So: after having an awesome time in new castle we took a nice boat to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is beautiful, it has many canals every where, lots of house boats in the canals, there are soo so many bikes, lots of old architecture and lots of nice cafes. We saw a bike parking lot for 2500 bikes! I wish other cities had that many bikes it would reduce pollution. The canals are full of cheesy boat tours, ducks and swans. I learnt that there is a limit to how many house-boats there is allowed in the canals, and let me tell you they have reached their limit! While we were there we also went to the Ann Frank museum where we learned about her diary, about her going into hiding, about the Nazi’s in Amsterdam and about the concentration camps. At the end we voted at an interesting exhibition called free 2 choose on subjects that have to do with Democracy and Human Rights. I found this really interesting you can look at it on line. One of the subjects was about whether girls should be allowed to wear head scarves to schools, you got ten seconds to place your vote, after you did this a pie graph displayed the percentage of votes in the room and votes cast that week. This was my second visit to Amsterdam and I took my family to show them the flower market it has many cool plants which are fun to look at such as carnivorous plants, orchids and pot plants! I wish we could have stayed longer in Amsterdam.
We took a train from Amsterdam to Berlin the next day. We saw lots of graffiti as our train whizzed by different towns. We were met by old friends from Cortes at the station. When we arrived at their house it turned out that Tilman and myself liked many of the same things. I was introduced to one of my new favorite foods, shnitzel which I learned how to make. My uncle came from Vancouver to meet us in Berlin. We went to Museum Island. We went to Museum Island two days in a row! The first day we saw Ancient Turkey in the new Pergamon Panoram special exhibition. The panorama was so amazing, the trees looked crazily 3D, but as soon as you walked up close you could see all the pixels in a bush down low. The same day Tilman, Mia and I went for bubble tea. I got strawberry with Lychee berry, Mia got raspberry with raspberry and Tilman got mango with Lychee. Tilman and I played a game where we spat Lychees at each other. On museum island the next day we went to the Pergamon. It had Roman, Turkey and Middle and Near East ancient artifacts. It was so cool to see all the Egyptian statues (partially because I really like Egypt) but also just to wonder how those people could ever build such things without advanced tools. We also saw lots of jewelry such as gold bronze and other jewels. We saw part of the wall that separated East and West Berlin. It was covered in graffiti. Tilman and I and one of Tilman’s friends went into a tourist shop and we got to try on some funny military hats, there were also pieces of the wall that cost five euro! Tilman’s dad pointed out little plaques out side of apartments, he told us that they had the names of the Jews that had been deported to concentration camps from their homes.
The next day with my Uncle we went to a Jewish museum. My mom’s side of the family is Jewish. Going to the Ann Frank house and the Jewish museum is interesting for us and learning about our history. The thing that really stood out for me was the Treptower Park. It is a memorial for the Russian soldiers who died in the second world war. It has a GIANT monument for them, really cool architecture.
Well that’s all for this week
Ruben
