Joint Blog
Sophia:
Hey guys, you might not have known this, but there are actual dinosaurs in New York. Ok, so they don’t have meat attached to them, but still, they were real dinosaurs.
Karin:
Yeah, the dinosaurs are located in the Natural history museum. They’re quite cool, and awesomely big. I’m not sure how natural a couple of skeletons are but they’re definitely history.
Apparently the latest fad is that dinosaurs had feathers. Imagine if a T-rex was all covered in pink feathers! I think they look much better in the traditional colours and scales.
There was this one skeleton that I thought, “Oh, that’s a cool dinosaur skeleton.” Then it turned out to be an actual animal that hasn’t gone extinct yet.
So Sophia insisted that this start with Dinosaurs-
-Hey I just started it! There was no argument!
Ignore that interruption. So Sophia insisted about the dinosaurs, but let’s just continue with-
-Dinosaurs!
No! we’re going with the Subway. The Subway is awesome, I personally liked the Subway.
Karin? I thought you were claustrophobic!, I personally didn’t like the Subway, unless I had a seat. Otherwise you had to stand and get squashed.
Yeah, but only if there’s lots of people. We were only on the subway two times when it was squashed like that.
I’m sure it was three! Or five.
No it wasn’t! it was just two, plus the time when we went to Coney Island the subway car was mostly empty all the way except for us! Anyway, we should start telling them about NY now, because at the moment we’re just arguing.
Ok (sigh), you’re right. All they know so far is that dinosaurs might have had feathers.
So , Ahem. I will start. I think Franci wrote about Central Park, And Marike wants to take Coney Island, but luckily there is a lot to tell about NY.
So there are a lot of well stocked museums around here. Like a lot! And when I say well stocked, I mean soo much that you can arrive when it opens and stay so long that they have to lock the doors behind you when you leave. Even when you skip lunch and just browse and read everything you can, you still won’t be able to learn even half of what’s available.
Except that you can’t survive without lunch, I’m sure it would mentally disturb the artefacts if they had to listen to my stomach growl.
Sophia is right. I’m sure it did bother those little blue hippos that the Egyptians buried with them, when my stomach growled at them.
But it was worth the wait. Lunch was delicious.
Talking about the hippos. The Egyptians knew that hippos were very dangerous, of course they’re still dangerous today.
Back in the day, the Egyptians had these little hippo statues that they painted blue with a pattern of flowers on them. Apparently the lucky for the dead person whom they bury them with, because of the paint job. But hippos are dangerous, so they break off three of the hippos legs. That way the little hippo, who is roughly the size of a duckling, can’t seriously harm the dead person when it “comes alive in the after life”
Look closely – three of the legs are a slightly different blue. The restoration team wanted people to see what had been added on.
There was this female Pharoah once, she was the only female Pharoah. There had been queens but not female Pharaohs. They found broken statues of her and made them whole again. It was interesting to see, because the longer she was in power, the more of the official dress she started to wear. In the end she actually wore the beard thing!
Here she isn’t wearing the beard but she is wearing the head-thing.
In some of the statues she looked like a man because she was wearing all the official Pharoah stuff. I would have thought it was a guy if the audio guide didn’t tell us differently.
I’ll tell you about the the gold stuff after Karin’s next paragraph.
Yeah, the Egyptians buried all their gold! They made a lot of ceremonial stuff. Like Sophia wanted me to mention a couple of stuff..
Oh yes, the finger and toe coverings. They would make golden fingers, that would look like fingers to put on the dead persons fingers. They’d do the same for the toes, and even make the dead Egyptian very unpractical sandals made of gold.
And now we shall move on to the golden egg.
Those eggs have nothing to do with the Egyptian culture. I don’t even know what those were for. I think it was art. It was just art.
I Don’t know why Sophia brought that up, but I found the armour cool. They had swords and jousting sticks.
I thought I said we were going on to the golden eggs! Karin how could you go to armour?
Technically the eggs weren’t even solid gold. I think it was made of some green stone touched with a little gold leaf.
Well the armour was way more awesome than that egg. And I think everybody was sort of expecting still to hear something about mummies before we moved away from the Egyptian stuff.
I wasn’t expecting to hear about mummies.
Well I will, for the sake of everybody who did expect that, say a few words in their honour.
Mummies are dead.
Thank you very much for those very inspiring words Karin. I wil never forget them! Three cheers for Karin and her insightful speech! You’re not cheering? Ah well, it was worth a try.
To all of you who cheered. YAY!!!!
Now getting back to more practical stuff. I think we can move out of this museum since there is still a lot of NY to cover.
But there’s still the armour! And the El dorado section! And there’s this great photo where I’m “holding” a gun! And the prince’s letter opener which is covered in diamonds. We can’t stop now! I won’t be dragged out.
