oh yeah....

i'm home in america now. i've been home for a while but i've been busy adjusting to america and working. i have to upload paris photos which i mean to do sometime this week. i hope no one thought i was dead. sorry if they did. i'm not dead.

BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

all right, last week i had a birthday. and i promise i'll only post a few pictures of fish. but there are way more to be seen when i get back. and a couple of small videos. but i'm sure you guys can wait.

SEEPFERDCHEN!!!!!!! they had a bunch of little seahorses. here's one of the best pictures i have of them.

here are some jellyfish. i wish the picture turned out better but they had a black light so you could see the jellyfish, that's why that one is glowing. but black light doesn't like to be photographed.

that little thing is a dogfish shark. there was this big pool where you could look over the tank at them. because there were so many people in the room, the sharks and rays kept poking their noses out of the water. i had my head a little over the edge to stare down into the water when one of the tiny sharks came halfway out of the water right in front of me. if i hadn't breathed and scared it away, it would have touched me. that would have been so cool.

and this is a sting ray. one of them almost touched me, too. it was really funny and weird to see them stick their noses and bodies out of the water. super funny.

and this is me on a dolphin. emily kept trying to make me wear this hat that we bought for her birthday but i kept taking it off. notice i'm not wearing it in this picture. in fact, i only have one picture where i'm wearing it. it was really ridiculous. i kind of regret getting it for emily... i didn't think she's make me wear it...

the we went swimming. this is a picture of the cheesecake that emily made and sheree brought to the swimming pool. for about a week before my birthday, emily kept talking about how she had this really great surprise thing for my birthday. and this is what it was! see, mom, you should make me one when i get back. and emily didn't think it was too hot outside to make a cheesecake. and we don't even have air conditioning here....

after swimming, we went to rheinkultur, which is the biggest free festival in germany. they have five stages set up and it goes all day long. there are tons of bands playing, too. the cool thing about this night was that one of my favorite bands, death cab for cutie, were playing. FOR FREE! it was pretty cool. but this picture just shows how many people were at the festival.

these are all the people i dragged along for my birthday: laura, martin, sheree, emily and katie. i tried to get them all smiling but someone thought it would be funny to make silly faces.... thanks.

this is a picture of death cab.

and this is another picture of death cab.

my birthday was really fun, as i said. i've been really busy with school finishing up and i haven't been going any cool places really. but in a ocuple of weeks i'll be in paris! and hopefully i can update this thing before then and also before i come home. which is really, really soon.

rhein boat cruise and the strokes in concert.

last wendesday we went on a boat cruise, arranged through the international club. it wasn't that exciting except we got one free drink and free weird sandwiches. i'm really excited for when i get back to america and can have normal sandwiches. not that i don't like these weird sandwiches, but i like american ones better sometimes.

this is a picture somewhere around königswinter.

this is definitely a picture of königswinter. you can see the castle ruins in the background. they look a lot smaller from down here. it's also a picture of part of the siebengebirge.

this is me, hanna, and sheree. hanna is from finland and is awesome. i want to go to finland now. she knows about five languages....

this is sheree, laura, and emily. laura is also from finland and is also awesome. like i said, finland must be a great place to live. and their language has *no* articles. not one "the" or "a". the only thing i've learned to say in finnish is "i am a bug". very useful.

last night i went to see the strokes, one of my favorite bands, in concert. it was SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!one this is actually a picture of the opening band, the eagles of death metal, who were ok but they're name is a lot better than they are. but the lead singer has got some really awesome moustache. you can't tell from here, but trust me, it's awesome.

ok, these are the strokes playing. i tried to pick the pictures that best showed that there were acutally people on stage. i couldn't get close enough to take better pictures due to the fact that the average height of the audience was eight feet, nine inches. ok, perhaps that's an exaggeration.

this is another picture of them. i was really excited to see them and to dance because i haven't danced in a while. i didn't mind so much being in the back because it gave me more room but i think there was a couple standing behind me that weren't amused by the dancing. oh well, they moved.

the lights at the concert were really cool, too. i should have taken a little video but my camera can't record sound so it would have been weird.

these last two pictures were probably the best that i took.

that's all for now. saturday is my birthday (sigh) so i'll have pictures from that soon. i definitely going to the aquarium and there's a free concert that day, too. neat.

BRUSSELS!!!!!!!!!!

last weekend i went to brussels. it's about a three hour train ride away and we left early in the morning. when we got to brussels, i took this as a good omen: batman!

this is the mannequin pis. the story of this statue is that a nobleman and his young son were walking around when his son got lost. the nobleman looked for his son but couldn't find him. a day, or a couple days later, he saw his son peeing on a street corner. he was so happy at the return of his son, he decided to put up a stautue in the exact position his son had been found in. now the people of brussels dress it up sometimes for special occasions.

this is a bunch of lavender bushels. brussels is known for lavender apparently.

this is a statue in the courtyard of the old city hall. we couldn't actually go in the city hall which was kind of a bummer.

this is the city hall.

this is a statue for all the martyrs. there are a bunch of names (i'm assiming of martyrs) listed on bronze panels below the statue but i couldn't figure out how to get down there to get a better look.

this is the crazy chair thing in the church of notre dame de finistère. it's completely made out of wood and is awesome.

this is the cathedral in brussels. because we went there sunday morning, we could go inside the church but couldn't walk around or take pictures because there was a service in progress.

this is the front of the palace in brussels. again, we couldn't go into the palace which was a real bummer but we did get to have a look around the old palace ruins under tha palace. the cool thing about going to see the ruins is that you have to enter this code to go through the door so we felt like we were spies or something. that was fun.

this is a really cool fountain. the top part spins around, probably due to water pressure.

