The Beers of China, follow-up...

I received the latest copy of the delightful publication that goes by the name, All About Beer.  In it was an article that excited and broke my heart at the same time.

There's an article, as you can see below, called "Leaping the Great Wall" which is about the craft beer revolution going on in China. Had I known that GOOD beers were available in Beijing while we were there, I could certainly have done more to seek them out.

But the most interesting part of the article was a little sidebar inclusion titled, The Best (and worst) Beers of Beijings Beers.  The last one listed, and shown in the second to the last photo, is the Snow beer, which I had incorrectly said was the Wal Mart brand beer.

It is not.

What it IS though, is the worlds best selling beer but what they wrote about it is what got me.

The caption says, and I quote, "The worlds biggest selling beer (despite barely being know outside China) and the reason many Chinese drinkers were delighted to find something better. Adulterated with rice and all kinds of other common adjuncts, it has a soapy flavor that is as close to nothingness as a beer can get. Dreadful.".

Alright then.

Makes my review seem downright polite by comparison.

I wrote then: "Wal Mart brand Snow beer number 2.  I honestly think it was the same beer in a different label. The one above was on a huge pallet display up by the register lanes while this one was available back in the beer aisle. Very forgettable.".

Slightly different label but from the sounds of it, the same lackluster swill...

China - Part 18 - Shamian Island (part I)

I decided to break this into two posts once I got going thru the pictures.  There are piles of photos that I want documented for Caleb to look back on in future years and if I were to put all of those into one post, I suspect it may take forever and day for it to open properly.

Apparently, based on my journal from the trip, this was Day 13. It was also quite the busy day according to notes. For starters, we were required back on Shamian Island to get Calebs TB test read, which only took about 15 minutes total, including the walk to the clinic. Then we had roughly two hours to kill where we were free to do whatever we wanted.

We wanted to hit the Quing Ping Market, and we did, or at least the very edge of it.  It's big! Really, really big. So big that they say an estimated 60,000 people shop there daily.  We only did the one side of the big road (behind Robby and Caleb in the first photo below) that was facing Shamian Island.  We could have gone back into some of the alley ways and that would take you to some of the bigger shopping streets.  That would have been really cool to see, but when we weighed the risk of getting lost and not returning within our two hour window vs. just seeing some of it and calling it good, we decided to only view the easy stuff.

This is on the walking bridge across a few lanes of traffic and the "moat" that makes Shamian Island, well... an island.

On the same walking bridge looking in the opposite direction.  The trees on the right side of the photo are along the "moat" and do wonders for blocking the highway noise and creating the relative quiet of the island.

This, to me, was interesting.  This is at the end of the bridge (or beginning, I guess, depending on which side you originate from) but that's an apartment building and it just has steps up from the bridge to go into the second floor of it. The Quing Ping market is immediately below and you can see a small bit of it with the yellow awning in the lower right of the photo.  We went down a LONG flight of stairs just left of this photo.

...and when you get down those steps successfully, you're pretty much in the market.  You can't really tell what's in those bags and quite honestly, I don't remember all that well, but I think this particular "shop" was the little sea critters such as star fish, sea horse, and so on.

This appears to be bulk spices...  This photo is kinda cool because it is representative of how the shops in China are along the roadways.  They're essentially garage doors that open up immediately into their shops about 15-20 feet away from traffic.  I suppose they might be considered Chinese strip malls?

Again, I have no idea what these things are. The long/tall things on the right side of the photo looked like snakes then and they still do now, because they are!  I did not waste much time around this fella, although I'm sure he's a pleasant guy.  Don't believe me about the snakes?  Take a closer look:

Sorry about the graininess of the photo but I had to zoom quite a bit.  Look closely, you can see at least one snake head/mouth.  Now, what on earth would a person need to buy a dead snake for, much less buy them in bulk?!?  I'll leave that up to you for speculation...

An alley way to the much larger market area that we did not go down.

The above photo is one of those alley ways which would take you to a larger street for shopping and so on.  Hopefully, you can see why we didn't go thru there cause you could not see these alleys until you were right in the opening to them.  Without a guide, I fear we would still be in Guangzhou.

Here's a video of some dude and his wife on their tour, with a guide, back in the deeper shopping. These people have several vids out there and they're kind of neat 'cause you get to hear the sounds of the street instead of just looking at photos.

And, the second alley that we did not go down...

This is mushrooms. Nothing but various species of fungus.

I don't recall what this store sold and when I zoom in really tight to the photo to look at the wares, it appears to be noodles or shells and I honestly cannot tell.  Absolutely fascinating.

These are fairly new apartment high rises.  I think they said in 2006-2007, Guangzhou was about 9 million people and it was about 12 million when we were there, late 2011.

The market we just walked thru is back behind that fence in roughly the center of the photo. That's mom with little Caleb in her arms by the pole out there and Robby running to get in on the photo op. The big thing above my head is the steps to walking bridge at our current location.  The bridge here goes over the ground level traffic, hence the term... uh, bridge, and under the road you see going up the right side of the photo.

Rob made it!  Notice the Chinese man who is curious about the "white" Americans.  That really never got old.

Here we are up on the bridge heading back to the island.

Again...  and this is looking back towards the market, note the same fence.

As you can kind of tell, from these photos as well as other posts, I was truly amazed with the roadways here. The amount of elevated roads was truly stunning.  A good portion of the drive from our hotel to Shamian Island was about at the level of the road overhead in this photo.  You would literally be looking into fourth floor apartments which were no more than 20 feet from your bus window.  Many of these folks do not have access to our fancy level of doing laundry so everything from shirts to pants to pajamas to underwear would be hanging outside, next to the four-story highway, drying!