No! No! ah man!! How could you Karin?
As you can guess I dragged her out. But no worries, she wasn’t hurt in the process.
Ow! My foot hurts! I need to go to the hospital!
I guess we can move onto some other museum… How about the Empire state building. It’s not a museum, but it’s New York.
The Empire state building is taller than the Eiffel tower. It’s not the home of King Kong, but we saw an employee who was crazy about him. He was dressed in full suit as King Kong. We took photos with him.
I guess not everybody has the chance to visit the Bronx Zoo, and see the real King Kong, like we did.
Yeah! let’s tell them about the zoo!
It was a long Subway ride away. But we got to see two snow leopards, wild dogs, a polar bear, and a red panda! There were field mice and a tiger, some sort of special wild horses.
They had this building in which you could go. In this building they would imitate the bird’s habitat as much as possible. The halls were empty, even of trash cans. You weren’t allowed to eat in there. The bird cages didn’t have any bars or anything, they could fly out of their cages and join us if they liked, but there’s no point in it for them. Because the halls are empty, there’s nothing there for them, so they just stay in their cages.
They do put a see-through mesh there when the birds learn to fly, so that they don’t actually fly out, but they take it away as they learn.
What else did we see? There were Giraffes and a few Zebras. I always feel proud of our African animals. Because they’re so exotic to the rest of the world. And they’re super awesome if I do say so myself.
Ok Karin, it’s my turn to drag you away to the INTREPID! I might still be limping from the time you tried to drag me away, but I’m still strong enough to get you there!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
So, the Intrepid was one of the special places I liked very much. It’s an aircraft carrier.(It’s a ship that carries fighter planes around on its back like a mother swan. The airplanes get launched off the deck of the ship.) Well, because the ship’s deck isn’t long enough for an airplane runway, they use steam that they build up, they push the airplane with the steam as it puts full power into getting launched. Even with the help of the steam it’s quite tricky to actually launch the plane. Now, naturally if the runway is too short to launch from, it’s too short to land on. Plus the ship is rocking because of the waves. When the plane lands it puts out this stick with a hook at the end to scrape on the deck behind him as he goes across. He lands at full speed. There are three ropes tied on the deck for the plane to hook onto with its special hook. If it hooks, all is well. The plane is able to slow down fast enough. If not, then the plane has too speed up again as much as possible in order to be able to launch again for another try.
So yeah, that was cool to learn.
There were airplanes on display on deck. Among them the blackbird spy plane.
It was an awesome museum and it was pretty cold.
Sophia, I don’t feel inspired to talk about the Intrepid at the moment. But it was an awesome experience, the moving way in which they told us about the kamikaze attacks. The space exhibition. I don’t know why there was a space exhibition on the ship but it was cool, and the kitchens were the best.
I will write about where we’re anchored. The Hudson. What I never knew before, was that New Jersey –It’s not in the shape of a Jersey- Is right opposite Manhattan. Well, from where we were anchored you could see the Jersey shore and of course we were closer to Manhattan.
We were staying at a place called 79th street Marina. But because the Hudson is a river with lot’s of barge traffic, the anchorage is all against the one side. We were too heavy to stay on a mooring buoy so we had to anchor out. It was probably a whole nautical mile of a dingy ride to the Marina.
We stayed in New York as it was becoming Autumn. It was amazing to see the green turn to orange and red. The colours were awesome.
Along the side of the Hudson, all the property belongs to the government. They made a park all along the rim of Manhattan, it’s a wonderful jogging place for people who take a morning jog or to ride their bikes to work. Riverside park is filled with trees, and you can see all the awesome colours.
The dingy rides back and forth were terribly cold!!!
Now we will write about YANKEES!!! The baseball team. YAY! YAY! YAY! GO NEW YORK YANKEES!
BOO! BOO! NOT THE YANKEES, BOSTON RED SOX RULE!
We went to see a baseball game at the Yankee stadium. The game was cool, but that’s not the point. We got a Yankees cap and ate hot dogs while watching the game. They were home made, but we ate them at the game so it was cool.
It was some pitcher in the Red Sox team’s last game. So they did a mini ceremony for him, everybody stood up for the anthem before the game. And the game was cool. I’ve never been in any kind of official stadium for big league sports and it was a lot bigger than I thought it would be.
It was cold!
The seats down where they were batting were more expensive. This was because if the batter, hit a foul ball, It had a chance to land in the crowd and If you catch a ball you can keep it.
Something like five balls were given away that night.
Ok, I think this blog is done. Sophia, your opinion?
Yeah I guess this blog is over. If you want to know more about New York go visit it yourself.
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