Rheinfels Castle & Burg Eltz with Grandma

Again, I just wanted to add some visuals to Ethan's previous posts about our travels with my mom. We took a weekend trip to the area in Germany south of us where the Rhine and Mosel Rivers meet, and where there are castles galore.

Rheinfels Castle ruins
On the Rhine River in St. Goar, started in 1245. Apparently what is left of this castle is just a portion of the original structure, but it seemed huge to us. All that's remaining, except for a small indoor museum area, is the stone structure - so no interiors, which Ethan & Griffin loved. The boys felt like such explorers here because you're basically free to roam all of the rooms, passageways, mine shafts, and grounds.

Catapult balls-after a battle they would be gathered from outside the castle walls and re-used

Grandma being brave in the dark, narrow passageways ;-)

View through a window

Burg Eltz

Near the Mosel River, started in 1157.

While the first castle was about exploring cool ruins, this was all about perfectly intact interiors and a cool location.

(postcard scan)

In a dramatic setting

Scott & my Mom taking the long walk (this was only the last 1/4 of the distance)

Grandma & Ethan waiting for the English tour to begin

Graffiti from a walking path tunnel in Koblenz. Since we live very near, and often visit, urban areas of Germany, we see a lot of graffiti, some better than others.

Second Amsterdam Visit (with Grandma!)

So Ethan did a great job of describing our time with my Mom here! I have some images to add to his posts. It was fantastic to have her here and I'm glad she got to see our house and lifestyle. I know it's still hard for her to have us so far away, but I think she understands even more now why we're here and why we're enjoying it so much.

View from our hotel in Amsterdam

Still on our list of tours to take

The city's much more colorful this time of year! It was cold, grey & rainy when we were here last

Rijksmuseum

'The Kitchen Maid' by Vermeer (postcard scan)

'The Night Watch' by Rembrandt (postcard scan)

I was so glad that we could share the experience of going to the Anne Frank House with my mom.

The bookcase that hid the secret staircase, which you actually get to climb. (postcard scan)

This was one of the parts of the house that made me emotional - pictures that Anne had taped to the wall as decoration. For some reason, the other area that got to me was the kitchen sink - I just got a vision in my head of the women working in the kitchen, trying to keep the group fed and keep some level of normalcy. (postcard scan)

On the Canal Boat Tour

Keukenhof Gardens in the Netherlands. We missed the full-on tulip blooming time by a week or two, but they had tulips inside and other plants blooming outside. (Ethan took most of these pictures)

Basketball Season

Hi it's me Ethan. The last time I posted it was about my grandma (grandma Hopson) coming to Germany. This post is going to be a pretty short blog about my basketball season and how it ended. So first of all just a tiny recap about what team I'm on and etc. Well first of all the team I'm on is my school basketball team. The league that we play in is called Sportverein. I tried out for this U12 basketball team in August 2009 right after school started. I was surprised to make this team because it was really meant for 5th graders and some 6th graders (You had to be born after 1.9.1997 to be on the team. Any older and you would have to be on the U14 team). We have 13 players on our team. Most of our team is fifth graders (Eric, Alex, Contantin, John-David, Karl, Saharat, Martin). 3 people (Marc, Timur, Valantin) are 6th graders. 1 4th grader (me). And two 3rd graders (Ethan.W and Brandon). At the beginning of this basketball season me and my teams goal was that we were going to try to be this league's champion. By the middle of the basketball season we hadn't had any loses and we were first in the league so we changed our goal and said we were going to try to be undefeated champions (we have 22 games in our whole season).

We were playing our last game and it was a blowout. The final score was something like 93 to approximately 45 or less. My team easily won. I made the last shot of the season for my team! It was almost a three pointer too. There was about 5 seconds left when I got the pass. I was in the far right corner about a step away from the three point line. A defender was guarding me. My back was facing the basket, so I was facing the opposite direction as the basketball hoop. My shot was a quick turn around fade away jump shot. The second I released the ball from my turn around fade away jump shot I knew it was going in. The ball was heading straight for the basket. I heard a swoosh sound that was made from the basketball that I had just released from my hands. I had made it. And it was a swish I might add. The shot went in with 3 seconds left and the other team didn't score in those three seconds. And that's how my basketball season ended. A pretty cool way to end a great basketball season. My team finished the season with no losses so we were crowned champions, undefeated champions.

