Yesterday was a grape harvest day for the host family of Peace Corps Volunteer, Robyn. She lives in a small village named Floritoaia Vechi and that's near the city of Ungheni. If you check your Moldovan map, you see that Ungheni is on the western boarder with Romania. The Prut River makes a boarder there as well as all along the western edge of Moldova. The river makes an angle turn there and in Romanian, angle is unghe, so thus Ungehni. Robyn met PCV Michael and me at the bus station and we took a walking tour of Ungheni. What a beautiful central park they have with fountain, sculptures, and exercise equipment! I love this sculpture of a traditional folk style couple. We even found Thomas the train engine there. But off we went to Robyn's home town and you can see what a great view she has of the valley. She says that see can see Romania from her back door!
Here's a picture of a small wine vat in the back yard. We picked a few grapes from the house garden and mashed them up in here. This will make a batch of house wine. But our real work was waiting for us in a hector size vineyard full of "poame" (grapes). You can see the big cistern we were filling there. We were harvesting "negru si alba poame" or dark and light grapes. Here's Robyn with a bucket full of alba poame, and Michael getting down on the dark grapes. Robyn shows the technique of the two handed pick. And I show you how you can test the grape quality. Well after 3 or 4 hours of picking, it was time for a lunch break. There's a storage building in the field where our hosts have laid out some good food to share with all the crew. And then just another 4 hours and we all end up in the final row together. The end of a perfectly grape day. Or as we all agreed "foarte greu", loosely translated 'that was a lot of work'.
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