Where I have lived for the past week and where I will stay for the next month is something like the imagined college dorm. Except with no rules what so ever, no supervision, no maintenance, no cafeteria and a lot more geckos, spiders and cats. So really it's more like a frat, except it's co-ed, in the jungle and there's no free booze. So really it's just like a WWOOFing house. It's awesome.
There are nine of us living in the house together, and two other guys who live in a cabin on a secluded part of the farm which is commonly referred to as "six acres". Claire and I room with a guy named Drew in the largest of the four bedrooms in the house, which is sorta an unfinished garage space that houses a lot of nature (we're low in the pecking order in terms of room choice). Drew is a recent high school graduate from Michigan, who is into febreeze, weed and says the word 'bag' as 'beeeg'. His side of the room is separated from ours by a curtain with an autumn motif and the obvious mess and stench that accompanies boys. The next bedroom belongs to Chris and Everett. Chris is the senior WWOOFer, he's 21, from Texas. He has a wildly untrimmed ginger beard, is vegetarian, smokes hand rolled cigarettes in the rocking chair, and can tell you crazy stories about some the past WWOOFers who have come through. One the criteria of rooming with him is being bearded, so Everett naturally sports a scraggly black beard on his thin face. Everett is from Salt Lake City, is tall and thin, enjoys video and computer games, feeds the chickens, makes good grilled cheese and very quietly approachable. The room on the other side of the bathroom from Chris and Everett is where Whitney and Alicia live. Whitney is a recent high school graduate from Missouri, is the fourth oldest out of nine kids, and is truly fearless, just like the tattoo on her ribcage suggests. We always get picked up hitchhiking with her because she wears less clothes than the average person, is extremely bubbly and friendly and has an open face. Whitney rooms with Alicia from Colorado, who is the first person in her family to graduate from college and the only person in the current farmily to sport a degree. Her nickname is 'shit tits', she has a monarch butterfly tattoo on her arm, a great laugh and always threatens to cut off her bun when she's drunk. In the final room we have Chancey and Alexa. The former is 21, the latter 20, both from Portland, Oregon and came to the farm together. Alexa is everything you can imagine when someone says "surfer babe". She makes friends faster than anyone I've ever met, is nearly as OCD as me, only eats granola and peanut butter, and is leaving the farm soon because she got a job working on a boat and is moving in with a man named Ron. I can't tell you much about Chancey, because the day after we got to the farm she caught a flight out to Portland for about a week. She's coming back to the farm soon, she said she "just needed to sort some things out at home". I do know her mom is a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, her older brother lives in Hawaii, she was planning to stay a year, and that she doesn't know that Alexa is moving out yet. Jared and Lee live out on six acres in the cabin. They used to be in the Navy together and recently reconnected on the farm. Jared lived in Vegas for 16 years, has a bunch of shoulder length little braids as hair, and is the most annoying ever. Lee is a super mellow surfer, who finds pleasure in the simple things, doesn't really eat and recently asked me if I could cut his hair into a mushroom shape because he's going to be a mushroom salesman.
The house is a big two story number, though the WWOOFers only live on the bottom floor. No one lives upstairs currently. There is a girls bathroom and a guys bathroom, and you get three guesses on which one is disgusting. It's very hard to keep the house at least decently clean because we track a lot of mud in, people 'forget' to do their dishes and we're a bunch of young people living together with no one telling us to clean up. It rains everyday, sometimes twice a day. This means that there is always mud, but also that everything is green. Everyone who works in the fields gets super muddy and that's why our house is always muddy. I have been working upstairs for the past week. The owner of the farm, a fast talking chinese woman who used to be a mechanical engineer at the top of her field, decided that, because I am Asian and tidy with my own things, I would be the person to clean out 17 years of fifth, bugs and mold from the upstairs part of the house. She and her family recently moved out, the manager and her daughter are moving in, and in the meantime the bride and groom of a nearby wedding want to stay there. The house was actually the most disgusting, and the couple was described to me as "immaculate", so naturally I have had a lot of work to do. Cockroaches have never been so big....
The next month will be, for one reason or another, one to remember. I don't mind being the resident maid that much, I just hope to have some close encounters with lettuce soon. As someone who historically adapts poorly, I think I'm doing pretty frickin well thus far. Hopefully it stays that way. I'm going to go clean gecko poop off my towel now.
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