Contra Dance

Went to a Contra dance with three other Penland students in Celo Friday night. It was held at the community center there and included all ages, from kids to grandparents. The caller and musicians were great and I had a fine time dancing. Getting there was a bit tricky - the roads are really twisty and the last road we took to get there was gravel. Luckily our driver had been there before. I tried to get driving directions from Google Maps and it simply hung up, probably just a network error, but I thought it funny. The directions we got for the return trip were something like "go to the end of the gravel road and turn left over the bridge. Go to the end of the road and turn right. Go to the end of the next road and turn right. Do that one more time and you'll find highway 19."

Celo is an interesting town - it's a land trust with a huge number of artisans and craftsmen. A funny quirk of being in so small a community, you'll ask people what they do and they'll say "I work with" or "I apprentice with" and throw in a name, obviously expecting that will explain all. I'm constantly having to ask "And what does he/she do?".

It was also there that I heard of WWOOF for the second time in one day. It stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, although the guy I talked to at the dance called it Willing Workers, so it may go by both. The idea is that it matches people who want to work on farms with farms who need help. Mary, the woman I talked to at lunch, also noted that there were a number of web sites where you could find farm internships where you actually got paid a stipend as well as room and board. Mary was excited that at the place she'd be able to learn cheesemaking and sheep shearing as well as basic farming. She'd left the university to start doing farm internships and craft school work study about a year ago. I'd never even considered the possibilities of farm internships and found it really interesting (not for me, but interesting).