That's the end of this post. So see-ya.

Exciting visitor!

Hi it's me again, Ethan. About a month and a half ago we had an exciting visitor at our house in Germany. This exciting visitor I'm talking about is our wonderful grandma, grandma Hopson. Sorry I didn't post about this earlier but like I said in my last post "I took a little break from blogging". Our grandma arrived at the Dusseldorf airport on March 25, 2010. I was so excited to see her. But on this day it happened to be a school day for me and Griffin so we had to wait a whole school day to see her. Finally it was time to go home and guess who picked me up? My mom and grandma!

My grandma had been here two days so far. My grandma stayed for two whole weeks in Germany. During these two weeks we had lots of fun stuff planned for her including two trips. One was to Amsterdam and one was to the Rhein-Mosel river area in Germany. We were going to go to Amsterdam first. We planned to stay there for two days and one night.

It had been two hours of driving and we finally arrived in Amsterdam at our hotel. We dropped our luggage off at the hotel and then we went to an art museum called the Rijks museum. At this museum there was a lot of paintings that were very cool! One of my favorite paintings was called "Night Watch" by Rembrant van Rijn. This was a very cool art museum.

For lunch we went to eat at a Hard rock Cafe which their food was awesome!

After we ate lunch we walked around a lot. Then we went on a canal ride from our hotel to the Anne Frank house! It was super interesting but disturbing to know this type of thing happened in the past. The residents of the secret annexe were Anne's family, a family of four; another family, a family of 3; and a man. The secret annexe they stayed in was cool but scary. There wasn't much light in the annexe because all of the windows were covered with dark screens and bolted shut. I found this experience very interesting.

For dinner we went to a Mexican restaurant. It was super good. They had good chili. It was a very suburb restaurant. After that we went back to our hotel and got ready for bed. I was very grateful because we had had a very long and exciting day and I was tired. Finally I lay in bed and fell asleep.

The next morning we went to a place called Keukenhof gardens. There they had fields and fields of flowers that had bloomed, they were so beautiful! They had so much flowers I can't get over it. I enjoyed this place because it was nice and relaxing. I really enjoyed this part of our Amsterdam vacation!

We finally arrived back home after another long car ride back from Amsterdam. It was a very cool and exciting vacation in my opinion. My favorite part of it was probably the Anne Frank house. I really enjoyed one night vacation.

It has been 5 days since we've gotten back from our over night Amsterdam vacation and grandma is still here with us. Guess what? today we're leaving to go to another over night vacation. This vacation is to Rhein-Mosel river area in Germany. Here mom says there is a lot of cool castles. I'm really excited for this vacation.

We arrived in the Rhein-Mosel river area in Germany after an hour and a half hour drive. We went straight to the castle runs this time without dropping our luggage off at the hotel first. The castle ruins we went to was called the Rheinfels castle. These castle ruins were huge although only half of the original castle was left. At this castle we did a lot of exploring and walking around. It was really cool. My favorite part was going under ground into the old mine shafts. It was very cool. We ate lunch, explored a little more and then drove to our hotel.

At the hotel in Amsterdam me, grandma, mom, dad, and Griffin all shared one room but in this hotel mom and dad shared one room and me, grandma, and Griffin shared one room. This was very exciting for me because my grandma always spoils me and Griffin so I was excited to stay the night in one room with her.

It's morning time and me, grandma, and Griffin all had a great night. Today we chose to go to another castle called Burg Eltz. This was a very cool castle. There was a lot of cool artifacts and we had a guide so we knew what stuff was. Yeah, we took a guided tour with a big group and it was very cool and I learned a lot about the castle. It was a big castle down in a valley. You had to go down a super steep slope to get to the castle. The guided tour took us through all of the rooms in the castle (which is a lot I must add) and told us all about them. This was a very cool castle and a good experience.

We returned home after a long car ride. My favorite part of that trip was the castle ruins where we got to explore.

