Manual Labor

This...thing for lack of a better word took so much effort to make and what's more is that I don't even know what it is!

Blahhh so today the camp took us for some good old DIY (an hour into the program I learned that it stood for Do it Yourself...(I've seriously never heard of that before). Anyways as we first walked in, all wide-eyed bushy tailed and naive, we thought it was quite odd that they gave us like a good 5 pounds of purple leaves, remember that a single leaf does not even register on a scale. They then told us to pull the stems off of every single leaf. Now this was no easy feat. At first we thought of it as a joke saying things like urghhh we have to finish peeling this batch or we won't get dinner and dude be quiet the master is coming. But after an hour of vigorous peeling, our jokes took a more sinister tone like we need to start a revolution and we need to rise up and overthrow our oppressors.

Unfortunately the fun didn't stop there. Next came the juicing. I learned that if you squeeze a bag full of purple leaves (I'm not too sure what they are as my Chinese is...you know) hard enough that black juice will come out. Mind you that squeezing juice out of leaves is no easy task. As one of our jokes so vividly put it the amount of effort we put into squeezing the leaves was not entirely unlike a woman in child labor. "Push! Push!" we would trying. "I am!" someone would reply and finally his answer would be "Push harder!". Plus there was all the normal groaning/grunting and jazz that comes with squeezing a bag full of purple leaves and (and childbirth). At the end they gave part of the fruits of our labor which is what is above. Unfortunately, I'm 99% sure that neither me nor my family will ever touch that stuff (and to be honest I wouldn't go anywhere near anything we made...)

Today I learned that I am simply not cut out for manual labor...