THE TALE OF THREE ICE CREAMS IN ONE DAY

(Monday, continued)

After Bergen Belsen, we got back on the bus and went into Hamburg. Our reservation at the Miniatur Wondurland was at three and we had about an hour and a half before we needed to go, so they let us wander around. Natalya, Alex, Sydney, Leah I wandered around the area to do a little souvenir shopping. After hunting for ice cream for a good 45 minutes and time running short, we went to the meeting spot. Of course, that was where we found Gelato. Shocker. It was actually so great! It was a food truck with ice cream and each scoop was 80 cents! I don't think it's possible to eat bad ice cream here. Really, every flavor I've had has been delicious. 

The Miniatur Wonderland was really really cool. Better than I we expecting. It's basically a giant room with thousands upon thousands of mini people and scenes and moving planes that actually take off and a Ferris wheel that moved and pretty much anything you can imagine. My favorite frozen scene was of a man being chased up a hill by a velociraptor into a very scary looking house. Some of the things that were hidden in these set ups were so incredibly random. They gave us a scavenger hunt to do with 20 scenes to find, and my friend and I found 14 of them. Some were really hard to find. If you want to see what I'm talking about, go here (because I'm doing a horrible job trying to explain how awesome this was): miniatur-wunderland.com

After that. We checked in at the hotel (it was just a nice hostel owned by a hotel company), and checked the wifi connection. Mr. Darlington led us to the square down the street and gave us some time to go find dinner and look around. We found a small Italian sit down bar in the middle of the mall (there were a bunch of sit down bars there. It was really cool) where we ordered gnocchi with tomato, mozzarella and basil. Yummy! While exploring the mall, we found a pet store and went in to check it out. There were a lot of bunnies, two Degus, some birds, and a lot of cool reptiles. The weirdest pets we saw were leaf bugs and GIGANTIC gold fish. We met up with some of the other exchange kids and found a gelato stand in the mall. Of course, not passing up an opportunity to taste the deliciousness, I got some. I had lemon with fresh mint in it. Sort of a palate intermezzo.

We returned to the hostel to drop off bags and grab coats for a walk around the area of the city we were in. We walked up this huge viewing deck with at least 6 sets of stairs with 15 steps each. And it was pitch black. With a light on every other stair. And Natalya and I raced up them. Let me tell you, this was so incredibly hard to do and I hope I never have to do anything like that again. It was a really nice view of the harbor once we were on top, though. After walking about two miles at 9 at night, Mr. Darlington gave us the offer of getting ice cream or going back to the hostel. I chose ice cream. Surprise, surprise. :) the mall was closed so we went to Burger King and got ice cream sundaes. :) I was pretty happy with my sundae and Burger King crown. 

Our hostel had a small tv in it, and we were able to find CNN pretty easily. We actually turned it on just as background noise while we were settling in, so it was still set to that channel when we turned it on again at night. Our teacher had gone to college in Boston, so he gets updates by text from the school. That's how we heard about the bombings. We must have watched the live coverage for an hour and a half. We all texted family and checked in online. It was pretty scary to hear that in our hometown, there were bombs going off. I'm glad that everyone associated with Hudson High and their families are okay, and I'm very sorry for those who were injured. 

Choos

Zoë