Barcelona Zoo

I love going to zoos so we went to the Barcelona Zoo.  It is almost twice the size of the Portland Zoo and was full of school groups of kids about the age of 4.  The zoo had a lot of animal shows.  We got to see the seal show and the dolphin show!!  I loved the dolphin show.  It was really fun to watch.   It had dolphins jumping 10 feet out of the water!  The dolphins were so cute.  They are bottlenosed dolphins from the Mediterranean.  Before the show we got to see them just swimming around in the tank from underneath where the show was.  There was one dolphin who came up to the same window and would roll against it and just loved it.  They are really friendly.  

The seal show was fun too.  It had seals lying on their sides flapping their flippers to wave hello to the crowd.  Seals are really really fast swimmers, however, on land they are quite slow.  I love seals too!  They are very fun and bark very loud.  There was this one really big one and his bark sounded like a motorcycle!  

The peacocks were everywhere and it just so happens that they love french fries.  

They also had gorillas.  They used to have the only albino gorilla of his kind except he died in 2003.  His name was Snowflake and he was the zoo's main attraction for 15 years.  They had a picture of him and he was cute.  

La Rambla, Barcelona

La Rambla is a famous pedestrian walkway in downtown Barcelona.  There are lots of human statues:  Cleopatra, Grim Reaper, Conquistidor, mythical creatures, and even a couple where the head was on a table next to the body!   As you walked by, the head on the table would talk to you, it was kinda freaky.  

It also has a famous bird market that sells birds, turtles, rabbits, pigeons, and dwarf hamsters like Houdini.  The free pigeons would squack around the cages almost as if they were trying to free the captured pigeons!  

There is a really famous fresh food market there, but it smelled like raw fish (ew) so we didn't go in.  They also had flower shops and yummy cafes with my favorite food ham and cheese sandwich.

Tivoli: Hadrien's Villa and Villa D'Est

Hadrien's Villa is a beautiful place.  Hadrien was a Roman Emperor around 100 AD.  He built a palace in the country so that he didn't have to deal with Rome and allergies and crowded streets.  My dad lived in Rome for a year when he was 5 years old.  His favorite place was Hadrien's Villa so I really wanted to go there.  It is probably one of my favorite places too.  Although there was a difference between Hadrien's Villa and Versailles:  

1.  Versailles has much more gold

2.  Hadrien's Villa is in ruins, while Versaille acts like it is only 1 year old. 

3.  Hadrien's Villa was built 2,000 years ago while Versailles was build 500 years

ago:  big difference!

However, they both were palaces/homes in the countryside for royalty. Life is good for royalty/emperors, but being on the opposite side, leaves you dying on the streets.  

Villa D'Est was originally a  monestary where the mayor of Tivoli lived.  But around 1550, 

a Cardinal had that position and decided to give the monestary a makeover and created Villa

D'Est with 600 fountains in the backyard.  Personally, I like the gardens, not the inside.  In the garden, we had a picnic of bread and nutella and apples, and I fed the fishes in the pond while big fat cats stalked the fish.    All of the fountains in the garden used water pressure and gravity, not pumps.  I like fountains!  

Pompeii

Pompeii is a pretty place.  It is a couple of hours south of Rome near a place called Naples.  

Pompeii was a nice little city about 20,000 people and very nice houses.  There was temples overlooking the sea and they had brightly colored paintings all over the walls of their houses.  And, they were quite smart.  Instead of using dirty water or having to walk and carry it,  they used rainwater by having no roof above their fresh water pool which they used for drinking and bathing.  In big houses, they had a huge garden in the middle of their house with no roof so they could grow plants and vegetables.  Yummy.  Sort of.  They were quite civilized, almost more than we are now.  They had toilet, kitchens, everything.  And then one fateful day... (du du dum)

In 79 AD Mt Vesuvius exploded all over town! Ash flew everywhere, burying people alive, and crushing down the roofs.  Many fled when they still could, and those who didn't, including dogs :'(,  died.   It has been in ruins ever since.  

Roman Colosseum and Forum

The Roman Forum was the center of downtown ancient Rome.  It was where the Senate killed Julius Caesar, changing Rome from a Republic to an Empire, pretty powerful!  Now it is just a bunch of ruins and huge columns and arches, really, really tall arches. 

