I think I'll go pick some olives...

This week we got to pick olives from trees surrounding the center and then pressed them into oil. It is so amazing that we just had to walk outside and there were a bunch of olives to pick, how fun! There were a bunch of olives on all of the trees- some of them were green and some were purple-we weren't sure which ones we were supposed to use, but apparently all of them have oil so we used them all. We had ladders all over and were climbing in the trees and it was a lot of fun. We actually went over to Augusta Victoria, a church up the street, and picked olives for them as a service project, so now I am an official olive picker. At the church they had a whole olive orchard and it was a lot easier to pick them. They had these comb like things that we were able to use to kind of comb all of the olives off of the branches which worked quite well. We just laid tarps out around the trees to catch the olives and then we put them into bags. I was picking olives up in a tree and seriously almost fell out of it-it was pretty funny!

Anyway, once we had all of the olives picked we got to press them into oil. They washed all of the olives in water and then used a millstone to grind them into olive paste. We put the paste in fiber disks and stacked them on one another and put them in this thing that applied pressure to pretty much squeeze out the olive juices. I don't totally understand all of the details, and the process takes awhile (they just showed us how to do the steps, we didn't complete all of them). It was really interesting to learn about the process though, it seemed pretty intense. Some people ended up having an olive paste fight and in case you are ever thinking about having an olive fight-they stain...

I think that we are each going to get a small vial of this olive oil that we made in the Holy Land, which should be awesome. They said that the oil we made isn't for cooking or anything because it is not very good quality-I don't really know what contributes to quality (Nathan-care to enlighten us?) but I don't think the equipment we used was terribly sanitary, and maybe the type of olives is a factor? Anyway, I am really glad I got to experience the olive picking/pressing process.