Sunday, 26 Jul

This morning I woke up stiff. Finnish beds, Scandinavian beds, are, well, different. They have an inch thick pad that rests on top of about 3 inches of foam. Although I don’t have any trouble sleeping, my back reminds me every morning that it’s not my bed. After a bit of yoga, which only helped a little this morning, I headed outside in search of blueberries. They weren’t hard to find. About 40 feet from my apartment was the first patch. The weather was partly cloudy and pleasant, but still, so the mosquitoes were a nuisance. In an hour, I had about 3/4 of a liter, which seemed like a decent amount. Adding what I'd already eaten, I had probably picked a liter. No sense picking more than I can eat in the next few days, as I don’t really have a good way to store them. About the time I started hand-picking, a woman and her son started harvesting in a more industrial fashion, with their official Finnish berry rake thingamabobs. These gizmos have tines on the end, a handle, and a collection area. You just swoop them through the bushes and they scrape off the berries.

In that same hour, they had picked about 20 liters. They were pretty funny, with their purple hands, purple lips, purple teeth... they had probably eaten as many as they had picked. They also confessed that they had hours of work at home cleaning all those berries. Me, on the other hand, had immediate gratification: fresh blueberries on vanilla yogurt.
After snacking, I headed into town for a few groceries. The strawberry guy was still selling strawberries, but I passed him by today, I’ve got fresh blueberries. Looks like I’ll spend most of the rest of the day cleaning up a chapter for the Patagonian nursery manual. That’s one of the monkeys I’m trying to get off my back this summer.

An update.... I've been sitting in the kitchen of my apartment becasue it has the best WiFi connection, and it's been a steady string of cars all afternoon. Car load after car load of berry pickers. The interesting thing is that they all go to about the same spot, and they all pick for about an hour, and then they all leave with happy faces. Gives you an idea of how many blueberries must be lurking out there...