Happy Days!

On Friday it was red nose day.  Ollie and I got our hair sprayed red, and we wore our red clothes!

 This is me ...

and this is Ollie ...

We look pretty funny!

After school we went and fed the ducks and swans in Holyrood Park ... a place where the king and queen, princesses and princes used to go hunting and ride their horses.

One of the swans bit Ollie on the finger when he was feeding it, but it didn't really hurt.  There was also one very rude swan that kept chasing and biting the others.  It was funny.

When we ran out of bread, we went exploring on the hill.  There was an old ruined church on the hill, and we could see lots of the city from up there.

Ruined church ...

It was very windy and cold ....

In this photo you can see Edinburgh Castle (far left), Holyrood Palace (under Amelie's bum), the Walter Scott monument on Princes Street and Calton Hill.  We were freezing!



On Saturday we went to the movies to see Gnomeo and Juliet.  We also took Ollies buddy Kristian and his mum.  Kristian and his mum are from Latvia.  They also came out to dinner with us at the Mexican restaurant.  We had a good time.

On Sunday we went to Emma's dads place at Dalgety Bay, just across Forth Bridge.  We had a lovely lunch and played a new game that Emma taught us called "Grab a Nana", it was awesome!  We also met Emma's friend from London, her name was Alice.  Emma and Alice were really nice and lots of fun.

After lunch we went to Emma's mum's farm.  We got to make friends with their dog (Tia), their 2 pussycats (Comet and Zues) and their 2 ponies (Doran and Merlin).  Ollie and I even got to go for a ride.   I rode Doran (the big white one) and Ollie rode Merlin.  We rode through the fields and near the woods.  Ollie was looking for foxes to wrestle, but they were too scared, and stayed in the woods.  Ollie says he can wrestle foxes because Pa wrestles foxes.  Emma's mum thought Ollie was a bit crazy to want to wrestle the Scottish foxes!  She said it is "probably not a very good idea".

I showed Emma what I can do on the horse.  I can turn it, stop it and make it go.

When we got back home, I also had a turn on Merlin.

After the ride was finished, I helped brush Merlin and got him some food.

We had a lovely dinner with Emma and her Mum and then it was time to go home because we had school in the morning.

It was a wonderful weekend!

From Amelie

Meeting the local wild life...

We've had a great week at school.  I've been learning about dinosaurs in my class, and Ollie says he has been doing lots of writing.  This week I got 8 points for my "House" and Ollie got another 5.  Our house is called "The Holyrood Royals".

On Saturday, something really exciting happened... it snowed in Edinburgh!  Here is a picture of Ollie with a doona wrapped around him in front of our window.

The church and cemetry next door and the Craigs were covered in snow.

Pretty soon the snow started to melt and got all slushy.  It was still fun to throw at each other though.

In the afternoon we went to "Our Dynamic Earth", which is a museum all about where the earth came from and how all the animals evolved.  One of the men that worked there gave me a really nice rock to have a look at, and then told me it was fossilised dinosaur poo!  Yuck!  He also gave me a little piece of metal to look at.  He said it was a metorite that landed on Antartica, and it was even older than the Earth.

Today we went on a bus trip around Edinburgh.  The top of the bus didn't have a roof and it was really cold!

We got off the bus at the botanical gardens to have lunch and a run around.  In this photo we are pointing at the Castle;

Dad told us that he would give 1 Pound to the first one of us that showed him a squirrel.  We saw heaps of them!

At first we chased them around but they didn't like that very much.  Mum and Dad told us to be quieter and they might come closer.  A lady gave us some seeds to give them and then they started comming really close.

Eventually they were taking seeds and nuts from our hands.  One of them even let me pat him gently.  His fur was really soft and his body was really small.

We wondered what would happen if Wookie was here to see all these squirrels?

Now it's time to rest up for another big week at school.

Bye!

Hunting for Monsters, Saturday 5th March

On the weekend we all went to the Scottish Highlands in search of the Loch Ness Monster.

We went through Inverness to Drumnadrochit, on Loch Ness to see Urquart Castle.  We learnt that "Inver" in Scottish means "Mouth Of".  Inverness is at the mouth of the river Ness.  Loch means Lake.

It was a beautiful day and we didn't even need our jackets.

We watched a movie about the castle which told us that lots of people were fighting over the castle, and in the end, it was the owner of the castle who blew it up!  He blew it up so that no-one else could use it.  Here is a picture of Dad and I at the castle.

When other people were trying to get into the castle, they used a trebuchet ... its like a big sling shot, which shoots big heavy balls at the castle.  They were so heavy that Ollie couldn't even pick one up.  This is the trebuchet, and the balls.

We looked at what is left of the castle, and even climbed up some very steep and winding stairs.

We looked for Nessie, but couldn't find her, Mum said that we were probably being too noisy.  I think she was looking at us though ... what do you think?

We didn't see Nessie in the water, but we saw her on the way back to our hotel.  We got our photo taken with her ... but this one definately wasn't real.