was this one guy, whose only job was to spread the holy smoke around pretty much everything at the front. I guess you would get pretty good at that. ;D







My favourite part was the choir. It consisted primarly of 2 girls who I think must be collage students, and 2 older guys. Together they all had a unearthly sound. It was exquisite. They were so intricate and it seemed odd to have such voices coming from such slender girls.

The Louvre

The Louvre is one of the biggest art museums in the world. It used to be a palace for one of the Louis Kings sometime in the 1700's. Because of that, it is absolutely gorgeous! On the outside there are tons of intricate and beautiful carvings. It must have taken forever to complete.

To get inside, you have to enter through a huge glass pyramid that is in the centre of this big courtyard. After having your bag checked, you take a series of escalators down under the pyramid and under the courtyard to where the beginning of the museum is. Beside that was a tinier glass pyramid.

The Louvre is a HUGE place. You get an impression of that from the outside, but you really understand that once your inside. There are like 6 different starting places to pick from! Like most of the other tourists (oddly lots of Japenese), we decided to seek out the Mona Lisa first.
First we went through the Italian section. There are tons of paintings of Mary and Jesus. I personally enjoy comparing where the artist places Mary vs. where the artist places the baby Jesus. I also like seeing the different kinds of halos the artist gives to them.

The Mona Lisa was surounded by a horde of tourists. Everyone was snapping photos at the famous painting. Wading to the front took a few minutes. It definately wasn't the biggest painting in the room.

The painting was covered by 2 layers of glass. I think that the first one is to prevent all the flashes from the cameras from harming the paint, and the second one is probably sensitive to weight so it could tell if the painting was being stolen.

The Egyption section had a lot of little figurines and quite a few stone pieces with hyloglyphs.

We were really trying to find the Greek section, which I thought would be paintings of the gods and stuff, but it turned out to be pieces of pottery from Ancient Greece. It was kinda cool, but I think that the room was cooler than the stuff in it. Since the Louvre used to be a Palace, there are amazing sculptured sides to all of the rooms. There are often murals of various gods on the ceiling all through the building. There were fabulous enamels and a ot of gold flaking stuff on many of the walls as well. The colour was still really quite bright too.

The artists from centuries ago believed that the body form was an art unto itself. Therefore in numerous paintings, there are naked women, or at least semi-naked women :p I wonder how mature my friends would have to be before they could walk through the entire Louvre...

In ancient times, athletes (all male) competed nude. They were thought to be brave and heroic and stuff, so all statues of God's were made in the nude as well because it was thought to be an honour. So we got to walk around a whole bunch of naked guys for an entire gallery! :D jk

In the sculpture section, there was another famous piece of art- the Venus de Milo.

Out of all of the other sculptures, I have no clue why that specific one so famous. Almost all of the female statues look kind of like the Venus de Milo. Right in front of her, was another Venus sculpture, only this time she had arms!

Alex and I Googled it, and it turnes out that it was made in like 100 B.C. and there was a huge war over it because it was considered to be one of the most beautiful pieces of art in the known world, and it was like a divine creation. Personally, I don't see what is so astounding about it.
During our whole day at the Louvre, we got an insane work out! The only way to get anywhere was to go up and down endless stairs! There must be over 100 stair cases in that place. Crazy.