July 2024
Prague Czechia 🇨🇿 july 1
This city is magical in many ways. First off, the pizza is better than the New York pizza just tested five minutes ago. Second off it is clean, when we were being dropped off at the subway from the bus I immediately noticed the subway was squeaky clean and colorful. I saw that the walls looked like red slides going down (not encouraging people to slide into the subway 😏)
I also noticed that it is like old New York with a main square and very cool architecture. Prague was amazing and I think it’s very interesting.
Prague Czechia 🇨🇿 july 4 (Happy 4th of July)
I am amazed to be in this city I started yesterday off with going to a baroque castle which means it is over the top plated in gold and beautiful glass windows and as part of my school work today I need to talk about baroque architecture and gothic architecture so If you don’t find that interesting then go to the next paragraph. So if you’re still here, here are 10 facts about baroque and gothic architecture. 1. Baroque architecture was in the 17th century the church had lots of money 💰. So how else to spend it than making huge cathedrals with gold plated everything and statues of important religious figures? Yeah they spent a lot of money on the cathedrals. 2. Many pieces of the art there were made by hand taking years to make like the stained glass windows and other paintings. The stained glass windows took the longest. Many people dyed the glass piece by piece instead of painting on the glass. 3. There are many types of columns like engaged columns which do nothing and just are implanted in the walls. 4.Rectangle columns are pilaster columns which aren’t rounded. 5. Corinthian columns have leafs at the top.
Jk the end of the architecture stuff is in 2 paragraphs not one 🤥
7. So the next type of column is a Doric column without anything special you might as well call these boric columns just plain old columns. 8. Ionic colmes are ones that people see most commonly; they have carvings on the top or bottoms and sometimes have lines going down them.
9. Out of columns the main window in a church is the rose window. And number ten the support of the buildings are called buttresses; some buttresses are not attached to the building so they are called flying buttresses.
Few, that was a lot of architecture later that day. We took a tour underneath the castle walls and no one showed up besides us. Our tour guide was used to big crowds so he was yelling at the top of his lungs in a tiny confined underground tunnel with 15 feet wide walls. Other than that the underground tunnels were so cool and many statues that were original yes many of the outside statues were replicas and the real ones were underground or in museums.
In all, I love Prague.
Paris day 3 first entries and last July 8 🇫🇷🥐🥖
I have loved Paris on the first day I was not feeling well after not sleeping for 48 hours straight and not eating for 10 hours straight, I got off the train and had a 1 hour walk and subway ride to do, so naturally I complained to my parents about the situation and then it started to rain and rain as we were walking. Yeah not so good of a start 😭. Then we tried to go to get food. but everything was closed we went to 3 restaurants. In the first one they were closed and on the second one they only serve drinks early in the morning soo on the last try we made it to a cafe.
The next day we saw the “arc de triomphe” and the Effie tower from a far we also met up with my Au pair that I have not seen in 9 years 🤪 her name is Ana aka Ana the banana 🍌 we also met her fiancé named Olaf. Makes me laugh to think of Olaf and Ana like the characters from frozen. We also found out that they were… drumroll please they are having a kid yes I think that’s crazy and amazing for them. We started to talk about names and Mira and I said Sven (another character from frozen) and it is a Swedish name and Ana is Swedish. It is perfect. ☃️🦌
The next day we saw the Eiffel tower up close and went to the louvre and saw many pieces of art, when we were exiting the louvre we noticed that it was set up like a casino with the only exit being through many tourist shops and traps and there were no windows it took us an hour to escape. Today we left Paris for 5 hours and went to Chartres to see 3 awesome cathedrals. We then went back to our hotel and realized that the Olympics are in 3 weeks and that they had an election yesterday. Crazy
Goodbye Paris
Switzerland day 1½ July 10 🇨🇭
Yesterday was crazy, we started at 7:00 am and then hopped on the metro bus, next we hopped on 1 out of 7 trains that were all around an hour. For the people who know I am a swifte I was excited to find out that she is performing in Zurich so at a train station full of swiftes I traded bracelets with them sorry to my friends Ellie and Ramona and my cousin morgen I tried to keep the bracelets but to be polite I had to trade them 😢. But after that I got 3 more bracelets, one of them was all too well, another was fifteen and the last was You need to calm down. The next thing we did was play at an amazing park. The Swiss are really good at building playgrounds at the tops of mountains.
Today we did a six mile hike up and we saw another park next to a lake with a boat that kids could row across the lake 10/10. We then walked back and had Swiss fondue 🫕 11/10.
