Berlin

           Although I live not far away from Berlin (exactly 2,5 hours by fast train) this year I visited the city for the first time. It was great.

            I only had two days to see everything but I managed fairly well. Berlin is off course very big, with many tourists, shops, caffees and great, gorgeous buildings especially when you walk from the Alexander Platz to see the Brandenburg Gate along the Unter den Linden. It's a very nice walk with trees, and most of the things you should see during a short visit :)

TV Tower

Neptun's fountain

Berlin's Cathedral

Brandenburg Gate

Reichstag

Reichstag's surroundings

 Reichstag's surroundings

 Reichstag's surroundings

 Reichstag's surroundings

Reichstag's surroundings

Reichstag's surroundings

Potsdamer Platz

Berlin's Wall plaque

The Berlin Wall

Jewish museum

TV Tower and the Red City Hall

Views from the Tower

The Bridge

Las Vegas

              When you want to entertain kids - you can take them to an amusement park or Disney World. And when you want to amuse adults you take them to the Sin City :) And what better city there is than - Las Vegas.

When near the city you can take a small detour and visit the Grand Canyon (or when you travel by plane you can see it from above - like me). It's a spectacular and unforgetable sight, even from a far distance.

Immediately after you leave the plane you notice one thing - Vegas is HOT! No wonder of course since it's on a dessert, but still. It's hot and dry. Mercifully, every hotel and every shop has air conditioning. So when you walk in and out of buildings you can experience change of temperature of around 20 degrees Celcius every few minutes. It's not easy.

The hotels are very often full during the day, or maybe only lobbies and places where you can gamble, which is basically everywhere. The streets are less crowded, no surprise here I guess, but those who can tolerate heat fairly well, walk to admire the "out side" Vegas. And there are definately things to see. Vegas offers the whole world in one place. You can see the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Statue of Liberty, you can take a ride in a gondola, admire fountains dancing to the music and of course enjoy losing big sums of money.

During the night the city can dazzle you with lights, traffic, sounds, music and the never ending clatter of slot machines. There are shows, performances, dancing. Anything you want - you can find. No wonder that it is said: "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas".

P.S. Selling alcohol and gambling is strictly forbidden to people who are under 21. It was very funny for me that I couldn't even try one game, because I was already 1 year legal in my country, but I had to wait 2 more to be legal in the US. On the other hand, I was sattisfied that the law was dutifully followed.

The Grand Canyon

Paris Hotel - where I stayed

Bellagio Hotel - with famous fountains - opposite the Paris Hotel

The Venetian Hotel - with the gondola ride

Years

       Years are passing, time is flying and nothing is going on. I achieve nothing.

Aloe

          I got the aloe plant from my friend. It was very small back then and I was not sure whether it would grow because for some time it was not growing an inch. But then ... voila. It grows like crazy.

           I keep it on my window seal for it to get a lot of sun.

My beautiful aloe :)

The fault in our stars

            I am too old to read books for young adults I guess, but there are books which do not have the age limit after all. They are interesting for any age people - and one of such books is "The fault in our stars" by John Green. 

         The book has a lot of teenagers in it. There is Hazel Grace Lancaster, Augustus Waters, Isaac, Monika and many more (whose names we encounter through the book). However, it is not an ordinary book about their lives. They all battle different kinds of cancer.

           We start of with Hazel who is the narrator of the story. She has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer which in later stage spread into her lungs. She has to carry an oxygen tank everywhere with her. Hazel's mother makes her attend a support group because she thinks that Hazel may be depressed. During one of the meetings she meets Augustus. Gus is a cancer survivor and because of that he had his leg amputated, which effectively ended his basketball career. Augustus takes to Hazel the second he sees her and right after the meeting he starts a conversation with her. It turns out that they have quite a lot in common and very soon they become friends. And I will write no more here.

           I really loved the story. I listened to my audiobook a few times already and I am sure it is not the end. It made me laugh numerous times, and it made me cry even more. It made me think about time and its passage and the things I do with the years I have been given in this world. Do I make my best of it? Do I try to use every minute?

          The book made a great impression on me. I should look up more works by John Green for sure :) And I cannot wait to see the movie.

Some of the more beautiful quotes from the book.

Books to read

         A list of books (taken from the Internet with some additions from me) which I want to read :)

1.    Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2.    The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3.    Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4.    Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5.    To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6.    The Bible - Council of Nicea

7.    Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8.    Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9.    His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10.  Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11.  Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12.  Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13.  Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14.  Complete Works of Shakespeare

15.  Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16.  The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17.  Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18.  Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19.  The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20.  Middlemarch - George Eliot

21.  Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22.  The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23.  Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24.  War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25.  The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26.  Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27.  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28.  Bracia Karamazow - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

29.  Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

30.  Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

31.  The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

32.  Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

33.  David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

34.  Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

35.  Emma - Jane Austen

36.  Persuasion - Jane Austen

37.  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

38.  The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

39.  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

40.  Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

41.  Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

42.  Animal Farm - George Orwell

43.  The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

44.  One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

45.  A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

46.  The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

47.  Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

48.  Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

49.  The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

50.  Lord of the Flies - William Golding

51.  Atonement - Ian McEwan

52.  Life of Pi - Yann Martel

53.  Dune - Frank Herbert

54.  Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

55.  Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

56.  A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

57.  The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

58.  A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

59.  Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

60.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

61.  Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

62.  Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

63.  Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

64.  The Secret History - Donna Tartt

65.  The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 

66.  Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

67.  On The Road – w drodze - Jack Kerouac

68.  Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

69.  Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

70.  Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 

71.  Moby Dick - Herman Melville

72.  Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

73.  Dracula - Bram Stoker

74.  The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

75.  Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

76.  Ulysses - James Joyce 

77.  The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

78.  The Inferno - Dante

79.  Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

80.  Germinal - Emile Zola

81.  Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

82.  Possession - AS Byatt

83.  A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

84.  Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

85.  The Color Purple - Alice Walker

86.  The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

87.  Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

88.  A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

89.  Charlotte’s Web - EB White

90.  The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

91.  Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

92.  The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

93.  Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

94.  The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

95.  The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

96.  Watership Down – Richard Adams

97.  In my Father’s House – Ann Rinaldi

98.  The Outsiders – S.E. Hinton

99.  Lucky Santangelo Series – Jackie Collins

100.    Vampire Academy Series – Richelle Mead
101. Black Dagger Brotherhood – J.R. Ward

102.     Tuesdays with Morrie -

103.    Angela’s Ashes -

104.     A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

105.    A diary of a young girl – Anne Frank

106.    The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

107.   Hamlet - William Shakespeare

108.   Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

109.    Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

110.    All quiet on the Wesern Front

111. The call of the wild

112.   Don Quixote - Cervantes

113.   Their eyes were watching God -

114.  The time machine – H G Wells

115.   Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 45
116.   H.G. Wells - The invisible man

117.    The perks of being a wallflower - Shephen Dibosky

118.    Shades of Gray - Jasper Fforde

119.     2001, a space odyssey – Arthur C Clarke

120.    War of the worlds – H G Wells