17/7: My mother Marja arrived in San Francisco on Monday afternoon, almost one day late due to broken airplanes and lost pilots. But, she finally arrived and on Tuesday morning, we jumped on the vintage trolley from mom’s Union Square hostel to Fisherman’s Wharf. We were going to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

She had a Suffeli with her for me. My favourite Finnish candy bar. It tastes like childhood summers and dreams. A perfect snack in on the vista platform on Golden Gate Bridge.

 

From Sausalito, we took the ferry back downtown.

 

The day was rounded off with noodle soup in Haight-Ashbury, and some crazy shopping on Haight Street.

15/7: San Francisco is full of parks. The biggest is the Golden Gate Park. I took Sarah and Derek with me and met up with the girls for a Sunday walk among the ponds and trees.

And here these lovely girls had to leave me and return to the farm. Saying goodbye was not easy.

After that, Sarah, Derek and me stayed in the park for a while and had to force a thicket before finding the perfect pic nic spot. Here, you see me trying beef jerky for the first time in my life. Really, despite the way I look on the picture (you know I love making faces), it wasn’t that bad. It was kind of like the biltong of South Africa. Perfect for a warm day on the road … but maybe not really good for anything else.

Sarah had been talking about frozen yoghurt ever since we met. But we had actually never eaten it together, I hadn’t even tried it. Ever. So, despite the chilly day, I forced Sarah to take me to a fro yo place and introduce me to this, according to her, amazing dessert.

I agree with her. This was a day of firsts. And I have to say, I would prefer the fro yo, any day. Frozen yoghurt with blueberries, mint chocolate pieces and some chocolate sauce. Delicious.

14/7: You never know what you may find on the streets of the Mission. While doing some window shopping on Valencia Street, we happened upon a queue of people. They were all standing in line for this small red cart decorated with paintings of pigeons. Noah, Eric’s roommate, who had joined our little group somewhere between Dolores Park and Valencia Street, said that this was the Valencia Street pie cart. The pie baker came to the corner of Valencia Street and 19th every Friday and Saturday afternoon, and sold pieces of pie until she ran out. It was just one of those things that you come across in the Mission, and (probably) nowhere else.

Of course we had to try. She had almost run out of everything, and we got the last two pieces that she had – lemon custard and strawberry-rhubarb. They were heavenly. Seriously, there can’t be a better way to eat pie than from a paper box with plastic forks, on a San Francisco pavement on a Saturday afternoon together with a bunch of new friends.

Happy pie eaters: me, Anne, Abbies friend Joe, Sandra, Abbies friend Ruth and Noah. (Picture borrowed from Abbie.)

And I’ve been thinking. I like inviting people to eat my pies and cakes and whatnots, and more than once I’ve been told that I should pursue a carreer in the pastry business. (Really, baking a good cake is easy – just use sugar and butter and anything will be delicious.) So maybe, if everything else fails me, I could build a red pie cart and start selling pieces of pie on Fridays and Saturdays on the corner Skånegatan-Nytorgsgatan on Södermalm in Stockholm. Don’t you think the weekend peppy hipsters would go nuts for some old-school American pie?

14/7: My date of departure from Duckworth Farm happened to coincide with a weekend. And as it happened, neither Anne nor Abbie had ever been to San Francisco. So, they decided to come with me and visit this beautiful city. And me, being the two-time veteran by now, I became their personal guide, up and down the steep hills.

The geographer in action. Being a guide is nothing that should be taken lightly, and not studying the map carefully would just lead to disaster. In my very biased opinion. (Picture borrowed from Abbie.)

Led by the map, I took the girls from the Civic Center to the Painted Ladies of Alamo Square. It doesn’t get more Victorian than that.

Then we climbed up to see the amazing view from Buena Vista Park. There, we met a young man from Los Angeles. His name was Leland. He was very charming and offered to show us some especially pretty houses on the street that he lived in Haight-Ashbury.

The trees in Buena Vista were big and beautiful.

So Leland took over the tour guiding role for a while, which I didn’t mind. How else would I have seen these amazing houses just one block from Haight street? I would’ve walked right by, never realising what I had missed.

Leland himself lived in this beautiful townhouse, on the second floor. It was a really beautiful place, and he was living there for the summer with seven other guys, two or three for each room. That’s how they could afford it, I guess. He invited us in for some water, and then we got to enjoy the sunshine in his backyard. Oh, how I love these San Francisco backyards. It’s like a secret world, behind the elaborately painted houses, orange trees and succulents in a green respite in the middle of all the city intensity.

Then, Leland took us to the best French bakery in the city and made Abbie all giddy by picking her brain about the American and Russian revolutions (the subject of her Bachellor’s thesis), before bidding us farewell. I had a mushroom sandwich with brie cheese. It was delicious. Who would have thought, with that combination? The pastries were good aswell.

So, I resumed my duties as guide, and took the girls down the steep hills to see the magnificent views of Castro and finally ended up letting them sit down and rest for a while in Dolores Park in the Mission. After some shopping on Valencia Street, I concluded the full day tour by taking them to the best taco place in town – Taquería Cancún on Mission and 19th.

They liked it. I love it. It was a wonderful day.

Mr. P driving the big tractor. He still feels kind of ambivalent towards big machines, even though he really enjoyed riding on Kermit’s motorcycle at Whiskey Creek Farm. He will probably not become a farmer when he grows up.

But something Mr. P really liked was the strawberries. He thought they went so well together, him and these gorgeously red berries.

June and July: The three farms that I worked at during my five months in North America were connected to the WWOOF network. World Wide Opportunities at Organic Farms. Little did I know, when leaving Sweden in March, that they would also give me world wide opportunitieas to make new friends.

