Frosty fair, Brussels bomb

As soon as I got home from work we wasted no time getting changed and heading out to the fair.  This was an awesome night to go, they waive the normal $10 admission fee since Monday is normally a very slow night.  We actually arrived a couple minutes before the gates opened at 6PM.  We were treated to the national anthem as we waited in line.

I thought that I dressed warm enough for temps in the low 60’s but it quickly became apparent that the hooded sweatshirt and jeans were not going to cut it.  I felt chilly pretty quickly.  Cindy was cold as well.

They rearranged the layout of some of the fair this year.  Gone was the long tent near the entrance where they had a lot of small displays mostly done by school kids.  Instead they plopped a relatively large roller coaster and a second ferris wheel in that area.  This was a big year for the fair as it marked the 40th year of it’s existence.

Our first stop was the small animal area that housed the turkeys, geese, peacocks, rabbits, and chickens.  Of course we spent the most time checking out the chickens. It was cool seeing many of the breeds that we already have in our flock.  The roosters they had there were huge and beautiful.  It’s too bad they are so loud, aggressive, and create more mouths than we want to feed.

I was hungry so we decided to grab what has become our favorite fair food, arepas. Arepas are sweet corn patties with cheese in the middle.  They are surely a nutritional bomb but they sure taste good.  They were so good that we actually went back and got seconds.  Cindy and I both discovered that the ideal amount of arepas to consume is somewhere more than one but less than two.  After finishing our second we both felt kind of gross.

We caught the last half of a tiger show that was put on by a decidedly German sounding couple.  They had around 10 tigers in a circular pen, including two beautiful white tigers.  It was cool seeing the awesome animals up close but I couldn’t help but feel badly for them as well.  A life in captivity just doesn’t seem how these type of animals would want to exist.

We met up with Cindy’s daughter and boyfriend for a short while as we were watching the pig show.  They accompanied us into the petting zoo area that Cindy loved so much last year.  All four of us took turns feeding the goats, sheeps, camels, and other animals slices of carrots that they sell there.  There were a couple baby goats in the corrals that had been recently born, one of them just at 4PM.  It was very cute seeing the mothers attend to their newborns.

Katie and Daniel headed off to do their own thing.  We stayed in the petting area for awhile.  Cindy spent the most time with a bizarre looking male goat that had four horns who was the father of the newly born babies.  He took a few carrots from Cindy but was just as content to have Cindy pet him.  He just stood there letting Cindy rub him wherever she wanted without a fuss.

We decided to head out between 8:30 and 9:00.  If it was a bit warmer we probably would have stuck around longer but I also had some work to get done at the office and we had to get the chickens secured so we headed out.  We didn’t get to see as many shows as I would have liked and we also weren’t able to walk around the large animal area where the pigs and cows hang out since it was closed during the show which was a bummer.  If we want we can always go again since the fair runs until Sunday. The warm shower at home felt quite welcome.

I read a little bit about the latest suicide attack in Brussels.  It’s another sad and stinging reminder of the state of the world we live in.  There is no “defeat” possible of an enemy that looks at strapping explosives to themselves and detonating it in large clusters of people as a badge of honor and a fast pass to a glorious afterlife.  It is a testament to the power, the twisted, reality altering, logic defying, atrocity creating, power of religion.