so... brussels. not really that interesting of a town. we probably could have been there only for a day and seen all of this. but we did go to a really neat art museum on sunday. anyway, that's all for now.

berlin zwei (warning: this is a very long post)

the next day we went to wannsee, where the wannsee conference was held. this is the building. in case you don't know what the wannsee conference was, i'll tell you. the wannsee conference was where the heads of all the different nazi departments came together to discuss "the final solution". for a long time, no one knew what to do with this house or the papers held inside because some of the people in politics had been former nazis and they didn't want to bring it to light. then it was a summer camp for underprivileged children. finally, someone decided that it would be a good place to have a memorial site. what i found particularly interesting is that it had histories of all the men that were involved in the meeting and what happened to them after the war. i should also point out that the tour was in english because the woman said she wanted us to really understand what happened there and we would be more apt to do so in our native language. interesting.

and now for something completely different. this is the fan fest, where they had five giant screens showing the games. we went there to try to watch the first game, which was a germany game.

unfortunately, this was my view. we could have squeezed through the crowd but some of us were hungry so we just went to a bar/restaurant and watched the game there. it was still fun.

hey, remember when i said i had a picture of that pretty building at night? this is it. they were showing some kind of soccer-themed thing on it. you can't really tell by my picture that it was moving, but it was.

then we stumbled into a park-type thing where we watched this guy do juggling tricks. he pulled pu my friends neal and bill to help him earlier and even though i was trying to hide behind my friends, he picked me, too. which meant that i got to throw these flaming torches you see here. it was stressful.

the next day we had our pick of three museums: the checkpoint charlie museum, the jewish museum, or the pergamon museum. i picked the jewish museum because it seemed the most interesting to me and mom and dad said it was neat. the architecture was really cool. this is one of the inner walls of the museum. i wished i stayed longer but we didn't have that much time. poo.

these are a dried shark and a dried fish. this man, mendelsson, was one of the first people (i think) to record findings about fish from dried specimens. i found it interesting.

after the museum, we walked around the city a bit. this is a church in one of the centers of town. it was bombed during the war and they rebuilt parts of it after but not to look how they did before, but as a kind of remembrance. we didn't actually get to go in it, though. i think i'll have to come back to berlin sometime and spend more time there.

then we went to KaDeWe which is an absolutely humongous store. KaDeWe stands for "kaufhaus des westens" and is rivalled only by herrod's of london. it was pretty cool and i got my picture taken next to big penguin stuffed animals.

this is a picture of KaDeWe.

the next and final day we went to potsdam, which is a small city outside of berlin. we visited sanssouci, which is one palace in a park with a bunch or palaces in it. this is one of the palaces. not sanssouci, though. "sanssouci" means "without pity".

this is a windmill in the park.

and this is me in front of the palace sanssouci.

FISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is the fountain and sanssouci. this is also where the fish live.

there, now i'm done with my berlin pictures. whew. that was a lot. there are a lot more but people can see those when i get back. next i'll post pictures of brussels.

berlin I (i would stop making segemented posts if i stopped going to cool places)

this past week the international club took us to berlin for four days. it was really six days but the first and last days were spent in a bus. fun. i really liked berlin a lot but i wished we had more time because there were a millon things i didn't get to see like the berlin cathedral and the only ramones museum in the world. ok, so i was really the only one that wanted to see the ramones museum (mostly because none of my friends knew who they were! aaaarrrggghhh!!!!) anyway, i did manage to get some cool pictures so enjoy.

this is a memorial to the six million jews killed in the holocaust. it has rows and rows of cement (concrete?) blocks and the ground beneath them is lower in spots, like this one, so you feel like you're in a maze.

this is what the memorial looks like from the front... or back... or.... side.

this is the brandenburg gate. behind the gate is a giant stage they have set up for the world cup. apparently the night before the opening game, there was a big music concert. i was kind of sick in berlin so i mostly slept a lot at night and stuff instead of going out. that and the pollen in berlin was UNBELIEVABLE! thanks allergies, thanks.

this is a giant soccer ball with a soccer exhibit inside. see that twisty silver thing to the left? we all thought it was a slide so we went inside to try to find it but it turns out to be an emergency exit only and the security guys wouldn't let us go down anyway. poo.

this is the famous checkpoint charlie....

... and the even more famous snack point charlie! it took me more than a few minutes to stop laughing so i could take this picture. next to snack point charlie is the mysterious czech point charlie. we're not sure if it's a czech-style restaurant or what but it, too, was funny.

these are parts of the berlin wall mixed with some educational panels. these particular segments are in potsdamer platz which was a desolate place when the wall was in place as it was between wall parts and soldiers mainly hung out there to kill people from escaping.

this is a really cool building. i think it's a bank. or a something else. i liked it. at night it lit up. i'll post a picture of my attempt to capture that later.

this is a picture of one of the giant screens behind the brandenburg gate where people could watch the games. this area was called "fan fest" and had five screens over a giant area, the whole of the tiergarten. it was crazy when the games were happening.

this is the reichstag building, germany's governmental seat. it's really, really neat and impressive on the outside.

and this is the temporary stadium in front of the reichstag. this one cost three euros to get in, compared to the fan fest which was free. but this place actually had food stalls and seats i think. i still think it's funny that they have a temporary stadium in front of their government building.

this is the glass dome of the reichstag from inside. we got to hear a little presentation about the history of the building and the room. it was neat.

this is a picture of the room where Really Important Meetings are held. the eagle is a national symbol of germany.

this is sheree and i in front of the glass dome on top of the reichstag. it has this double ramp thing inside it so traffic isn't going up and down one track. i thought that was a great idea. they also had an ice cream stand there. i also thought that was a great idea.

this is it for this time. i'm on my way to brussels this weekend and when i get back, i'll post the rest of the berlin saga and then the brussels story.