This post includes a fact file about every place I have written blog posts about. Belarus Fact File Main Industries: machinery and equipment, mineral products, chemicals, metals, textiles, foodstuffs Famous People: Thaddeus Kosciuszko (Belarusian, Polish and USA revolutionary hero and general), Marc Chagall (artist), Petr Klimu...
To break our trip to Singapore we decided to make a stopover to Auckland for 4 days. First we wanted to go to Waiheke Island, an island off the coast of Auckland. It is a half-hour ferry ride to Waiheke. It is very beautiful. It has a lot of beaches and mountains. But on Waiheke we wanted to go to to Oneroa, a little village wit...
It was great. Dunedin had a lot of fun places like museums and pools. I met a lot of good people and will never forget them. I will miss Dunedin. ...
Our friends Jeff and Lisa suggested to do something fun: clamming! On a Sunday we came to Jeff and Lisa’s and we grabbed a few buckets and set off. We were going to a place called Warrington Surf. It is a place where you come and (I couldn’t believe it at first) you put your hand into the sand and you retrieve a LOT of c...
Once we went to Oamaru, a city in north Otago (Otago is a big part of the south island that includes the cities Alexandra, Queenstown, Dunedin, Arrowtown, and Oamaru, out of everywhere I’ve been). Oamaru is in the Guinness World Records for the most old-fashioned steam vehicles. They are Victorian style. We saw a truck, a rolle...
Once we went to Invercargill, the southernmost city in New Zealand. The city is best known for their successful colony of tuataras, a prehistoric lizard that survived only in New Zealand. It even has 3 eyes (I am completely not kidding)! When we came to the tuatarium we saw a 120-year-old tuatara named Henry. When he was younger he g...
Once we decided to go to the Moeraki toka (it means Moeraki Boulders in Maori). The Moeraki Boulders are unusually spherical boulders. According to wikipedia, the boulders consist of mud, fine silt and clay, cemented by calcite. How they are formed, it is not yet very clear to scientists. One of the theories is that the core gets...
One day we got tickets to go on a scenic train trip on Dunedin Railways. All of my family (including me) like trains, so we were excited to go. The trains are slow and old-fashioned, and there are a lot of tunnels. The longest tunnel is 1 kilometer long! Also, the engineer always tells stories, you see a lot of animals AND once in a ...
On October 30, we went to Catlins Nature Reserve. First we decided to stop in Kaka Point to eat lunch and ice cream. When we finished eating we decided to go to Nugget Point, a place not far from Kaka Point. We went there to look for seals. There was a lighthouse on the top of the hill and we walked 900 meters to get there. It was a ...
The next day we had THE most amazing adventure in my life. We decided to go over the Franz Josef Glacier ON A HELICOPTER and land on it! We got picked up by the helicopter van and drove over to our helicopter, a Squirrel B3e. We learned that we must enter from the front of the helicopter, in order not to get hurt. When we already got...