May 2009 Archives

Hello everybody. We're now in Greece. When we arrived, our friends Aris and Erene, who live in North Carolina, met us at the Athens airport. They are the parents of one of the first Hands-On Explorer Challenge winners, Elena. They took us to Loutraki, where they have a house that we got to stay in. Loutraki is a beach town on the Gulf of Corinth, but we really didn't spend time on the beach here ... we were busy exploring the ancient ruins.
 
One of the first things we did was go into the city of Athens to see the famous Parthenon which was the most important building in ancient Greece. It is found on top of the Acropolis. All cities in ancient Greece have an acropolis, which was the highest point of the city and was where the citizens would go to prey or hide in case of an invasion. But when people talk about "the" Acropolis, they mean the one in Athens.
 

Hi people. I'm in Greece, which is known for a lot of stuff, like good food, beaches and ancient ruins, all of which I really like.
 
When we got to here, we were met by our friends Aris and Erene who brought us to their beach house in Loutraki. We used Loutraki as a home base for our time in Greece.
 
We drove to Athens and went to the Acropolis. The Acropolis is 2,500 years old. They are doing a lot of restorations on it, but it is still cool. On top of the Acropolis is the Parthenon.

Hello everybody. For this blog we start off in Edinburgh, where we met up with our friend Richard, who was our guide in Bhutan. He lives in Scotland, so he invited us to spend a few days with him while we were here.
 
On the first day, we went to visit two old castles, Chrichton Castle and Dirleton Castle, with Richard and his partner, Alan. They were great guides and taught us a few things about how they were built.

Chrichton Castle was built in the 16th century and Dirleton Castle was built in the 13th century, so they were both very different. First of all, Chrichton Castle was one of the only ones with a straight staircase. Almost all other castles had spiral staircases because that made it hard for attackers to fight with a sword when the staircase was narrow and constantly winding around. Castles were also built up on hills so that they could get a good view of everything around them and know if an enemy was coming their way. People living in castles always had to be worried about being attacked. Underneath all the windows they even had holes cut out called "gun" loops, which helped them fire at invaders from inside the castle (before guns, they would have used arrows).
 
One thing you should know about Scotland is that it has a lot of sheep and we were there in the middle of calving season, so as we drove around, we seemed to be constantly surrounded by sheep and their baby lambs. When we left Richard's to drive to Loch Ness, we kept ourselves quite entertained looking out the car windows at all the animals.
 

Hello to everyone on the computer right now (not tomorrow, not in a minute, not in an hour ... now!). We're in Scotland and I've been having a great time seeing castles and golf courses and trying to see Nessie!
 
When we got here, we met our friend Richard, who was our guide when we were in Bhutan. We stayed in Richard's house with his partner Alan. Richard and Alan showed us castles, beaches and even a Buddhist temple, which reminded us of being in Bhutan.
 
The castles were built on high mountains so the guards could see when the enemies were coming. Around the really old castles they built moats to make it hard for the enemy to get in.

Hi everyone. I'm in Rome, Italy where there is a lot of really cool "old stuff." In Rome, there is the Colosseum, which is where they used to have gladiators fights in ancient times. I learned that sometimes the gladiators would fight to the death. The ancient Romans liked to see blood and killing, but that was about two thousand years ago. They are really nice now and the Colosseum was almost completely destroyed because of an earthquake.  
 

Hello everybody. For now, we start off in Rome, which is the capital of Italy. On our first day there, we had some great Italian food for lunch and went to the capital of the Catholic Church, the Vatican.
 
The Vatican is technically its own country because of how powerful the church is and that it follows its own set of laws and even has its own police force. We went on a tour of the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel. Once inside the Vatican we went to the art museum, where they had huge statues, paintings and accurate aerial maps of Italy from before airplanes were even invented.

Hello everybody. We've now left the French countryside and are in Germany, where we started off on the German highway called the 'autobahn' going 210 kilometers per hour (that's 131 mph) on our way to Neuschwanstein Castle. There are spots where you can drive as fast as you want!

The Neuschwanstein Castle is in the Bavarian area of Germany and the town we stayed in was right at the base of the Alps, which still had snow on the top of them. There were two famous castles to see there. The first was called Hohenschwangau and it was built in the 1830s by King Maximilian on the site of an old fort. The castle was used as the royal family's hunting residence and this is where King Ludwig II, who built Neuschwanstein Castle, grew up. Seeing Hohenschwangau Castle was a great introduction to what these old castles were like.

Hello everyone. We just visited Germany and I'm going to tell you about it ...
 
We went to a castle called Hohenschwangau Castle -- long name, don't you think? It was where the famous King Ludwig II lived as a child.  I really liked it because it had a lot of cool paintings and objects inside. The castle belonged to Ludwig's dad, King Maximilian.