The Horse-drawn Carriage

When my family and I were in Bruges, we took a tour of the city on a horse-drawn carriage. I was so excited. It was a fairy tale ending to our trip to Bruges, riding around like a royal family.

We walked out to the Markt, which is the Bruges town center, in the evening. When we reached the carriages, a guide offered to take us around, and soon, we were off!

Our horse

We passed some interesting-looking trees. Their branches were bent at ninety-degree angles. That cannot be natural! Sadly, I don't know how the branches grew like that, since our tour guide didn't know, either. 

Earlier, we had walked around and found some of those trees. 

If your parents are desperate for a tour of a city, and it's your life's ambition to ride in a horse-drawn carriage, this is a great compromise. I just hope your tour guide is more helpful than mine!

Kathy and Daddy in the carriage

Kayla and me in the carriage

  

My Signable Bear

When I went to Girl Scout sleepaway camp, I got a care package. Care packages have fun stuff you can use on vacations, like stickers, notebooks, and decks of cards. In my care package, I got:

• A bandanna
• A wooden tic-tac-toe board 
• A camp journal
• A card game 
• A water bottle
• And best of all, a signable bear. (There was probably more stuff in it, but I forgot what those things were.)

Signable bears come with a Sharpie-like marker so you can write your name on them. I got the signatures of everyone in my living unit--even the counselors! Here are some pictures:

Not all of the signatures are from the people at Girl Scout camp, though. When I got home, I asked some of my friends to sign her. Then my parents signed her, and even my friends' parents signed her. When I went to Minnesota I took her, and my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, and even my great-aunt signed her!

The bear was my favorite part of the care package. She's great as a cuddly stuffed animal too. I sleep with her every night.

Rascal And The Cootie Catchers

This post has nothing to do with travel, but it's something funny I wanted to blog about.

Kathy and I adopted kittens Monday night. We've had them for about six days, and they are the sweetest things in the world. My kitten's name is Rascal. He's a gray shorthair cat with slightly large ears and yellow eyes. Here's a picture of Rascal.

Say hi to the camera, Rascal!

Kathy's cat's name is Tang. He's an orange-and-whitish cat with long fur. Mommy says he might be part Maine Coon. Here's Tang.

Sleepy kitty!

And last but definitely not least, we have Cuddles, our Himalayan (mix of Persian and Siamese) cat. He's a real kitten at heart, even though he's six years old, and there's nothing he likes to do more than cuddle. (Duh.) This is Cuddles.

Isn't he handsome?

So what was the title of this post again? Oh yeah, Rascal and the cootie catchers. A cootie catcher is used to tell fortunes. It's really fun to play with and you can make it out of almost any type of paper.  First you have to fold it. You can find instructions here. Here's a picture of one I made.

One of my many cootie catchers

So anyway, Rascal saw me opening and closing a cootie catcher, and since he's a kitten, he'll go after almost anything that moves. (Including his own tail!) Rascal sniffed the cootie catcher, and then he swiped at it. I threw it for him, and it landed on his nose. He went bonkers. He started batting it around on the floor. He wrestled with it. When he finally got tired, there were little bite marks on it. That kitten loves cootie catchers. 

Clever cat...he put his cootie catcher inside his ball track. Can you see it?

Where My Taste Buds Have Traveled

My taste buds have traveled to different places than I have. For example, last night they went to Japan. We went to a restaurant called Ariake. It's a Japanese restaurant that specializes in sushi. My favorite types of sushi are kani (crab cake), tobiko (flying fish eggs, or roe, if you want to be fancy), and California rolls (I don't know what they have to do with California, but they're really good). They're filled with avocado, cucumber, and kani.

There were also appetizers. Kathy and I each had our own bowl of miso soup, which is cloudy, tan broth with scallions and tofu. The temperature of the miso soup was perfect--not so hot you'd burn your tongue, but not so cold you wouldn't want to eat it. We shared fried shumai, shrimp-and-onion balls covered in dough and deep fried. The shumai was crispy on the outside and the dough came off when I ate it. So much better than American french fries. Even better than Dutch vlaamse frites. It's a close call. 

For dinner, I ate California rolls and kani, and Kathy got tobiko and ikura, salmon fish eggs. Mommy got a different kind of sushi, the special of the day. Daddy got shrimp tempura, which is deep fried shrimp dipped in batter, arranged in a pyramid on the plate with the tails sticking up. There is a fried onion ring on top holding the shrimp tails together.

After dinner, Kathy and I ordered dessert. She chose green tea and red bean mochi (ice cream covered in rice flour paste and sprinkled with more rice flour--really good), and I decided on black sesame ice cream (not mochi, just ice cream). It looked like this:

(Half-eaten) black sesame ice cream

and tasted delicious. There was a hint of chocolate, a hint of peanuts, and an undertone of sesame. It left a good aftertaste in my mouth. Mommy liked it too!

My taste buds really liked visiting Japan. Their favorite part was the black sesame ice cream. Someday I want to visit Japan for real, and find out if you can get shumai on the street.

The Ghostly Gangplank

The Ghostly Gangplank

In Minnesota at the Mall of America, there is a ropes/obstacle course called The Ghostly Gangplank. It goes all the way up to the top of the mall, which is so big it can fit loop-the-loop roller coasters in it! When you are on the floor looking up at it, the people on the top level look like figurines.

Each level has some kind of obstacle you can walk across, like two skinny balance beams parallel to each other. Those are hard to cross because when you're thirty or forty feet in the air, you're probably thinking something like, ''Oh my gosh, if I put my foot in the wrong place I'm going to fall to my doom!'' At least that's what I was thinking. There is a bridge that looks like it's falling apart, and you have to walk on the slats. That was easy to cross because the gaps between the slats weren't very big. There is a really hard one on the sixth level--two black ropes that cross in the middle, making a narrow X. Those are hard to walk on--they are very wobbly! I couldn't even cross those.

Luckily you're strapped in so you won't fall off.

About to go up the Ghostly Gangplank!

There are six levels of obstacles that get harder as you get higher, and you can actually walk ''the plank," a small platform that gives you a view of all the rides in the Mall. At the end of the plank, you can pull on two ropes to make a clanging sound. Mommy tried that. She said it kind of scared her. "Walking on the plank, there is nothing below you until the ground," she said.

You transfer levels by walking on staircases. You could walk right up to the sixth level if you wanted to, but what fun is that? It's a lot more fun to do the obstacles. Each time you go up a level, you climb another eight feet. You're so high up on the sixth floor that when the roller coasters pass you, you can feel the breeze they make!

When you reach the top, you can go down a slide. It's a curvy tunnel slide that goes all the way to the bottom floor. You sit on a sack to go down, and when you reach the bottom, you're probably going to feel like, "Wow! I'm back on solid ground!" It's really fun.