# 28 Chinese New Year

 This year I decided to celebrate the Chinese New Year!

I started out by reading about all their new year customs at the chinesenewyear.net website and found out about some things that are lucky and not what they eat to celebrate and where certain people are supposed to sit.  I also read about the year of animals I’m a dragon and this year is the year of the Ox.

Last year and this year I ordered some Legos, and they came with a free year of the rat set 2020 and a Free year of the ox set 2021.  So, I had to make sure to Build the Rat on New Year’s Eve since it was the last day of the year.  

Then we Built the ox on New Year’s Day since it was the first day of the year of the ox.

 

On New Year’s Eve we also ordered Chinese food from a local restaurant Asian Pearl Bistro.  

We ordered various Chinese dishes including egg drop soup, kung pao chicken, chicken lo mein, chicken with snow peas, with fried rice and some dumplings which are something special they traditionally eat for New Year’s.  Most of the food was pretty good and we had a good variety of food.

With our order came a couple of red envelopes that were just supposed to be for dine in only, but they were in our delivered box.  Each one contained a dollar bill which is a traditional thing to give as gifts in china

We ordered too much food, so we had plenty of leftovers the next day

 

Then a few days later I watched a virtual tour of the great wall of china.  The video I found on YouTube was a 30-minute video that was someone’s video that they took while walking along the wall.

 

This was really neat to see.  I liked when they turned around and you could see how far you’ve come and see how long and high the wall is.  The little indoor places and towers were interesting with the arched doors and windows.  I liked seeing out from the wall, seeing the trees and mountains although it was a bit foggy in the video.

 

Reading about Chinese new year traditions, building the Lego sets, having Chinese food and taking a virtual tour of the Great wall made for a great adventure that I really enjoyed.

 

https://chinesenewyear.net/

# 27 Keukenhof Virtually Open 2020 360° tour

 

 

I was searching online awhile back, and I happened to come across   Keukenhof gardens in the Netherlands and saw they had virtual tours on their website and more on YouTube and since I enjoy botanical gardens I figured this would be the perfect adventure.

I learned a lot about the park from their website, their 23 videos and Wikipedia

 

• Keukenhof is a world-famous attraction that According to many visitors is a place to visit at least once in your lifetime.

• Keukenhof in the Netherlands is located in Lisse and in the province of South Holland southwest of Amsterdam in the area called the "Dune and Bulb Region" (Duin- en Bollenstreek).

• The history of Keukenhof dates back to the 15th century.  Keukenhof Castle was built in 1641 and the estate grew to encompass an area of over 200 hectares.

• The castle gardens were redesigned in 1857. in the English landscape style, which is still the basis of Keukenhof.

• In 1949 a group of 20 leading flower bulb growers and exporters came up with the plan to use the estate to exhibit spring-flowering bulbs.

•  The park opened its gates to the public in 1950 and was an instant success, with 236,000 visitors in the first year alone.

• Keukenhof means "Kitchen garden"; also known as the Garden of Europe, is one of the world's largest flower gardens.

• Keukenhof Park covers an area of 79 acres and approximately 7 million flower bulbs are planted in the gardens annually.

• They are widely known for their tulips and have 26 varieties, but they also feature numerous other flowers, including hyacinths, daffodils, lilies, roses, carnations and irises.

• They are only open to the general public for an 8 week tulip display from mid-March to mid-May with peak viewing arriving near mid-April.

•  In 2019, 1.5 million people visited Keukenhof or 26,000 visitors per day.

 

My favorite parts of these 23 videos were

• seeing all the colors of tulips not only regular colors but also the mixed colors as well

• the lake with a fountain in the middle

• the windmills and wishing well

• blue flowers that were planted so it looked like a river

• flower beds that were shaped like tulips so when looking from above were shaped and colored like tulips

• a couple of their bridges

 

This was a very fun adventure and one of the better virtual tours I’ve done!  It was a lot of fun seeing all the flowers and different colors.  This would be a really fun place to visit in person, but since I can’t this was the next best thing!

If you want to watch the videos for yourself here are the links

  

https://keukenhof.nl/en/news/360-tour-door-keukenhof/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0VXJL1AT4g&list=PLXmB70ZilxL5ssMcQeyWlBnH3ns7IJsxD&index=1

# 26 Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden Home Safari

A while back I thought I should try to find a virtual tour of a famous zoo. So I did a google search and found a ton of videos on the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden’s Facebook page.  Some of the videos just showed various different animals and some had zookeepers telling you about their different animals and answering questions.  I spent a few hours watching a bunch of these videos and saw and learned about a lot of different animals including polar bears, red pandas, ostriches, elephants, flamingos, tortoises, hippos and more.  Some highlights and Some things I learned were

• Seeing and learning about Rico the porcupine, I found out porcupines are Nocturnal, have big noses and a good sense of smell and have quills for protection, but their bellies are soft 

• Watching the elephant reserve. Not a lot was going on, but one was eating, one was taking a dump and another was playing with dirt and throwing dirt on himself or herself and taking walk. 

• The brown mountain tortoises which are from South east Asia. Have different shaped shell than other tortoises. They were just slowly wandering around

• The Hippo Cove had a couple of hippos swimming around and then napping. 

• The flamingo cove where there was a chick that just hatched. 

• There was a Home Safari Snow Day video. It was fun watching Kris the cheetah & Remus the companion dog play in the snow. 

• Fennessy the giraffe was celebrating his 1st Birthday!   He is a 791-pound male calf that was named “Fennessy,”  after giraffe conservationist Julian Fennessy. I also learned giraffes are about 6 feet tall when they’re born 

• I learned about the aardwolf; they are similar to hyenas.   They also have a long sticky tongue and can eat 200-300 thousand termites in 1 night. 

• I also thought the penguin parade was interesting to watch 

•  I really enjoyed touring their botanical gardens! I found out that The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden started as an experimental garden and is one of two accredited botanical gardens in Ohio. Each April they display over 121,000 tulips.

If you want to watch some of these videos for yourself here's the link to the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden’s Facebook page

Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden | Facebook

This was a another fun adventure and I learned a lot about so many animals.  This might not be as fun as actually going to the zoo but this was the next best thing.

#25 O Lego Christmas tree

This past Christmas I decided to build my own Christmas tree out of Legos.  The previous year I made a small tree, but the branches were not very strong.  So I wanted to make a larger and stronger tree.  First I started by testing a couple of branch ideas and came up with a design to have different branch layers with 4 branches, one going in each direction but still connected together. For the branches I had to take standard bricks and then put a layer of flat bricks on each side. This basically made a sandwich and made pretty strong branches. Then I had to build the brown tree trunk around the branches. Underneath the tree I made a pretty solid base and built various different color and sizes of packages/ supports.  Then we found various Legos; clear, colored, round, squares to decorate the tree.  By the time I was finished my tree was 30 inches tall and I used about 2,100 Legos

This was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. I can’t wait to start my next bigger and better Lego project which might possibly be a saguaro cactus.