Potatoes and Estonians

Tere Sobrad!

Which is Estonian for “hello friends”, we’ll get back to how I know that.

Australian Dirty Job #3

Ok, so after Italian Mass, I went to Maccas (McDonalds) as is the family Sunday morning tradition (it’s like the only place in town, sad kinda) and I get a call from my handler Michael telling me I’ve got a job for the day. Totally the news I wanted to hear. So I call up the guy (another Italian, my day has been full of them) and get the details.

I head home, get changed and suited up for battle against these potatoes. When the potato guy calls me again and says, “oi mate, could you do us a favor? I got three other backpackers staying at the Leeton Hotel that don’t have a car, mind swinging by
and picking them up?”

So, I’m thinking to myself, great, I have NO idea where this place is, I’m already totally running late, and now… now I have to go chase down some other backpackers, and potentially get all of us lost? Ya… that’s awesome.

So, I show up at the Leeton Hotel, running late, and meet these three guys from Estonia. Markus, Richard, and Martin. We head to the place, find it a lot easier than I thought I would. They asked me if I knew what we were going to be doing… all I could tell them was, “Paul and Michael said be ready for a smell”

They couldn’t quite prepare us enough for the wrenched stench which would soon consume our nasal passage and ensue in an all out war against our sense of smell in order to annihilate the memory of everything we once thought of as a good scent.
For an example, go buy some potatoes, leave them in the back corner of a low drawer somewhere for a couple months, let them rot, then open the drawer. Now, if you would like an example of the texture of a rotten potato… go get a red delicious apple and make it (coat lightly with butter and cinnamon/brown sugar first if you want to eat it afterward) once it is baked to the point where you can pull on the stem, and a large chunk of core comes out with it… ya… that’s the texture of an uber-rotten potato.

Ass nasty.

Score another point for the college degree.

I’ll tell you this though, I would still go to that smell hole and work with the people that I did today, then EVER go back to Hell’s Gate vineyard on a nice cool day. But hey, that’s just me. It was a good group of people working that day, an interesting group. Auggie (the guy who runs the potato farm) was a pretty good guy to work for, a lot better than that Rod fellow. After work he drove up with some beer in the back of his ute, we ended up not getting home for like an hour and half after we should have, but that’s ok. The Estonian guys are pretty cool blokes.

More fun with potatoes and Estonians to be had tomorrow!