The country of great museums

Jonathan and I have really been enjoying the museums here. There are so many fun, interactive, creative museums to visit. We wandered into the Technische Sammlung yesterday (literally within walking distance of our house, an added bonus!), and stayed for over 3 hours, playing with things, experimenting, and trying to solve logic puzzles quicker than the other (or quicker than the other museum guests).

I was surprised when Jonathan was so open to wandering into yet another museum, but his open-mindedness really paid off. The Technische Sammlung is a museum dedicated to explaining different aspects of technology and history in its simplest forms, and showing its visitors how to use the technology. We saw an exhibit on the history of the camera, including a camera obscura from the 1700s, and the museum later used this same technology for hands-on experiments. We learned to use a braille computer, spent over an hour in the exhibit dedicated to logic games and puzzles, were shown how to harness wind power, and goofed around.

Jonathan and Andreas had men's night, since I had my once-monthly women's bookclub to attend. I baked some cookies to bring with me to bookclub, and left a few behind for the menfolk. I don't know what they were up to, but they were both laughing and gasping for breath when I walked in the door at 11:15pm...

Kira has booked her train ticket here, and will arrive on Saturday. We will be having a huge picnic in the Grosser Garten (Dresden's equivalent of NY's Central Park, but with a baroque palace plonked right in the middle of it) with friends to celebrate not only Kira's arrival, but technically also the 4th of July. We'll have games, more food than even Jonathan can eat, and good times will be had by all, I'm sure.

Please make sure to leave comments when you read our blog entries--it's really nice for Jonathan to know who is following his adventures, and to get feedback. Thanks Mom and Auntie Jahnet for your comments so far--they are really appreciated!! Ok. Now here's the Boy.

Says the tall, enormous shouldered one: Erica and I went to a technology museum. They had some realy cool stuff there. THey had logic puzzles and old computers. There was a braile type writer I was using. I was realy good at using the type writer, Erica never got how to do it. There were these shapes cut into a box in another part of the museum, and you had to put shapes that you have never seen except for a few in these different holes. I was realy good at it, Erica was ok at it. You couldn't see what you were doing.

There was a huge ring where you pulled it up with a string and you were in a huge bubble. There was a sort of puzzle like thing of the front of a chapel, we had to build it, it was so hard. There was an optical illusion that had different colors on a wheel but they actually weren't there.

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