【推荐1】Chicago Children’s Museum

This museum offers plenty of fun activities for kids. However, this is one of the few Chicago museums not “fun for the whole family” as adults and older kids will be bored to tears.

Address: 700 East Grand Ave. (Navy Pier), Chicago

Phone: 312-527-1000

Public transportation:

CTA bus lines #29 (State Street), #65 (Grand Avenue), and the # 66 (Chicago Avenue) all serve Navy Pier.

Parking rates:

* Monday through Thursday: $20

* Friday through Sunday: $24

* Holidays: $24

Hours:

* Monday through Friday: 10 a. m. —5 p. m.

* Saturday and Sunday: 10 a. m. —8 p. m.

Entrance fees:

* Adults: $12

* Children: $12

* Seniors (65+); $11

* Children (under 5): free

Activities:

Located on one of Chicago’s top tourist attractions, Navy Pier, the museum offers three floors of activities for kids, including:

* Play It Safe—all about home safety

* Inventing Lab—provides parts and instructions for creating things

* Kids Town—a playroom recreating a Chicago neighborhood where kids can pretend to do things like shopping for groceries and driving a CTA bus

* Climbing Schooner—a three-floor climbing building

* My Museum—kids get to create various art projects that are “all about me”

* Skyline—learn about skyscrapers (摩天大楼) and design your own

* Treehouse Trails-a play area designed like a forest

* Waterways—water activities showing how pumps and dams work

【推荐2】Four Books That Will Interest You to Travel the World

There’s truly nothing like travel when it comes to gaining life experience. To get you in the adventuring mood, we asked Amazon Senior Editor Chiris Schlep to help us come up with a list of books that transport readers to another time and place. Below, see his list of four books that will interest you to travel the world.

Maria Sample’s first novel is not exactly a love story to Seattle, but if you read it, you just might want to come here to see if people are really as self-involved as the characters in her book. What really shines through is the strange storytelling and the amusing incidents. Buy it on Amazon. price: $26.60.

You can’t travel to Thomas Cromwell’s England without a time machine, but reading Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning novel is the next best thing. It will make you long to see the ancient buildings and green grass of the English countryside, much of which is still there. Buy it on Amazon. price$25.10.

Eli Hildebrand has built a writing career out of writing about her hometown island of Nantucket. Her latest is Here’s to Us, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is a great beach read. Buy it on Amazon. price: $30.80.

This book by the popular author Jess Walters is a love story that begins on the Italian Coast in the early 60s and eventually concludes in contemporary Hollywood. As the settings shift from Italy to Edinburgh to Los Angeles, you will find yourself longing to go as well. Buy it on Amazon.price:$28.90.

【推荐3】Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and Exhibition Tour

Shakespeare’s Globe Exhibition is the world’s largest exhibition devoted to Shakespeare. Located beneath the reconstructed Globe Theatre on London’s Bankside, the exhibition explores the remarkable story of the Globe, and brings Shakespeare’s world to life using a range of interactive displays and live demonstrations.

Tour the reconstructed Globe Theatre and see how plays were staged in Shakespeare’s day

All-day access to the interactive Globe Exhibition

Actors, recordings and interactive displays bring Shakespeare’s world to life.

9:00 am to 5:00 pm. On Monday, tours run all day. Tuesday to Saturday, last tour departs at 12:30

pm and at 11:30 am on Sunday due to performances taking place on these days.

October 10 to March 31

10:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Rehearsals (排练) will also take place throughout the Theatre Season. Please note that access to the Globe Theatre may be restricted and there may be occasions when the Globe tours are unable to run. When the Globe tours are not available, Rose or Bankside tours can be offered instead.

Inclusions: Entrance fee and all day access to Exhibition

Guided tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (maximum 50 people)

Exclusions (不包含项目): Hotel pickup and drop off

Food and drinks, unless specified

Click the link below to check pricing & availability on your preferred travel date. Our pricing is constantly updated to ensure you always receive the lowest price possible - we 100% guarantee it.

VIEW PRICING AND AVAILABLE

【推荐1】We all love bank holidays. In the UK, we only get eight bank holidays in one year, and at least five of those occur around Christmas time and Easter time! A bank holiday is a British English term. This is an official day that is decided by the government, when banks, shops and offices close for the day even though it’s a weekday-usually a Monday, and a lot of people have a day off work.

