Niagara Falls

Had yet another awesome day in Canada. Today I went to Niagara falls on a bus tour. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't as nice as before..

It might be difficult to see on this picture but it was pouring down. Anyway, I got on the bus and we headed off towards the Niagara falls.

We arrived around 11.30 and started with going on a little boat tour into the falls called "Maid of the Mist". As we got on that everyone was already soaked from the rain, so the plastic rain robes didn't do so much for us. As can be seen, even I got one of these sexy see-through plastic bags to put over my clothes. ;)

The Niagara falls are very beautiful, and I really like the whole nature thing about Canada. I like it a lot. :) The falls, made me think about the idea I have been sketching on, the "Theorie Egregium" and how the equations for it should be somewhat similar in 3 dimensions to those of flowing water...

After walking around in 3 hrs in pouring rain around the area of the Niagara falls, we went on the bus again and stopped first to see the Niagara Whirlpool (which wasn't much to see really so I'm not going to bore you with some pics of it). Then we continued on to the small town of "Niagara-on-the-Lake". It was a beautiful little town (looks something like Alabama in the film "Sweet Home Alabama"), and we got to walk around there for 1 and a half hours.

A beautiful small town and as everywhere (or at least that I've been to) everyone in Canada is super friendly and nice. :) If I were ever to get married, this is definitely a place I would go to.

And here's a picture for Helen. A small, but still quite big boutique selling only Christmas decorations. It was really nice! :) I also went into the local chocolate store and bought a chocolate dipped Belgian Waffle. Tasty! :D

After Niagara-on-the-Lake we headed towards our final stop before going back to Toronto, a wine yard, where we had free wine tasting. I generally try to avoid wine because it often just tastes cheap, and makes my lips purple (from red wine). But now we got to try three different Niagara produced wines, a red wine (Dark Noir), a white wine (Riesling) and a real Canadian Ice wine (Riesling). The red wine wasn't that good, tasted a bit like the regular Merlot wines, and the white wine like a german Riesling wine (eg Wild Boar), but the Ice wine was really good.

Ice wine is generally more like a desert wine, invented in Germany (probably somewhere in the south) and is produced in a different way than regular wine. The trick is to let the grapes freeze for at least three days in a row before picking them. The water in them then separates from the sugar, and by then picking them in the middle of the night and pressing them at a low temperature, you can extract only the sweet juice from them and get rid of a lot of the water. They also have to make sure that the alcohol percentage in the wine doesn't get to high, as it would remove a lot of the sugar in it and thereby the sweetness. The wine was, very good, and if I had the money and knew I could bring it on the flight, I would have bought a bottle. (Ice wines are more expensive than regular wine, because you filter away so much water in the process, you need more grapes, and the amount of grapes needed for one bottle of ice wine is equal to the amount needed to make 30 bottles of regular wine.

Tomorrow morning I'm heading to Toronto Pearson International Airport to fly into Fredericton and on Monday, the studies begin.. Just hope I'm ready. ;)