There's the fence again.  It was around a construction site in the demolition phase.

This is a zoom of that photo.  Those step railings that are on the far right of the photo are where the market begins. That cluster of building more in the center is where the bigger part of the market goes back into. It's hard to tell from the photo just how "clustered" those buildings are, but I wanted to try to give a slightly better idea of just exactly why we did not go back in there.

Just more elevated roads...

This is coming off of the walking bridge.  This lady was selling some type of root that was maybe a form of yams? Never-the-less, she had an interested buyer.  In the upper right of the photo is the bridge across the moat back onto Shamian Island.

And here we are on the bridge.  Remember back in this post, when I said the river was low and so the smell of the moat was hampering some of the serenity of the photos?  That sludgy crap on the left side of the moat is probably why!

That's it for this one! 

Next post we'll continue on with our shopping on Shamian Island and the stuff we purchased, which wasn't much.

Until then, take care and God Bless!

China - Part 17, Yuexiu Park... the 1st time!

I haven't forgotten about finishing up the photo album of our trip to China, but with lots of stuff going on, it seems to always get pushed to the back burner.

Never-the-less, I will get them all finished.  Since we're up to Guangzhou now, it won't be too many more posts before it's all wrapped up.

Part 17 is our second day in Guangzhou.  This was Sunday and spawned this post initially. I may update this post later on as I've sent a request to one of the other adopting families who we went to church with to see if I could get a couple of photos from them since we failed to take our camera that morning.

There was a nap by momma as she was not feeling great, but I woke her up around 4:30'ish and we talked about what we wanted to do.  We decided that we wanted to take a walk to Yuexiu Park in search of the 5 goats statue, and even more so, an excuse to get out of the hotel, which was starting to feel a little cramped with the four of us.

This is down on the road/curbside, just outside of our hotel... well, and maybe down a block or so.  The roads are wide enough and the traffic crazy enough that you will likely perish trying to cross above ground here.  So, they designed this underground passageway that will take you to about 5 or six different destinations, depending on how you interpret the signage.  We did pretty good with that part and the Yuexiu Park is pretty well marked.  You can go down to the level we went to and simply walk to whatever corner you wish to come back up at, or you can proceed even further into the belly of the earth and ride the metro. We didn't.

That is our hotel after we resufaced.  The smaller, two story building in the foreground and partially obscured by the trees, is a strip mall of sorts.  That's where the McDonalds was in proximity to us as well as a jewelery store, clothing, and a bunch of other crap that we did not care about.  That recessed U shape of the hotel is where our swimming pool was located, which was up on the fourth floor above the restaurant.

This here is also our hotel from a different angle.  This photo proved to be a life saver when later on, we got lost in the park, which is rather large we found out, and Lesley happened to notice this building with that little symbol above the Chinese writing just right of center in the photo.  She went scrolling back thru all of the pictures we had just taken on the camera and found the two of our hotel, and by the grace of God, we knew which way to go to get back to our hotel. After dark. On a street with about another 1000 people on it. With two hungry kids. That are tired...   A life saver, I tell ya.

This is quite obviously inside the park.  The little paddle boats were for rent but we did not do that.  Sounded like an awful lot of work having been away from a fellas own bed for over two weeks at that point.

Hiking the trails and taking in the beauty of it all.

This was up on top of one of the bigger hills in the park.  I'm not really sure what the point of it was, but there were a few tables and benches around so probably just a fine place to relax after the hike up.

I believe this may have been about where everything went wrong.  We went down the steps here and used my sense of direction, which is usually spot-on, and wound up on the opposite side of the park from our hotel.  In my defense, there is a lot of water passages thru the park so the paths must follow them and there are not tons of places to turn at.

Here we are, after dark, wrong side of the park and knowing it!  Dad's still smiling but the boys do not seem to be.  If I recall correctly, Robby was upset that after all of this time walking, we still had not found a place to play football.

It's blurry, but it's one of the few shots at dusk that sort of turned out. I've spoke of them before, but there are multiple elevated roads in this city, with elevated round-a-bouts, plus you can see the old-style cables for the cable cars that still run.

This was one of the few times when nobody was coming at us on this narrow sidewalk, so I snapped a shot.  People on bicycles would come flying out of the darkness at you, buses would pull up along the road and empty 30 people out right in front of you, or there would be 20 - 30 people waiting to get on a bus that you had to navigate thru.  All in all, it was a pretty fun walk and a little bit exhilarating to sort of be lost in China!

This is the underground again.  Those black and white signs just above center in the photo are the pertinent signs for people like us. If you paid attention on the way down the steps (from off of the street level) the entry point was marked with a letter. You followed the signs back to your letter and everything was good.  If not, I would imagine that you would give up and simply get a job at one of the many stores that are down here.

Ahhhh... back in the room after eating some room service.  That desk is where I did my blogging from. Also note that Robby is still at the room service cart eating.  :-)  That's my boy!

Cousins at the zoo!

No Jumpstart class for Caleb on Fridays so it seemed like a good day to hit the Blank Park Zoo. My sister Dianne and her two boys, Samuel and Jonah, joined momma and the boys on their most recent trek.

No need to comment on all of the proceedings, so I'll let most of the photos speak for themselves.

One of these things is not like the other...  I like the fact that Jonah not only marches to his own beat, but he goes so far to employ his own drummer as well!

Robby appears to have some sort of affliction...

The photo of the day, as far as I'm concerned!  Oh sure, Rob probably tried to beat Caleb up within 5 seconds of this shot being snapped, but at least Mom got the pic!

Three of the musketeers "jammin" on stage.