Today it was rainy and cloudy but still crowded at the Colosseum.  It was more crowded than usual because the week we were in Rome it was culture week and so all museums and sites were free including the Colosseum.  The Colosseum was a place where men would slaughter each other or animals, like dogs or lions.  If one fell on the ground, the other would ask the emperor whether or not to kill the fallen.  The emperor would ask the people in the stadium.  If their thumbs went up, kill it was.  If their thumbs went down, they would spare his life.  People who were poor loved going to the colosseum because it was free er... entertainment, and they felt empowered when they chose whether the person would live or die.  That is one way the emperors maintained power.  Things haven't changed much.  

Paris 2

Today me and my mama went to Versailles.  It is a palace that Louis XIV built and he lived in it.  Same with Louis XV and XVI.  It was really pretty.  Louis XIV convinced everyone that he was Apollo,  the sun god, and to prove it, he made it so he could control everything, including nature.  So he had a huge garden all shaped and cut perfectly.   Versailles has marble everything:  statues, floors, stairs, columns, and even around the ceilings.  It also is full of paintings of the royal family, the Bourbons.  In every room the ceilings were painted beautifully of Madonna and child (Jesus and Mary) as well as ancient Greek gods.  Me and my mom rented a golf cart to drive around in the gardens.  We would have walked, but they were really, really big and I hurt my knee the other day.  

On Monday, we went to Disneyland Paris.  It was fun and I went on the Space Mountain 2 twice, The Haunted House twice, It's a Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean and Thunder Mountain.  It was crowded.  Really crowded.  Disneyland Paris is far out of town and we had to take two 

trains to get there.  

Tuesday, we went to a museum about the history of Paris.  From looking at all the rooms, it looked like they really loved their cats.  In some of the rooms, they had special cushioned beds for the cats, made out of silk.  That evening, we went to a church on the top of a hill called Sacre Coeur, which means Sacred Heart. Inside there were a lot of stained glass windows and lit candles.  Up there I got a really cool sweatshirt that says Paris on it.  Then at night we went to the Eiffel Tower; it was stunning!  It was lit up with yellow lights.  But every couple of minutes

these white sparkly lights would go all over the tower.  It was really, really beautiful.  

Wednesday we went to museums!  First we went to the most famous museum in the world, the Louvre.  Guess who we saw there?  The original Mona Lisa by Leonardo DeVinci!!  The Louvre was one of the most crowded places I have ever been to (besides Disneyland Paris).  It was exorcise just to get through the crowd to see the painting.  You have to stand about 15 feet away behind a rope with museum workers standing there.  It was crazy.  After that we went to Notre Dame, a 1,000 year old very famous cathedral.  It reminded me of Sacre Coeur!  Everywhere you looked you saw Madonna and Child.  I suppose it makes sense, because it is the church of Our Lady, and that lady is the Madonna.   Then we took a bicycle tuktuk to the Center de Pompidou, the museum of modern art.  When we were walking up to the Pompidou, outside there was a mime.  He was very funny!  The Pompidou is a building meant to look like it was

inside out.  All the escalators going up the floors were in clear tubes sticking out of the building.  It was one of the funnest parts of the Pompidou.  After the Pompidou, I tried

my first crepe; it was delicious!  I totally recommend them! 

Today after Versailles, we went to the Pablo Picasso Museum.  It didn't only have his paintings, it also had the paintings he had in his home.   I sketched some of them.  It was pretty fun.  My #1 food is stuck between a pain chocolate (chocolate croissant) and crepes.  The worst thing about Paris is the noise in the streets.  The best thing about Paris so far is that I am here!

Paris

Today is my second day in Paris.  Yesterday we went out to dinner with some friends. Their names are Thea and Sara.  We met them in Cambodia last summer.  Thea is 12 and Sara is her mom.  

   Today we got up late and at 11:00 we went to see the Eiffel Tower. We couldn't go up in it because we came too late and by then there were about 1000 people in line just to get tickets to go in the elevator, and I don't want to even tell about how many were in line to go in in the elevator!  After the Eiffel Tower we walked about 3 miles to the bus stop to go back to our hotel.  

    Europe has the best chocolate in the world!  I could write a whole paragraph about the European chocolate, but I'm not going to.  Instead, I'm gonna go eat some.  Bye.