candy

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

So my family and I went to Tokyo eki (station ) and there was this cool candy shop called Pappabubble. The shop made sucking candies with designs in them.

First the candy workers had this big pot of liquid and they poured it on a flat surface. The liquid was really hot but it cooled really fast. Two workers had to keep stirring it. When they poured it a little spilled out and 10 seconds later one of the workers had to use a spatula to get it off.

Suddenly one worker added sour powder to part of it and the yellow goop turned orange. Then the other guy added an ingredient that looked liked strawberry jam to a different section and it turned red. Then they split it into 3 pieces - red, orange and yellow. 

Then they split the orange into 6 pieces and made long triangular prisms. It didn't look to hard to do.

One of the guys took the yellow part and flung it around a hook, then pulled and stretched it. He did this again and again about 50 times. Each time he did it it got lighter and fluffier. When he was done it was white.  

While we were watching the yellow piece, another worker did something to the red part, and it turned orange (I didn't really see what they did). Then they put all the parts together so it looked like an orange slice. They rolled up the white stuff up so it was in between the triangular pieces, and then wrapped it all up in the last orange section. It was as thick as my head!

Here is the link to a video:

(this is not the candy we saw, but it shows the shop and how they roll it)

We were wondering how it was going to get small. Maybe they would put it in the oven like a shrink dink? 

Instead they stretched it.  By now a third person had come to help.  The first guy had to stretch and stretch it out. The second had to cut it into even slices. The third person  rolled the slices so they are round. Then the second person cut it up to the right size. 

We got to try a sample of the just made candy. It was still warm but hard. I will remember this for a while.

Sports day

The whole school had Sports Day last Friday from 9 - 3. Sports Day is like Field Day at Kipling but there are only two teams - Blue and White. The parents were also on teams. I was Blue.

When we sat we might have lollies taped to our seat. I did not have one.We did it at an olympic sized park, which was actually in the Olympics like 50 years ago! It was big but looked really empty. Some of it seemed really old too.


We started out with the tug of war! The tug of war was my favorite. Each grade goes one at a time. When 4th grade did it blue won really fast. I thought we were going to win because we had 2 really strong people. We didn't have a strategy, we just pulled as hard as we can. The parents did a tug of war too, and my Mom did it.  But it was not fair, because white had a lot of people and blue didn't have that many.

The 400 meter run was my least favorite event. It was really tiring. It was not as bad as the 800 meter because in the 800 I just jogged. We had to stay in our lanes. It was on a real Olympic track so there were 8 rows. It was one lap around the track.

I was best at the centipede race. The centipede race is where teams of 4 strap their feet onto a pair of long skis, that have four straps each. Teams must cooperate to go around a cone and get back to the finish line first. My team was "sugoi jozu" (very good). My team was me, Gabi, Adam and a girl.


The javelin was my worst event. The javelin was actually just a really giant foam rocket (like 3 feet long). You try and throw the javelin as far as you can. My throw did not go very far because it went sideways :(. My friend Keenan won because his went really really really far. But Keenan was on the white team!

 Blue team one 1500 some to 1300 some. Sports day was really fun.

Kazuno- day 2

On a really long field trip 4th grade went way out far (3 hours) from Tokyo. We stayed in a house called kazuno for 2 nights. On the second day this is what we did...


We went to the insect farm for most of the day. It was a really big place but not all of it had exhibits. The most exiting part was the butterfly museum. Half of the kids made crafts and the rest saw live insects in glass boxes, then we switched. The craft was a foam butterfly that was flat with a paperclip on the head. The back was curved up a little so when you dropped it from a height it would glide down. The insects in the glass boxes were amazing. There were beetles 5 inches long and tiny ones too. The tiny water insects were cool. They swam around so fast. For lunch we settled down in a big clearing. My table and the other one by us yelled the greeting to everyone (they were kind of far). The greeting is  みんなさんごいよいわいですか？　　　でわみんなさんごいしょに？
　　　　　　   mi n na sa n go  i yo i  wa i  de su ka              de wa mi n na sa n go i sho ni
Which means "Everybody are you ready?"  "Everybody say at the same time"

After that we played a big game of cops and robbers. I made a big alliance with Thomas, Liam and a lot of others. The whole park was the boundaries. Then we went back to kazuno.

At about 8:30 that night we made a campfire. We had two groups that did two separate activities. One group roasted s' mores and the other played flashlight games. The s'mores were normal and good. The flashlight games were hide and seek and sharks and minnows. The hide and seek was 1on1 and you had to find your partner with your flashlight. The shark had an easy job. They had to use their flashlight to find the minnows where ever they are. The minnows had a hard time trying to escape from the flash light. And what's a campfire without a ghost story? Ms. Eliot told the one... "The one was about 4 young adults in a car. Their car broke down in a night like this one. They found a house with a fire just like this one by the mountains just like Kazuno is. They knocked and out came...a little boy about 10. They asked where are your parent but the little boy hadn't seen his parents for so long. He invited them in and made them a bed and hot coco. When they woke up he was not there. They started the car (somehow it was working) and went to the gas station. They told the worker about the boy. The worker said that there used to be a boy. He died in the fire 50 years ago...." At that point all the girls screamed and waved there flashlights everywhere (they didn't find anything though). Then Ms. Eliot said she would say something scarier and if you did not want to hear it go stand over there. Most people thought it would be like and the house was this one or something like that. The scary part was ... it was time to go to bed and the scariest ghosts are the teachers you kept up all night.

Kazuno will always be memorable.

Hong Kong-Ocean Park

Last week me and my family went to Hong Kong for 4 days. My favorite place was Ocean Park. Ocean Park is kind of like an amusement park and zoo combined. It was on Hong Kong Island, up on mountains. This is some of what we did.

Rides

• The first ride we went on was the Dragon. The dragon is a mild roller coaster. It was fun but my head hurt from it being banged around. 
• The Abyss was a drop from high up. You could see the other islands of hong kong (we were already on a mountain).The drop was fun but not that scary.
• The Eagle was basically a spinny ride. You are in a cart (looks like an eagle) that spins in a group while your group spins the opposite way.  It went up in the air. 
• The Crazy Galley is one of those giant swings shaped like a boat. I sat in almost the back row. 

Animals

• The pandas were really interesting. When it was feeding time the panda would go inside and the zookeepers would lay a trail of food leading to a pile of bamboo. The panda came back out and ate all of the vegetables but did not eat the bamboo as far as I saw. I don't think his eyes are that good and his nose was blocked out by all of the vegetables so he thought there was more around kept looking for them.

• The walrus were in the cold arctic room. The building was really cold. When you looked from the underwater tank they did interesting stuff. One of them came in floating on his back then flipped (underwater) and headed back the same way.
• The goldfish had a surprisingly big area. There were so many types. The weirdest one was the bubble eyed ones. Their eyes had a big blob under it. 

Ocean Park was really fun with all the rides and animals.  The park was better than other parks I'd been to because it had animals and rides. There was a good view because of the mountain and that was interesting also. If you are in Hong Kong I recommend Ocean Park.