The City and the Sea Vlog and Nature Documentaries for Kids

Streets of the Old Havana, the Old Square, the Capitol, salsa at a restaurant. .. just amazing. A must visit!

Lots of interesting things to see! I took a boat trip from Istanbul - to the entrance into the Black Sea. Beautiful palaces...interesting coast.

So beautiful!

A visit to the island of Poros where there are scary rocks held by cables so they don't fall down from the top of the mountain!!!!

A visit to the Temple of Aphaia, the goddess of the seasons and agriculture.

#short version of my zipline adventure!!!

We follow a few tiny streets in Plaka and visit a restaurant.

We caught 4 different species of creatures on the Jersey shore - a clam, a mussel, a barnacle, and a crab. All these are surf creatures who live in the tidal zone - where the ocean water rises and falls. So they all can breathe both underwater and on the shore. How exactly do they breathe? Crabs have gills they use to extract oxygen from the water. The gills are located at the base of their legs. What you see moving right there next to this crab's eyes are the 2 pairs of antennae. Crabs use antennae to smell, sense chemicals in the water, and also to feel the current and movement of water. Mussels also breathe by running water through their gills. Unlike all other molluscs, mussels get their food only by filtering water. The gills are deep inside the mussel - what you see here showing from its shell are the flaps of its mantle. That's where the mussel "inhales" water. It exhales it through a special siphon. This is an Atlantic surf clam. This portion of the mollusk's body coming from the shell is the clam's siphon, or, rather 2 siphones - for the water coming in, and water coming out of the mollusk. Inside, behind the siphon are clam's gills with which it breathes. Any food that comes in with the water, like plankton or algae, gets into a clam's mouth. For clams to eat and breathe, the water must be in motion, and they create that motion with the siphon. Here is a large mussel shell with two creatures attached to it - a barnacle and a slipper shell or oyster-pest. Barnacles are crustaceans like shrimp and crabs. Barnacles have no gills, instead they absorb oxygen through their legs - these hairy things that come out of the barnacle's shell. The shell is made up of six plates. If a predator comes close, the barnacle's legs pull in and the shell shuts closed. It also closes when the tide is low and barnacles end up above the water line.

All you need to do is find an area of brackish water - where fresh and ocean water meet, like a canal or a lake near the ocean. You will see hundreds of these crabs!!!! The crabs you see in this video are Fiddler Crabs. We filmed them in Manasquan New Jersey by a canal where the ocean water meets the fresh river water. This type of mixed water is called "brackish." The fiddler crab is called “fiddler” because male crabs have enlarged right claw, which is almost three times as large as its left claw. They use it to fight and impress their girlfriends. See these two crabs are waving their big claws trying to scare each other. Fiddler crabs live in burrows near the water's edge, forming large colonies - hundreds of crabs. These small, round holes are entrances to their burrows that can be up to three feet long. They dig with their legs. When the tide rises, fiddler crabs plug the entrance to their burrows with sand and sit inside waiting for the water to leave. They eat rotting plants. In winter they also seal their burrows and stay inside. They can stay out of the water for months at a time, as long as the sand around them is damp. The predators that eat fiddler crabs are birds and racoons.

This cricket found its way into our house. I filmed it under a microscope and let it go. It was sooooo happy to escape! No kidding, you can tell the temperature of the air by the song of any cricket! We've tested it! THIS IS a bush-cricket also known as "long-horned grasshopper". It's not a true grasshopper - grasshoppers have short and thick antennae, but these crickets' antennae are often longer than their body. Bush crickets are herb iv ors - eat leaves and flowers. They live in warm grasslands areas, in bushes and gardens. Bush crickets are nocturnal. To find each other in the dark they make a special call - that cricket sound. They produce it by rubbing their legs on their wings. Many use mimicry to camouflage themselves as leaves and blades of grass so nobody bothers them in daytime. The most amazing thing about crickets is that the sounds they make depend on temperature, so by the number of chirps in a cricket 'song' you can tell the temperature of the air! To find the temperature you need to count the number of chirps of one cricket within 15 seconds, then add to it 37 to get the temperature in Fahrenheit!

#short version of my zipline adventure!!!

A look at a few items in the Acropolis Museum, Athens: Caryatids, Parthenon frieze from 437 BC!!! ... Greek writing, Lego Acropolis and the excavations underneath the Acropolis museum.

A brief tour of the Acropolis in Athens - the heart of the Ancient Greece!

Views of the Moskva river embankments and the Kremlin from a tourist river boat. Also Vorobiovi Gori (the Sparrow Hills) and the "Museum of Optical Illusions" (selfie photo place) in Moscow.

My friend Kai's family invited me to a sushi restaurant in New York City. Cool place. Making sushi is magic.

Two cool exhibits at VDNH - Robots and Terra Futura (history of inventions!)

Created this with my parents' help for a private talent show hosted by my best friends' family every Christmas.

Max Brenner restaurant, Union Square

Moscow Panda Park - two routes - "Brave" (Смелый) and "Zip lines" (Тролейный)

Moscow SkyPark zip line: From the Vorobiovi Gori (the Sparrow Hills) high bank of the Moskva River in Moscow, to the Luzhniki stadium low bank - at 45 mph. You have to show them your passport to prove you are over 10 years old. They also weigh you to make sure you are not too light and won't get stuck in the middle of the river!!!