Grape Picking

Gracie was the last of our family to have a birthday in Japan, and she's 5!!! That means that we have been here almost a year now!!!
On her birthday, we had the next of our agricultural group activities. This time it was Grape Picking. Not such a difficult task, but as interesting as the others. We met at the grape arbor which was really neat. It was very close to HGT. At first, we me the farmer and he discussed how they grow the plants. As always, it was difficult to understand, but we got the general idea. We stood under the grape vines. I could not stand straight up, and had to crouch a little. It was neat to see how far one plant actually grew. It was probably 30 feet between plants.Then we ate some grapes. There were 2 different kinds. Smaller green ones and larger purple ones. The man in the hat in the picture above was one of the leaders of this group, and was always helpful. All of the grapes had seeds, but they were very tasty. The purple ones actually had a texture and taste much like a plum in the US.
Finally, we were able to pick a few bunches. The vines are quite thick, so we had some cutters to use to trim the bunches. All the while, the kids were chasing green and brown frogs and toads around the arbor. It seems that every time this group gets together, we're catching frogs!There were also these cool gourd like things growing in the grape arbor as well:
That was all for the grape picking, our next event will be the rice harvest in October. In the afternoon, we had a small party for Gracie's birthday. Gracie helped make the cake: We had a ton of Skittles lying around, so we used them to decorate the cake! Nicole came over and we had some cake and ice cream.

Finally we ended the day to the Bolshoi Circus! It is a the Japan touring version of the Russian National Circus. It was in Oyama, a town about 45 minutes from Utsunomiya. It was pretty much like any other circus, but did use white Siberian Tigers! Like seemingly everything else here, no pictures were allowed after the show started. And, we had to take off our shoes! Here are the few pictures I was able to take before the show:
Another fun day in Japan!
9/9/07