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After a restless and slightly moist night ( no sexual undertone in that sentence intended) We awoke to a sound of farm life. Tanya was in the kitchen preparing meat and cheese for breakfast having already milked the goats, fed the chickens and the pigs and cleaned up after our arrival yesterday! It was 7.30am and the kids were excited to explore! The biggest joy of the farm is the innocent fun that can be found. From chickens to feed, to buckets and spades in the sandpit. Gone are the restraints of our westernised modern existence (I look at my Ipad as I type this and smile) and it is time for the kids to learn new skills of exploration and discovery! Maia jumps straight into this, venturing out onto the farm with no fear ready to explore. Jamie, although fascinated by this new world cannot escape the pull of his mothers arms, and only takes tentative steps outward before running backwards for her comforting and protective embrace. Eventually he lets his curiosity get the better of him and he runs off with Maia to greet the chickens!
f*** it's hot! Sweat is literally rolling down the back of legs! (I know this paints a really nice image but if I had the body of Brad Pitt this would be acceptable). First task of the day is to unpack these 4 suitcases! This should be a task on a Japanese game show! The house is like a sauna and this small tasks turns into an endurance challenge! We are staying on a farm for 2 weeks, so dear reader please answer me this apparently simple question. Why does my wife requires 12 pairs of shoes? I don't think I have ever owned 12 pairs of shoes in total! I will keep a count as to how many pairs she actually uses and let you know at the end! Task completed after 30 sweat-browed minutes! Time to take the kids for a swim in the lake.
I can't imagine turning up to our local fishing lake and leaping in! Not only would it upset the locals of Compstall but also cause the ducks to have some form of coronary! Yet off we all trundled with Yuliyas cousin and her family to the lake! A shallow sandy section of the lake had become to the locals a tropical seaside area! Whole family were there, from new borns all the way through to toothless grannies! Toddlers took their first tentative steps into the lake, Young lovers frolicked in the waves exploring its and each other's depths, and granny stood ankle deep gossiping with her neighbour with her bloomers hitched up to her thighs. As for us we arrived pasty bellied and squealing at any hint of the waters mysteries grabbing our ankles, legs or worse! Every weed felt like an octopus, every minnow a piranha! As for me I reluctantly got my belly out and for some it was an act of the divine as they settled to sunbathe under the reflective rays I seemed to be producing! Ok I understand that the chance of getting a tan in Britain is very slim but give me a break! Honestly it was like that scene out of "American Werewolf in London" when Jack and David enter the 'Slaughtered Lamb' pub and everyone stops and stares, this was just the same! "Look at this fat pasty man from the UK"! Next time I will keep my t-shirt on so they have no reason for staring and pointing! It's not like they have much to shout about most of their men over the age of 40 seem to be hours away from labour. This is a due to a mix of drinking vodka and eating vodka based vodkas! What does surprise me is the amount of beautiful woman who seem to be married to these fat old men! Money apparently still does a lot of the talking in Belarus still.
Later after lunch when Jamie was in bed, Victor took Yuliya, Maia and myself to a new lake! The area is known for its industry of building materials and huge quarries are mined and subsequently fill with water creating beautiful landscapes! Nature is allowed to take hold and these lakes crop up every now and then as oasis in the farmland! Maia was straight in frolicking around, I decided to explore. Swimming out about 50 metres minding my own business, I got grabbed from underneath by a hard and twiggy hand! Moving my leg so fast I almost kneed myself in the face. Again the boney hand grasped at my ankle! I swam to shore faster than Usain Bolt can run! I hardly even touched the water! "There's something out there it tried to drag me under". "You mean the tree?" My wife pointed out! Unbeknown to me when the lake was flooded a portion of forest was also flooded! This it turns out what was trying to drag me to my watery grave!
My wife's father Victor is, and always has been a man of the earth. He is a mans man. He can find a fix to anything mechanical, he can grow whatever you ask him to and he can hunt a variety of creatures using old school trapping methods! I will never be able to compare to this masculinity! The only way I can ever come close is to fish! Not his fishing, for food as he can put out several nets across the lake and come back with a full brace of the most beautiful fresh fish! No, what I am talking about is your old school one on one fishing with a rod, a line, a float and a hook! This evening we had our first outing to the lake with his friend from the village! Off we walked out to the lake and to his hidden boat, aboard and off we went! I was then given my rod. No issues. It had a nice reel, it was indeed a nice carbon rod but it had a spinner on it! Now I have only ever fished with a float and this was new territory for me! I put on a brave face and pretended to know what I was doing! As expected after 2 hours I had treated the fish to an inept display of fishmanship and my fellow anglers had once again proved that I was no more than a preverbal fish out of water when it came to my hunting skills!
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