Bank holidays are different in Colombia-firstly, they are called “festivos”. There are twenty festivos for the whole country in one year! In Britain, people get more holiday allowances(津贴)than Colombians but fewer bank holidays. There can be even more festivos in Colombia, depending on which region of Colombia you live in. This is because different regions have their own holidays. For example, some regions have a patron saint (守护神), so they have an extra festivo to celebrate that saint.

However, there are some days that are national holidays for historical reasons. There is an Independence Day celebration on July 20 every year. This is just like Bastille Day in France on July 14, or Independence Day in the United States on July 4th. Other important festivos in Colombia are: Labour Day on May 1, and Columbus Day on October 12. Columbus Day is a historical bank holiday that almost every county on the continent of America celebrates. This includes Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Mexico and the United States. It is memorialization of the day when the Italian sailor, Christopher Columbus, first reached land on the continent in the year 1492. Many people criticize this day and say it is not something to celebrate because of the way Columbus and his team treated the people that were already living there.

【推荐1】Science fiction writers create imaginary worlds. The way things work in your imaginary worlds will be based on actual science. So it’s important for you to be familiar with the scientific principles and inventions that are related to your creation. For example, if you’re writing about humans living on a planet with zero gravity, then you need to know the effects of zero gravity on the human body.

Then you have to figure out the exact rules of your imaginary worlds. And you have to follow them. If humans have evolved (进化) to breathe underwater in Chapter 1, your character can’t drown in a swimming pool in Chapter 3. If your robots write poetry but not fiction, then you can’t throw a novelist robot into Chapter 8. The issue here is maintaining your readers’ trust. That means the reader is willing to pretend along with you. If you start out with an ordinary detective novel (侦探小说) and then throw in someone breathing underwater in the 6th chapter, your readers’ reaction might be, “What the h……?” The imaginative spell is broken. You’ve pulled the readers out of their imagination. The same thing happens if you change the rules halfway.

Part of your preparation work for the novel is to map out its worlds for yourself in great detail. Decide: the history of the world, the geography, what possibilities it offers, how everything works in this new reality, and how all of these factors affect the way your characters think, feel, and react to things. You don’t have to tell your readers all the rules in the first chapter. But you have to let your readers know enough to understand what’s going on. This also allows you to work out logical problems and contradictions (矛盾) before you start writing.

When you are writing, remember to make it feel real. You are inviting readers to visit a new world. They will want to be able to see, hear, feel, smell, and even taste what it’s like. Whether your novel is about a world without disease or an undiscovered planet, help your readers feel like they’re actually there.

The 23rd April is World Book Day, but did you know that it is also Shakespeare Day? Everybody has heard of Shakespeare, but do you know many plays he wrote? Have you heard of many of his poetry?

Shakespeare’s plays fit into three categories: tragedies, comedies and histories. Perhaps his most famous play is the tragedy story of Romeo and Juliet, which deals with two young lovers who are forbidden to marry by their parents. Other tragedies include Hamlet, a play about a vengeful ghost Othello, about an army general who is manipulated(操纵) into killing his wife, and Macbeth(麦克白). If you’ve seen Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban written which is sung in the Great Hall after the Sorting Ceremony. These words come from the Witches in Macbeth!

Shakespeare’s comedies include Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is a play about confusing identities. Two twins are shipwrecked and the sister, Viola, dresses up as her brother, Sebastian, who she thinks is dead. It’s hilarious, because the brother reappears without Viola realizing and there’s a big love triangle going on: Viola is in love with the Duke Osino, who is in love with Olivia, who falls in love with Sebastian, except she doesn’t realize that Sebastian is actually Viola dressed up! Everybody falls in love with the wrong person, but it is all made right in the end.

The history plays, such as Antony and Cleopatra, Richard III and Henry V are based on the lives of real historical people. Antony and Cleopatra is a story about a doomed romance in ancient Egypt. Cleopatra becomes Antony’s mistress and Antony becomes so obsessed with her that he loses his military might. Cleopatra kills self by letting a snake bite her after Egypt’s army has been defeated by Octavius and Antony kills himself too.

Shakespeare’s plays can be very heavy going sometimes. Some of the themes they deal with are heavy and complex, so they almost always contain a lighter subplot with characters who aren’t closely linked to the characters in the main plot. They are often used in tragedies to lighten the mood of the play and to keep the audience interested in the main plot.