Well, to be honest, the friend making didn’t start well. The twenty-year-old Germans at Time Out Farms weren’t really my soulmates. And at Whiskey Creek Farm I was the only wwoofer for most of my stay. I really liked both places, but for other reasons. But at Duckworth Farm, the friend making became the main attraction.

During my four weeks at the blueberry farm, I was part of two wwoofer groups.

The first: Sarah, Tallulah and Shanley. The American girls, from Arkansas, Florida and Pennsylvania. I was lucky to get one word into the conversation whenever they got started. Not that they were unusually talkative – it’s just that many Americans have a different way of conversing, there’s kind of a different rythm. As the polite Swede that I am, I always wait for the other person to stop talking before I begin my reply. But here, people talk until they are interrupted instead. I never really got the hang of it.

But the girls were great. I shared a room with Sarah, and she was the sweetest thing. There never was any awkward getting to know period, she was her warm and generous self already from the start. Tallulah was young and full of ideas, and Shanley just so incredibly cool.

The second: Anne from France, Abbie from Minnesota and Sandra from Spain. These were the ones I worked with the longest. Sandra and I shared a room, and the first thing that happened once she had unpacked her bags, was that she started telling me about the amazing, life changing experience she had just had on the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route in northern Spain. It was extremely personal, and gave me the impression that this beautiful girl was an utterly honest, passionate and loving human being. And during our two weeks of sharing a room, this feeling just got stronger. She had an energy about her, so strong that you could almost see it as an aura around her.

Abbie was also passionate, but in another sense. Her passion was politics and the history of political thought – the subject she had just gotten her Bachellor’s degree in. I loved to listen to her talk about American politics, and I wish the United States had more people like her, aspiring politicians that really care, and for the right reasons. Maybe then the situation in the world would look different now. We also discussed litterature, and had major bonding moments over “Anna Karenina” and other Russian classics.

Anne didn’t say very much, but when she did, she had the most charming French accent, and she gave this international group of wwoofers some balance, what with all the fiery passion flying around.

Really, all six of them were such strong individuals, so much themselves without pretense. I guess that’s common among wwoofers. It takes a certain kind of person to go volunteering on a farm. It’s a very active choice. But I also think that Lorri was exceptionally good at choosing her wwoofers. She said so herself, she was very picky and read the profiles of every applicant carefully. And I’m very thankful of her for that, because I’m certain that the people I met on her farm are people I will remember for the rest of my life.

July: But I didn’t spend all my time in Sonoma County at the farm or in Sebastopol. I also got the chance to visit some of the other cute towns in this extremely exclusive part of the world.

 

In Petaluma, the houses looked almost like on the hills of San Francisco, and the Art and Food festival had some really amazing crafts and heavenly peanut buttercups to share.

 

And they had this beautiful free public library – and you all know about my love for libraries.

 

At the salsa concert in Windsor, Sandra owned the grass in her bare feet and smooth Spanish moves. Seriously, why are they all such amazing dancers?

Sonoma is special, it really is.

June and July: Duckworth Farm was really a beautiful place.

Harvest.

Pax and Troubles, fighting over a stick by one of the ponds.

The restroom in the barn.

Sandra, enjoying the afternoon sun.

The view from Lorri’s porch.

Pax by the upper pond.

On a bench underneath this tree, I read the final chapters of “Anna Karenina”. Such a beautiful book deserves to be finished in a beautiful place. That’s just how it is.

June and July: But the Duckworth’s didn’t only have four wonderful dogs. They had a little bit of everything, just as a real, old school farm should.

There were eight horses and two ponies in this beautiful green stable.

The donkey was tiny and charming but stubborn, like donkeys generally are, and called Squeaky. You could not help loving her.

 

Troubles, her ball and Squeaky. She really was tiny, that donkey.

 

There were cows and two calves. When I arrived, they were just weaning one of the calves – he was screaming for his mom day and night. I also got to milk his mom one day, and seriously, I thought it would be a lot harder than it was. So now I know how to milk a cow. In case of the zombie apocalypse or some other catastrophy that forces all the survivors to move out into the country and start farming again.

 

They had chickens, egg birds that lived on the hill. But those I knew all about already.

 

Four sheep, that kept to themselves up in one corner of the property. They were very private and sceptical of strangers. They would not let me come near them, even though I sang “Bä bä vita lamm” for them and everything. And they really needed to get their wool cut too!

 

And then we have the geese. They moved around in a group, very close together and talking talking talking like a bunch of gossiping old women.

 

And more than once they turned up in places where they shouldn’t be. Like in the blueberry field on a picking day. Lorri sent Pax after them, but that just made them scream louder and scatter all over. So, there was nothing else for us to do than to chase everyone down and catch them and carry them out, one by one. And, I tell you, a goose is heavier and a lot tricker to carry than it might seem. But they are funny. Oh yes they are.

Animals. They are so much fun.

June and July: Some afternoons, when the stable chores and the weeding and picking was done, we would gather in the kitchen and be taught how to cook or bake. Lorri was passionate about food, and Snazzy, one of her daughters, had a culinary collage degree. So they were both very knowledgable in the kitchen, to say the least. And being taught how to do these typical American dishes made for a really fun afternoon activity.

 

Snazzy taught us how to knead the pizza dough properly.

 

Sandra with flour all over her face – she took her kneading seriously.

 

Of course, we were also taught how to bake blueberry pies and cobblers. Abbie, who had just arrived at the farm when this picture was taken, couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw all the goodies we were surrounded with at the farm.

We were also taught how to do galettes, a popcorn candy with chocolate and peanut butter, American biscuits (not to be confused with the English kind), plum jam and a chocolate pudding to die for. I was in baker’s heaven.