July 15 Zermatt 🇨🇭
In the past few days, I stopped being vegetarian by my parents’ choice because I was malnourished so I ate sausages that my mom also ate. My mom stopped being vegetarian 20 years ago at the exact sausage stand around the same day. a we had a hike up to the Hornley hut the day after we went on a three day hike that ended up to be 36 kilometers or 22.3 miles. On the first day we did a hike into thrift (a tiny hut in the mountains) the next day we sumeted the Metalhorn in which is surrounded by a large glacier that I needed my crampons to cross. And on our hike out that went horribly wrong we hiked 20 of the 36 kilometers the way it went wrong was because of a landslide (which are very common in Switzerland) one of the trails was closed I was Already exhausted after that we found that they were letting some hydroelectric water down there rivers so the bridge we needed to cross was closed down and falling apart and we needed to reroute about 5 other times.
That night I enjoyed some good fondue made in a camping burner which tasted surprisingly good until something bad happened like bad bad, My sister MB was getting up and knocked the fondue burner over with a lot of boiling water that landed on me and now my leg has second degree burns on it so now I can’t hike in anything other than 2 dollar flip flops.🥺🤕
Tuesday July 16 🇨🇭
My foot is still burnt and sadly I have not done anything in the last 2 days because I can’t walk fast or hike at all so I can re-cap on the interesting parts of Zermatt. I had a nice dinner tonight that was so good. I had Alfredo pasta, MB had truffle chips with a fondue like dip and of course We all shared some fondue with bread. Zermatt just has this special magic feel that no where else would have, the beautiful town with the old architecture and the fact that it’s surrounded in mountains is just really special to me. Walking around the city alone is just something that you can’t do in the US, but it’s super peaceful and safe to do here in Zermatt. I also see this sense of community and connection. We met someone at a restaurant on our 2nd day and we met his friend two days later just by chance. That would never happen in NYC.
Kandersteg 🇨🇭July 22
We are at a cozy campground with a communal hut that has board games and books to read and play when it’s cold or rainy outside which happens a lot here. We have done a lot of school work in this area too. We hopped on the gondola yesterday because we have a pass for most of the forms of public transportation. Yesterday we hiked to a lake and found loads of wild berries that were edible including strawberries and blueberries that tasted better than store bought fruit.
We also had a dilemma that a tent door was left open when it was downpouring and know some of our stuff is wet 💦. We also can get all the way across Switzerland in just 6 steps in between trains. Its amazing to go town to town in tiny old trains that go over butiyful mountains.
After a fun yet short stop in Austria 🇦🇹
We are now in Italy 🇮🇹
We did a easy 16 kilometer hike in the last few days (11 miles for the Amaricans) we are now in this beautiful area of Italy called the Dolomites. they are a very spiked mountain rage dotted with cozy tiny huts with good food and places to sleep relax and play cards. I have now been here 2 times (for my parents this is number 4). We are doing Via Firata which is basically being clipped in to a mountain on a 2 foot wild trails at most, and just hikeing (I was rased to think it’s normal ,I’ve done it since I was six 😊😁😬). There are also loads of ladders and bridges. We also saw a hudge landslide take out on of the via firata routs that my parents wanted to do.
EXTRA!! 🤯
Why do I like to use emoji’s in my writing?
So I’ve been writing in this blog for 2 months now and ever since then I’ve used emojis.
The reason breaks down into 4 things.
- they show lots of extra emotion that even discriptive words can not explain
- I am sort of lazy as priviously mentioned I use them in place of discriptive, words most of the time in school I just google like “Happy discriptive words” or “Words to use when trying to convey anger” but I don’t have access to google here so the emojis are my only option.
- I can’t use them in school so instead I use them here in this writing to just have some fun
- I also really like this one 🧌 idk what it is tell me if there is any way I could use it.
July 31 🇮🇹
We did an amazing vía Firata up the face of a tall mountain that had an epic view from the top. When we were getting down from the mountain I had living daylights were scared out of me because we were on a scree field (which is a rocky slippery slope that has lots of tiny loose rocks). I just got off the wire from the via Firata then entered the scree field when all of the sudden I heard yelling. “Rock echo Rock Echo” I was confused because Echo is something you yell in an area that reverberates the sound but in Italian it means “over there”. So they were yelling “rock there rock there” my dad said to crouch by a a safe over hanging area just in case the rock came close so I did and he covered me. Then I say a 1 by 2 foot rock come tumbling down very fast with lots of tiny rocks and noise. I was super scared because last time I saw a landslide it was like 20 feet long and hudge. But this time it was just 2 big rocks. I was scared the rest of the day.
After that I was in the exact spot 6 years ago where my mom said I hear thunder and my dad said the iconic line “ITS JUST AN AIRPLANE™️” and then It started downpouring and the ground was flooded and lightning was flashing everywhere and we started running down to our hut. 😳😟💧⛈️ That left a scar on us.
Eight Boots Abroad 