You sound like you're from London

There is still snow at Broc, so we are working in some of the greenhouses here at home.

Since we are being ultra-organic, Jean-Louis can't use herbicides or pesticides. As an alternative, he treats the soil with hot steam (which I think is about as organic as you can get). Basically we spread out organic fertilizer, till the soil, and then cover it with a huge tarp. We then seal the tarp with sandbags around the edges, and then fire up the steam machine.

It makes a huge amount of steam, it filled up the greenhouse very quickly, so for a minute we had a sauna or indoor clouds. Fumigation with steam for 2 hours kills all of the dormant seeds in the upper layers of the soil, so that the only things left will be what we plant.

We spent 2 full (french) days treating the soil like this.

Thursday was Valentines day, and we found the pinkest rotating sushi bar in Europe for dinner. I've never been to a rotating sushi bar before, I liked it a lot, good job japan. Speaking of Japan, I am picking up the Japanese WWOOFer in town on sunday. She is 31, a painter, and I don't know if she speaks any english or french. I've been sending here e-mails and she responds in what looks like google-translated fractured english.

Friday was kickoff for Carnival. The opening ceremony was free, and we watched it with some english teachers we had just met. They are doing the same program as kelly, where they teach english to french students for a year. They are a pack of about 7 british girls. I can barely talk to them because I'm distracted by their accents, and apparently they are making fun of the american accents at the same time.

One girl knows a lot of trivia and enjoys sharing it, so we learned some facts about koalas, polar bears,  and dinosaur skeletons that I hadn't heard before.

Another girl has a friend that got seasick while whale-watching, and was lucky enough to vomit directly onto a surfacing whale. This spawned the optimistic catch-phrase "at least your not sick on a whale", which can be employed whenever something goes wrong or someone is in a bad mood. Real life example: If you fall over and land in a puddle, a cheery face with a thick british accent will look down at you and say "at least your not sick on a whale", and then grin and stroll off. I guess that is a valuable perspective to have whenever things are looking down.

The opening ceremony was very well done, with aerial acrobatics, floats, fire, fireworks, and a lot of confetti. Photos/videos to come.

There are some more Carnival events happening sporadically throughout the next few weeks, we will see what those entail.