Hooray we're going to Italy! About our travel plans for August and this thing called WWOOF.

We're getting on a plane to Italy in less than a week from today! I'm sooo excited! This is actually the first time I'll be farther away than to Germany's neighboring countries...you have to start somewhere, right? So Italy it is. Four weeks. The longest trip I've ever been on. I'm already in a crazy packing mood where I snag things from our drawers to protect them from being worn before we leave and where I try on every single dress in my closet to decide which ones are suitable for a trip to Rome or Naples.
But most of the time we'll be in the countryside anyways. Because we're WWOOFing!

WWOOF means World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It's a network of national organisations who help volunteers, like my boyfriend and me, to find and work on organic farms. It also works the other way around, of course.
After we chose our destination and paid the membership fee of 25€ for WWOOF Italy, we were given access to a list of over 200 different farms, economic villages, vineyards etc. and started planning. We contacted various farms on the route from Naples over Rome and Florence to Bologna and chose three of them. We will stay for 9 days at each place and help out with various tasks for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. In return we will get food and shelter for free and the opportunity to learn about organic lifestyles and get first hand experience in organic and biodynamic farming, growing and caring for animals.
It's not the traditional tourist-vacation type of thing, but we like it that way. Living in a huge city like Berlin, there's noise and hecticness everywhere and all the time. I'm so looking forward to enjoying the quiet, listening to the wind in the trees, being able to see the stars for a change, and even having no phone signal on a farm somewhere in the mountains away from any streets. Also, I'll enjoy doing something with my hands for a while and not so much with my brain. Relax. Recharge. Regenerate. Exactly what we need.