Switzerland Summer 2011

Typical Swiss Family

 Woefully late, we are posting just a few pictures from our trip to Switzerland in July-August 2011.

Typical Swiss Family with Typical Swiss Pet

We spent some time in Zurich visiting Katherine's aunt Moni and her cousins Yvonne and Fabian and their young children.

Ava

Katherine's Cousin Fabian

Kath's Cousin Yvonne and Son Aris (+ one on the way), Zurich

Nora and Aris

 After a few days in Wil with her  aunt and uncle Burgi and Walter and her grandmother we headed off to the family hut (despite the rain and fog).

Churfirsten

Huesli, Alt Sankt Johann

Ruedi had already been in Switzerland for almost a month, three weeks of which was spent biking with a riding pal from Iowa. Cecile arrived around the time we did. We took several small walks until the weather cleared. On the first good day, Oliver and Ruedi climbed the Schiebenstoll.

Typical Swiss-American  Grandparents (with pet cow)

Schibenstoll (2234 m)--Oliver Climbed with Ruedi

The next day, we climbed the Säntis (which Ruedi and promised Oliver he could do once he was 10). Nora and Cecil joined us by cable tram.

Säntis (2502 m)

Lisigrat (narrow ridge passage to Säntis)

Oliver on the Lisigrat

We celebrated the 1st of August with Nana and Katherine's aunt and uncle Margrit and Sepp. The day before was a Alpengottesdienst--an outoor ecumenical service complete with alphorn players and one the the best yodel clubs in the valley.

Alphorn Players

Cow-Bell Players

Jodel Club Säntisgruess (click for audio of similar group)

The four of us took off for three days on our own to Zermatt (home of the Matterhorn).

Granaries, Zermatt

It was a beautiful 7 hour trip by bus and train (with many changes). Zermatt is a totally different world from Alt Sankt Johann, packed with international tourists and hikers. But if you walk uphill for about an hour, the crowds thin out substantially. We stayed in a hiker's hostel, with a large group kitchen. There were several groups of English and French who had hiked for a 7 days from Chamonix (Mount Blanc), staying at huts along the way. (Advice: try to secure you spot in the communal kitchen before the group of 15 French hikers start preparing their three-course meal). The first full day we took a gondola up to Schwarzsee, and then hiked the rest of the way to the Hornli Hütte, at the base of the Matterhorn. From here, the hard-core climbers begin their ascent to the peak (after spending the night at the hut; they need to start at 4 in the morning in order to make it back while there is still light).

Matterhorn

Alps

Oliver in the way to the Hornli Hütte

Nora on the way to the Hornli Hütte, Matterhorn in background

At the Hornli Hütte, Base of the Matterhorn (3,260 m)

The next day we walked up to the Riffelalp, and then took the Gornegrat train the rest of the way. The views were unfortunately limited by the clouds (normally one can see many 4000 meter peaks). Caught in a brief freezing rain, we took the train back down, returning happy but exhausted to our hostel.

Gornegrat (3900 m)

The next day, we returned by rail to Wil for one last day with the family, and then the following day we came back to Göttingen.

The end of the school year

There are about three weeks left in the school year, but things are definitely winding down. Oliver has gone from having two tests a week to no tests and units on bike safety that involve riding around ping pong tables on the school playground. At leat he is finally learning how to read the German traffic signs that have remained a bit of a puzzle to us since we arrived! Nora's work load has been much more manageable all year, thank goodness. The German school system is very good, but also very demanding of individual students and their parents, especially beginning in third grade. Basically if you have dedicated and well-educated parents who know the system, you will more or less succeed. Most families here have one parent home everyday afterschool to help their child navigate through and manage the school work, and we have all learned the German math curriculum, backwards and forwards. The good news is that Oliver did really, really well. He earned super grades and a strong recommendation to attend "Gymnasium," which is the college-preparatory school option here. Next year he will attend a very good school that caters to students from 5th-12 grade. It seems early to be making these kinds of decisions, but he is looking forward to the new school year. We will be able to stay through mid-January before heading back to Middletown.

