Strawberry fields forever

你们好 ! 

The past ten days have been a bit intense and I am exhausted but happy to have some time on my hands to send you some news.  

So going back where I left off in my last email. After the long train ride I have arrived in Beijing and I reached Shared Harvest, an organic farm 2.5 hours away from Beijing the next morning. 

As it always happens to me in China I struggled a bit to adjust to this new step of my adventure. When I arrived, yet again no one spoke enough English to have a conversation. My bedroom did not even have a bed at first, it was basically just an empty room. We did manage to find a bed, but no mattress, pillow, etc. Also everyone has their own plate for lunch and dinner and everyone has their own roll of toilet paper that they take with them everytime they go to the loo. No sharing ! 

After a couple days a Chinese girl, Yaoyun, who is studying in the Netherlands came to do an internship. She spoke perfect English and Chinese and made my stay a lot easier. 

It is the first farm I visit that doesn’t only aim for self-sustainability but that is a business willing to make a living from selling organic food. It works with the CSA model,  which stands for community supported agriculture. About 800 hundred families are members and can order their groceries online every week to get them delivered. They can also come to the farm, plant some veggies and get to know the farmers. There are educational projects for the kids.  

The farm has 66 hectares and 26 greenhouses. They use machines and modern technologies. During my stay we spread lady bugs eggs to prevent aphid’s infestations, we pollenized the plants electrically and by hand (I learnt how to recognize if a flower is male or female), we prepared seedlings and we harvested and calibrated the vegetables to be delivered. My favourite work was harvesting strawberries in the strawberries greenhouse. I sneaked in during my breaks to go eat a few. One day someone accidentally locked me inside the greenhouse, and I had to ask for help ! It’s karma ! 

I still had a lot of misunderstandings due the language barrier, but it led to good things. One day a guy told me I could go “ground floor”. I had no idea what he was talking about. Aren’t we already on the ground floor? Is there even another floor? I ended up jumping in “Uncle De”‘s car, who was making big gestures and stopping every minute in the middle of the road to have me repeat some Chinese words. I began to worry as he kept driving and the sun was slowly setting. He asked me, still with signs and moving his hands a lot in the air instead of keeping them on the wheel, if I smoked and dranked. He eventually stopped in a small village, where we were met by a very old smiley man. It turned out he was an 80 year old miller and we went to his mill to deliver wheat, to “grind flour” (and not “ground floor”). It was really amazing to meet this man, who still works very traditionally.

During my stay I also got to interview Shi Yan, the founder of the farm. She told me that she thinks it is a political act to farm organically in Beijing, and that she has to remind her customers that organic doesn’t mean pure in such a polluted city. However she feels like she is doing her part in trying to make a change and hopes she can continue doing so. The government has asked her to leave her house in the nearby village so that they can build a… tourist complex, indeed ! “Real farmstay at an organic village” would be the theme. 

Shi Yan then asked me to share my experience with the workers. I had no idea what was expected of me and how it would go since almost no one speaks English there. I prepared a PowerPoint with some sentences in Chinese and pictures and hoped for the best. My friend Yaoyun actually translated the whole presentation live, so it made it much better. I talked about Latin America and the rich climates of Peru and about my project here in Asia. They had many questions about my zero waste policy and I could share my recipes for home made cosmetics. We had a good discussion on the role of women in farming and in China’s society and how the west shouldn’t be taken as a model of development. They asked me which traditions of India and China I thought should be preserved. I talked about plant medicine, ancient agriculture techniques and the matriarchal traditions of indigenous communities in southern China. I tried to tell them to celebrate their own beauty and uniqueness. I think they liked my presentation and they gave me a jar of strawberry jam to thank me at the end, because everyone noticed my love for strawberries and apparently it became a running joke amongst the workers. 

After a week at the farm I decided to make use of my last two days in China to visit Beijing a bit and go to the Great Wall. I went with my Colombian host from couchsurfing and one of her friends, an American-chinese guy. It took is a while to get there, but suddenly we could see the wall in the mountains, with its towers raising against the sky. We walked up for about an hour and we were there, walking on the Great Wall of China ! I was so moved ! It’s the best season to go, all the trees are blossoming and flowering and the mountain was glittering with white petals flying around in the wind. 

My last day got really stressful. I had to catch a bus to the frontier and be out of the country on Monday, which was the last day of my visa. There were no tickets sold in advance so I wasn’t sure if I could actually get a ticket.  I still went to visit the Tiananmen square and the temple of heavens in the morning, because I like living dangerously. When I got out of the temple I saw a bakery that was selling a beautiful baguette. I took it as a positive sign from the universe, rushed in the metro with my baguette in my hand like a real Parisian and ran to the bus station. 

There, the receptionist called the bus driver and told me to wait. About an hour later, the driver came in and started doing stuff around the station. All of a sudden he grabbed my backpack, told me to get on the bus and drove off. I could not understand what was going on. The bus was supposed to leave at 5.30, it was 4pm and more than anything I WAS THE ONLY PASSENGER. I started laughing nervously. The driver when he saw me started laughing as well. I wasn’t laughing at all anymore, as he stopped on a parking lot and kept repeating “Ming tian ! Ming tian !”. “Ming tian” means “tomorrow” in Chinese. 
– No, no. Tomorrow I have to cross the border. And I can’t sleep on this parking lot either. Jin tian ! (today)
– Ming tian !  
After a few minutes going back and forth like this I ended up understanding that he was telling me we would indeed cross the frontier the day after, but that the bus was leaving the parking lot at 6.30 that day. I had 2 hours ahead of me and slowly more people arrived. They were mostly Mongolians and could speak English. They confirmed that the bus was leaving that same day and going to Mongolia. 

The next morning my strawberry jam and I were at the frontier, still a bit nervous as the officer kept counting the days over and over to make sure I had not overstayed my visa. And then that was it, I was in Mongolia, with still a 16 hours ride on the mythical transmongolian train ahead of me to reach Ulan-Bator, the capital. I fell asleep as the sun was setting on the Gobi desert, where I saw camels pacing peacefully, and I woke up to the sun rising on the snowy steppa where horses were grazing. What a magical journey ! it was worth it all the way.  

I am now in Ulan-Bator, planning my next move but I’ll probably start with taking a well deserved nap. I am glad I did not end up in a Chinese jail and glad I have reached a country that doesn’t have so much control over it’s citizens. In the month I have stayed in China my wechat (which is the local whatsapp) already got blocked once because of “suspicious activities”…

Love to you all, 
Lucile