My grandma still had a final week to go before she had to leave and here are some of the things we did in that final week:

• Walked by the Rhein river a lot (it was very soothing)
• Went to the Lego discovery center (it's still super cool and fun even though it was our 3rd or 4th time going)
• Aquazoo (there was so many cool sea creatures and fish)
• Downtown Dusseldorf Altsadt (went there two times, got ice cream, went to a boat museum, and scootered a lot by the Rhein)
• Roman Museum (Fun fact: a Roman city used to be located in the spot the museum's on which is in Xanten, Germany. They had lots of cool artifacts)

Sadly it came time for grandma to leave. I was really sad because I had a great time with her. She left on April 10, 2010.

Well that's the end of this post! Can't wait to post next.

B-day, horray!

Hi everyone, it's me Ethan. Sorry I haven't posted for suuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccchhhh (such) a long time! I haven't really been in the mood lately and I haven't had a lot of time to post, but I'm going to start posting more again. Well first of all this post is about my birthday party. Of course it hasn't happened yet but I would like tell you all of the people that are coming and where they're from. Although some of them I don't know where exactly they come from so I'll try my best. Here's the list:

• Gonzalo-Spain
• Luca-Ireland and Germany
• Gavin-New Jersey, USA
• Hyung-woo-France and Korea
• Akash Satpute-India and UK
• Felix-UK and Germany
• Benjamin-Germany
• Nathan-Texas, USA
• Badar-Kuwait
• Kelvin-Germany
• Tate-North Dakota, USA

Those are all of the people that I invited to my party. The only person we know can't come is Luca. My party is on June 6, 2010. I chose to have it in an indoor soccer field. We were having trouble finding a good birthday party place so we chose this place. I'm real excited for my birthday party! I can't wait. Double digits, yeah! (my REAL birthday is on June 3.)

The Hague, Leiden, & Scheveningen in the Netherlands

Ethan's basketball team had their final NECIS tournament in March in The Hague, Netherlands. He rode the rock star bus again with the teams, and stayed for 3 nights with his team in a hotel! Scott, Griff & I stayed nearby in Leiden. Ethan had the best experience doing this and they even had a dance one night with all the other schools! His team was outmatched in most of the games, mostly because of being such a young team, but they won a couple of games and came in 6th place out of 8 teams. Overall we had a really good weekend and found some cool stuff to do, but there were some very frustrating aspects of this area. First of all, we had the hardest time finding restaurants near our hotel and near the schools where the tournaments were held. These were not places in the middle of nowhere either, these were heavily populated areas without a restaurant in sight. Also, we found driving especially difficult - signs were not as good as we're accustomed to and road ways just weren't that logical. Oh well, hopefully the boys see that even though travel isn't always easy, it's almost always worth the effort.

Ethan's team warming up - he's in the black shirt going under the net

Madurodam

Besides staying in a hotel for 3 nights, this was definitely the highlight of the trip for G. He loves building mini-cities and creating drama within them (usually a battle or a fire) and this place was full of exacting models set up outside, replicating famous places in the Netherlands 25 times smaller than real life.

Had to pose in the big shoes first!

Did we go to a concert?

Yeah, a mini concert! This was Scott's favorite display.

Were the bulb fields in bloom?

Just the mini bulb fields! ;-)

We also checked out a good natural history museum, Naturalis, but I included this picture because it shows our school spirit shirts. Go ISD!

One afternoon I took off on my own for a couple of hours and went into the main city of The Hague to the Mauritshuis museum. As much as I love sharing museums with the boys, it was a real treat to go here by myself and enjoy at my own pace. This was a great little intimate museum featuring mostly 17th century Flemish "Golden Age" paintings.

I saw 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' by Vermeer - really as engaging & beautiful as I'd hoped it'd be! (postcard scan)

Also, 'Anatomy Lesson/Dr Tulp' by Rembrandt (postcard scan)

City shots

On our last night we went to the seaside resort town of Scheveningen, on the North Sea, where we finally found a good meal! It was freezing outside, but still cool to be at the beach.
Kurhaus hotel

The pier