HOLA!!!
yes, i´ve made it to spain, and i´m quite happy about this. i got here just last night.
hmmm...i haven´t written since i left la cite des insectes, so let me tell you about la sorga, and my short time there. my hosts from the first place gave me a ride. on the way, we stopped at lascaux, which is a prehistoric site with cave paintings. it was pretty cool, and you couldn´t even tell that it was a replica of the real thing. La Sorga, which means the source in a dialect of French, is by the Dordogne River, which is a really beautiful area. It looked like a perfect river for canoeing on, but alas, as has been my fate until now, i could not find anyone to go on a boat with me and row, row, row, gently down the stream... Foie gras is really popular in this area. It has something to do with geese and fattening them up a lot, but supposedly it´s really good.

At La Sorga, only 2 of the members were there, Liam and Aymeric. The others were all off on vacation, or living somewhere else for the winter, or studying in another country. Even Aymeric left after a week to go work in Algeria, leaving Liam, and another wwoofer and i there. Oh, and there are even more kitties at this place, 8 or 9 i think, and three of them blind. Even though i was only there for a week and a half, the place changed a lot while i was there. They built an extension onto the caravan, where the kitchen and main communal area are, making it twice as big.
I helped a little with the extension, mostly just putting up insulation. I also did some work in the gardens, and collected some walnuts and huge squashes. I did a lot of cleaning too. and wood collecting, moving, and storing.
They all have their own separate houses built out in the woods...yurts and houses built from wood and lime/straw. They have built the foundation for a main living space that is going to be quite big compared to the caravan, and it´s going to built with straw bales. I would really love to go back there in the spring or summer because there are a lot more people there, and kids running around, and abundant gardens.
Again, i didn´t have to worry about not speaking french because Aymeric spoke really good english, and Liam is from England, so only when some other friends came over occasionally did i have to sit there and try to figure out what was going on. I was getting quite good at participating in conversations without knowing what´s being said. I just had to make sure sometimes that they weren´t laughing at me. They said they weren´t.


So La Sorga was cool, but it was cold, and not Spain, so i decided to leave yesterday. I hitchhiked from Le Muscle, France to Figueres, Spain. Oh, and they don´t call it hitchhiking here, they call it autostop. So i got a ride from La Sorga to the bottom of the hill from a woman and her daughter. Then a guy from Belgium, who is a roofmaker, gave me a ride to Sarlat. Then, Fred, a truck driver drove me to Cahors. He didn´t speak much english, so it was a little hard to talk, but we did anyway. Then a guy who looked like he could have gone to Naropa picked me up and took me to the motorway to get a better ride. Another truckdriver took me to Toulouse, and he didn´t speak English at all. We spent a lot of time looking at the map and pointing and smiling and saying things that the other didn´t understand...then my last ride, another truckdriver, Julio from Barcelona, took me all the way to the campground in Figueres. He spoke pretty good English, and even bought me some coffee and potato chips at the gas station. I was actually amazed at how easy the day went. I never waited more than 5 minutes for a ride, and made it to Spain before dark, so that when i was rigging up my little tent out of tarp and rope and sticks, i could do it in the light.

today, i am going to the Salvador Dali museum here in Figueres, and then maybe taking a train or bus to Lleida, which is a little bit west of Barcelona, to go to my next wwoof farm, el xop.

hasta luego