Sarah's First Parade

For the last two weeks, St. Catharines and the surrounding area have been celebrating the Niagara Wine Festival. Yesterday was the Grand Parade, which marks the closing of the festival. The parade was well over an hour long. I think the highlights wouldhave to include the several groups of shriners that drove little go kart style cars and the Star Wars group. Sarah just watched and soaked the whole thing in.

This was the Nin Jitsu Martial Arts group. David thought it was pretty funny that they only had one Asian person in the group.
Shriners

This float carried the "grape king"
More Shriners

Lots of Brock students
Recycling is BIG out here. The blue bin is for cans, bottles, etc. The gray bin is for newspaper, cardboard, etc and the green bin is for compost materials.
This is a grape picker. It reminded us of a raspberry picker, but even bigger.
Little Sarah is sleepy from a busy morning.

After the parade we headed to Montebello Park for the wine festival. Many of the wineries in the region had stands set up where you could pay tokens to taste wine and/ or food. There was also entertainment and lots to see. It was strange to be in a crowded large park to see everyone just drinking wine. After the festival we headed to a research vineyard where David has labs at to pick grapes. He just bought a grape crusher, press and filter and is planning on making wine in the next couple of days. I think I'll make some fresh grape jelly today as well.

When we got home from picking grapes our neighbours, Jerry and Kathy, invited us over for some pasta on the back patio. We ended up spending the whole evening at their place just sitting outside chatting. By the end of the evening all of the neighbours (both sides and behind the back fence) were also over. It was nice to meet the rest of our neighbours and spend some time getting to know them. At 7pm I took Sarah home to feed her and put her to bed. Since her room and is so close to their house, I was able to just bring the baby monitor next door and not have to worry about her in the house. It's been interesting to see how people out here seem to embrace the idea of community much more than where we are from. Last Saturday we spent the evening with our landlords and their neighbours. Everyone just brings some food to share, all the kids play together and the adults just hang out.

This afternoon David has to go to the festival to pour wine and help out at one of the wine seminars (which he did last Sunday as well). Our neighbour Kathy has offered to come over and babysit, so David and I are going back to the park for a fee Philospher Kings concert. Should be a good day.

When we got home last night David and I talked about the idea of community and the clear differences out here. We are also seeing that God has put a lot (nearly all) non Christian people in our lives so far. Many are catholic background, but all have no personal relationship with Christ. We are realizing that God has put our mission field literally right on our backyard. We are curious and excited for the ways that he will use us in the lives of those around us. Please pray for us as we seek to be a light and show God's love to our neighbours and those we meet