Ouch

I'm at the farm! It's in Castillon, near Bordeaux, and close to the town of St Emilion, which used to be and pretty much still is the wine capital of France. The scenery here is stunning, I have never seen fields more beautiful: vineyards everywhere and beautiful old mansions and chateux scattered around the countryside. This farm is pretty lovely too, it's got a wisteria covered terrace and a stone balcony looking over never ending fields of vines. Never ending vines that we have to work on! The work so far has been the toughest sinceI've been in France - next to this the BnB seems like a holiday! It's very physical work, tough on your back and your hands, I've got multiple blisters despite wearing gloves. So what we're doins is hoeing the vines, which means digging out the earth that separates them to get rid of weeds, and then we cut off the little leaves and branches growing at the base of the vines, because they're more prone to develop mildew, which is a type of fungus. Aaaanyway, I feel like I've learnt quite a lot about vineyard work so I'm hapy with that. So, we work 7 hours a day, which is really long but the food here is really delicious, lots of cheese!
Also, there are 4 other helpers, so that makes it really nice too. There are 2 american girls who've come over to learn about cheese-making because they want to open their own fromagerie, then there a guy from New Zealand who's gonna work here for 5 years; he wants to learn all about wine making and vineyard work because he wants to run his own vineyard at ome point and merge it with a hotel and restaurant to use his knowledge of interior design and marketing too. And then there's a British fella who's just taking a break from UK life and wanted to work out in the country, so a bit like me.
The owners are called Fearn and Andrea, he's from America and she's from London, and they inherited the property from their parents. She's also a teacher, and teaches english to teenagers near Bordeaux, and from what I've heard they're getting a bit tired of running the farm and would like to retire, but they need someone to take it on. They have a daughter and a son, she's studynig Neuroscience in Bordeaux and he's studying Philosophy at Oxford. Claire;, the daughter has told me she wouldn't mind runnin ghr farm but she's only 22 and wants to do some travelling and live her life a bit before settling here, because apparently once you start it's a full time thing, there are loads of things to do throughout the year and you can't take off and leave the vines.
So anyway, those are my news; I think on Sunday we're going to see how a giant omelette is made in one of the nearby towns; 3000 eggs!!!!
needless to say, I'm on a French keyboard again..