10 February 2009

The Donkey Track to Gorbio - the Last of the Olive Harvest


The olive farm is on the right of the track - we saw it yesterday and you see a shady photo of the track in the pic on the left.

The olive harvest is in and it's been fabulous this year, but of course there are always a few more olives to collect. In the last photo you see the olive lady pulling up the orange netting so the fallen olives arrive in one area. Then she bends over to pile them into her bucket.

This lady is not a spring chicken and this is hard work.

The houses and greenhouses you see in the background of the last photo are below the village. You either live in the village of Gorbio or the commune of Gorbio, which is below.

23 comments:

  1. voila un travail très dur, le ramassage des olives, on finit avec le dos complètement mort.

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  2. Oui, c'est un peu comme les vendanges en pire car là il faut se baisser jusqu'au sol.

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  3. She looks to be ready to fall off the cliff.

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  4. You will probably get to this, but what is the difference between village and commune?

    That is a lovely expression "spring chicken". I wonder if I can find its derivation ... Google tells me that it is a young chicken brought to market early that has more white meat than dark which makes good eating as its flesh is juicy.

    mmm ... very innnnteresssting ...

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  5. She might not be a spring chicken but she seems to be very supple!

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  6. Interesting!!! I've never seen an olive farm! :)

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  7. Julie, the village, of course, is part of the commune but normally, where you have a hill village - you differentiate between people who live in the village and people who live around and below the village - ie lower down. All are part of the commune of Gorbio tho. Commune is French for town or village or territory, perhaps. Here a better definition would have been probably 'Gorbio people who live either in the village or in the valley.'

    As for spring chicken. It's a phrase I've often heard 'She's no spring chicken' meaning 'she's no longer young!'I Googled it and it goes back, it seems to 1711!

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  8. ...one of my favourite foods. Superb.

    Interesting comments on the "meaning" of "commune". And of course in England we're well aware of "Upper X" and "Lower X" or "Y St. An" and "Y St. Another"

    Now we're really talking "Community".

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  9. Chuckeroon, I probably need a French person to properly translate the word 'commune' because the dictionary gives so many definitions, town, village, territory - also district and parish - the last two sounding more in keeping with how it would work in the UK. I'll ask Nathalie on the weekend!

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  10. Great photos. Those olives look beautiful. What do you suppose she will do with those?

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  11. She does look in danger of falling. Picking the olives is hard work and round here anyway it always seem to be older people who do it..lovely shot, Jilly.

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  12. I wish I was on the walk with you! We watched a documentary about olives last night on the French Channel we get via satelite. My husband is from Provence and it's all about the olives for him :)

    Thank you for taking us on your journey Jilly. C'est fantastic!

    -Nancy

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  13. Somebody should tell her to bend her knees!!!
    What a tedious job...

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  14. Parish sounds right doesn't it, J? Smallish with a very difinite focal point / rallying pint: local decisions for / by local people.

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  15. Parish sounds right doesn't it, J? Smallish with a very difinite focal point / rallying pint: local decisions for / by local people.

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  16. Oh I love this photo! Silvery hair and silvered olive leaves and mounds of what appear to be Nicoise olives! Does Gorbio have a communal place for pressing and processing olives?

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  17. She has laden here bucket to spilling point. I bet its a job to get all those back down the hill without dropping any!

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  18. Hi Jilly! What a wonderful series. And a break for your 2nd birthday! Congratulations on that, what an amazing feat. I wonder if you ever feel like you'll run out of things to photograph. Somehow I doubt that.

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  19. I saw olive nets this past summer on Corfu, and posted a photo. If you want to see, just type in 'olives' on my search box and it should come up. I like this lady's sports shoes!

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  20. The old woman should better bend her knee than bend her back forward
    for fear of not stand up anymore as"the old man and the sack" did in
    a previous spot of for fear to have a back pain. It's a very hard work.
    In the word "commune"there is the
    idea of"which belongs to several persons"

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  21. I can quite understand when 'Roon refers to "pint". Would really hit the point right about now!

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  22. Olive harvest is an artesanal one !
    This woman is certainly used to do this task, each year at the same season. She's absolutely typical of people living in rural area.
    Very touching picture, Jilly.

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  23. Awesome photo! I never saw an olives on a tree until I went to Rome recently.

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