Harvest Weeks 3-5 = BUSY

OK the grapes have arrived!!! It's been extremely busy at Villa Maria with 12 hour shifts going from 6am to 6pm. Not much time, nor energy, for activities outside of work (which is why I'm overdue on my blog posts). I've gone to some trivia nights with my host family, and have made the most of my days off by wine tasting, hiking by the coast, and grabbing a kayak for an afternoon. My roommate and I also joined our host family for some power boat racing on Lake Rotuiti - which seemed like such a "bogan" (NZ slang for unpolished/redneck/WT lol) excursion, but it was actually quite fun! The lake had a beautiful mountainous backdrop, and the boats were constructed in a way that made them look like space crafts. Pics (and a video?) here before continuing my post!






Now for more detailed work happenings...I'm working on the continuous floatation machine, which I described in an earlier post but essentially pushes the grape juice solids (i.e skins & seeds) upwards, to then float on pool of juice and then get sucked off by a vacuum. It's the big circular thing in the pics below. Villa Maria also feeds us everyday for breakfast, lunch, and an afternoon snack....which is ALWAYS cake. I don't think I've ever i) seen so many sunrises in my life and ii) eaten so much cake in my life. I also learned one of my coworkers is an Olympic silver medalist from Paris 2024???? She and her team narrowly lost to USA in women's indoor track cycling. Neat! Last thing here is we've processed about 7,000 tons of grapes and are scheduled to process around 15,000. For context, that's equal to 1,000-1,500 truck loads of the below video (if it uploads).










And here are some non-work fun miscellaneous pictures for those interested. Pls excuse the feet...













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