Categories
Travel

Great Wall of China

20120606-202412.jpgI am on a family trip to china. We have been taking in the sights, including the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall of China in the Beijing area is quite breathtaking. The wall is in full sunshine, so during the Sumer months the sun can be brutal. Take a wide brimmed hat, sun screen, and water.

Take your time and enjoy the experience. I enjoyed interacting with the other tourists.  We ran into a youth group from Malaysia. They had asked someone outside of their group to take their photograph.  My wife stood behind the photographer and held up her fingers to give him rabbit ears. The kids started to laugh and take photos of their own photographer.

For this section of the Great Wall, we rode a gondola cable car up the mountain to the base of the wall.  We then climbed onto the wall and up to the first tower. The steps are rough and steep.  There are sections without steps that are also quite steep.

Categories
Personal

Belly Dance

When you have children, sometimes their interests will take you places that you may have never expected. My youngest daughter took up belly dancing a few years ago. She has progressed to the point where she is now performing in public. She is a student of Davina Tribal Collective. Tonight they sponsered a belly dance show. So far it has been a wonderful evening.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought that I would be spending a Saturday night watching belly dance, let alone my own daughter. It is really inspiring to see her perform with such grace and confidence.

Categories
Beer

Lindeman’s Kriek Lambic

The other day I picked up some new beers to try. One of them was Lindeman’s Kriek Lambic. A lambic beer is a beer made from malted barley and unmalted wheat. It has little hop bitterness and no hop aroma or flavor.  After the wort is boiled, it is put into large shallow vats to cool in the open air (cool ships). As the wort cools it is inoculated with the wild yeasts and bacterial that float on the air. After the beer is cooled and inoculated it is put into wooden barrels or vats to ferment. The result is a beer with a acidic nature and other funky flavors.!–more–

A kriek is a lambic beer that has cherries added to the beer after the primary fermentation has finished. The cherries add color, flavor and more sourness to the beer. The Lindeman’s kriek was a nice cherry flavor without being syrupy. It was sparklely and refreshing. It poured a nice cherry pink/red color with the foam also being pink. It was a little like a cherry flavored sparkling wine.

For my first kriek beer, I quite enjoyed it. I don’t know what other commercial examples are like, but I think that this is something that I would like to brew at home. I wonder how the sour pie cherries would work that we sometime buy over in Willard. Either the the pie cherries or the cherry concentrate would be worth trying.