138_3816.JPG We drove to Karlsruhe to visit my cousin Elias and his parents, Rachel and Ekkehard. 

138_3820.JPG This is my sisters and I behind our kitchen door in our apartment in Germany.  We stayed in a small town named Reichenbach, which is just outside of Karlsruhe.  The door is made of oddly shaped glass that makes you look like you're in a digital picture gone bad. 

138_3822.JPG I was climbing the walls in our Reichenbach apartment. 

138_3823.JPG From left to right:  Rachel, Elias, Ekkehard, Mom, Mariele, Adele, and Kylene.  My Dad is taking the picture.  We are in a restaurant where there is a slide that took you down two stories. 

138_3824.AVI My sisters and I went down the slide.  On Mariele's turn, she screamed and it echoed!

138_3829.AVI Here I am coming out of the slide.  Sometimes I roll over in the slide.  Once I came out on my stomach and I landed on somebody's foot!

138_3830.AVI This is my Dad taking a video while he is going down the slide himself.  It is pitch black at first.  That is because it is pitch black in the tunnel until the very end.  Even my Mom went down. 

138_3865.JPG I climbed this old rock and I stood on top of it.  There is a castle on top of it.  It's about a thousand years old.  This was the favorite castle of the emperor Barbarossa (after he quite being a barber).  Barbarossa means "red beard".  The castle has a lot of staircases and a lot of cool rocks.  This castle was way high up on a hill to make it harder for enemy soldiers to attack it. 

IMG_3686.JPG This is a picture taken from Barbarossa's castle of his next-door neighbor.  It is equal in height to the one we're on.

138_3872.JPG From left to right: Mariele, Elias, Kylene and Adele, at the top of the castle. 

138_3875.JPG The "inside" of the castle. 

138_3879.JPG We are sitting on top of a well.  Instead of someone having to go down to the bottom of the hill to get water, they built a well. 

138_3883.JPG You can walk out on the big rock sticking out.  It's the rock that the castle was built on. 

IMG_3690.JPG I am climbing the walls of the castle.  Is this the way soldiers did it in the dark ages? I hope not. 

IMG_3693.JPG I am scaling another wall.  Once again, I was so eager to start climbing that I forgot my harness!  Do you think I fell? 

138_3818.JPG We found a different kind of flusher in our apartment.  You pushed one side to make it flush, and you pushed the other side to make it stop. 

138_3889.JPG Cousin Eli is about to go down the slide.  This slide is in a playground near the Black Forest, which is a famous part of Germany.  They call it the Black Forest because it's so dense with trees that no light gets to the forest floor. 

138_3892.JPG We went to a Gelato shop that gave you these enormous ice creams!!! They were stuffed with whipped cream and chocolate and cookies! I ate most of it, but it was soooooo huge I couldn't eat it all.

138_3899.JPG We drove to Strasbourg, which is in France.  On the way, we saw these trees growing green stuff on them.  Later we found out the green stuff was mistletoe.  It is the only plant that grows on another plant and can't grow out of the ground. 

138_3900.JPG For lunch I had a chocolate crepe.  It was very French and so delicious!  I wanted to order another one but my parents wouldn't let me. 

IMG_3695.JPG This is my favorite toilet flusher so far.  The way you flush it is you pull up the ball and when you decide that enough water has flushed, you let it go and it stops flushing for you.  I found this in the French restaurant. 

139_3906.JPG We are stuggling to stay up on a man-made metal rock. 

139_3910.JPG This is yet another cathedral.  There is a clock inside of it that does a little show for you every time it turns an hour. 

139_3908.JPG Here are some gears from the clock inside the cathedral.  This clock is very famous because it is hundreds of years old and it has lots of gears and moving parts and was made way before people had electricity.

139_3915.AVI Right before we were about to take a boat ride, we spotted a family of ducks. 

139_3917.JPG My family and I are on the boat.  It took us around the city of Strasbourg, which is an island, for your information.  Strasbourg is an island because the river split in two and then joined together again, forming the island.  On the boat they had a recorded tour in a lot of different languages.  Channel 2 on the headphones was in English, so I listened to that. 

139_3921.JPG This is a covered bridge.  It is covered because they wanted to keep the gunpowder dry that was stored on it.  The three little rectangles all in a row is where they stuck the guns out to go boom boom to defend the city. 

139_3925.JPG This is the European Parliament building.  Until just a few years ago, each country in Europe was completely separate.  You had to stop at every border and wait in a long line and show your passport to get through.  And every country had different money, which you had to change if you wanted to buy something.  But now there is the European Union (called the EU), which is made up of twelve countries.  Not all the European countries have to be in the EU, they choose to do so if they want.  They all have the same money, the Euro.  And there is no more stopping at borders.  And in this building people come from all the EU countries and meet together to make laws that govern all of the EU. 

139_3926.JPG This is the international human rights building.  If anybody feels like their rights are being violated, they can lodge a complaint against ANY country here - not just any country in the EU.  Even America. 

139_3933.JPG My family and I went to a French gelato shop where we got "la glace", which is the French word for ice cream. 

139_3935.JPG This is Elias enjoying  "la glace."

139_3939.JPG We went to a zoo in Karlsruhe.  We saw lots of critters but this picture shows the antelope. 

139_3942.JPG This is my sister at the top of a climbing structure at the zoo. I went up there too, the the very tippity top, but my Mom did not get a picture of me, so pretend it's me up there.

IMG_3698.JPG This is my Mom's delicious German dinner of pig, salad, and sauerkraut, which she enjoyed very much.

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