Other than school, the kids have been enjoying their extra-curricular activities. Nora has been taking weekly group violin lessons, and has learned how to play all four strings and the first two fingers! She really enjoys it, and Katherine has fun practicing with her, well, at least most of the time. Her group will give an end-of-the-year concert on Friday.












Oliver's soccer team really came together this spring, and they are now in first place in their league with only one game remaining. Oliver scored his first goal in a "point game" last week, and has grown into a strong individual and team player. He has a wonderful coach from Afghanistan, and nice teammates.

Mike gave a talk to a history colloquium this past week, and will give a shorter version of his paper at a conference on the Jewish Enlightenment in Frankfurt in a few weeks. Here is a picture of the spiffy dad on the eve of father's day.

Katherine has been scaring up images for an article that will be published next year, and is deep into another  one. She is enjoying the concentrated time to research and write without interruption. The other development is that she started running again after a ten year break! It is amazing what a good pair of running shoes will make. On July 6th (the last day of school) she, Oliver, and Nora will all participate in a run held downtown, the Altstadtlauf. She and Oliver will run a 5 km course, and Nora has signed up for the 1800 meter run, and as of today has some serious running shoes that should help her along.

Otherwise, life here is calm and enjoyable. We like hearing the birds in the forest at night, and lead a rather simple existence. 

It stopped raining!

Although we had a very wet fall, the spring here has actually been quite lovely. Indeed, there probably hasn't been enough rain from the point of view of farmers nearby. But this has meant that we have had a chance to explore bike trails and canoe down rivers nearby. Recently we visited the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, which is a palace and parkland built in the late 18th century just outside of Kassel. The palace sits on an enormous parkland peppered with fake ruins and fantastical constructions.

This is the palace, which now houses Kassel's small, but impressive collection of antique and old master art that comprised Germany's first public art museum.

This is the view uphill from the palace, which culminates in a stone cascade, topped by an octagonal building, which is itself topped by a pyramid on which stands a huge Hercules sculpture. It is a silly idea, but what the heck.

The whole park comes alive once a day in a spectacular water show. All of a sudden, water gushes out at the top of a pyramid-shaped cascade and runs downhill through man-made gulleys, down waterfalls,

under bridges, and  and across an aquaduct before being shot up in the sky as a fifty meter water jet. The whole show lasts about an hour! We visited the park on a very hot day, and the appearance of water out of nowhere was quite magical and a real relief to all of us.

We finished the day by walking to the Löwenberg, a castle ruin that was built around 1800 when such things were thought Romantic. This was one of the settings that Goethe had in mind when he composed Faust.

Norway!

Our kids had a two-week Easter vacation, and we spent a little over a week of that with our good friends Morten and Ragnhild and their family in Bergen, Norway. We first met them when they were our neighbors in family-student housing in Berkeley in 2001. Their son Ola is just a few weeks younger than Oliver, and we spent a lot of time together for the year they lived upstairs from us until we moved to Middletown in the summer of 2002. Morten is a physician who received his PhD in public health from Berkeley and Ragnhild is a nurse. Now the boys are 10, and since then we've had Nora, and they've had two more children, Mari (7) and Jakob (4).

We spent the first 4 days at their home in Bergen, with a lovely view of the harbor. 

The kids got along great. Ola got a lot of practice on his English, and Mari and Nora managed to communicate well enough to spend plenty of time jump-roping or on the trampoline ("hoppe").  Jakob decided not to sweat the foreign language thing and just talked to us freely in Norwegian.  We had a lovely hike in the hills above their house, and our kids got to try new kinds of fish.

Morten and Ragnhild treated us to a fabulous day-long fjord tour organized by "Norway in a Nutshell." The trip consisted of a train trip from Bergen to Voss, travel by bus to Gudvagen, where we picked up the ferry for a gorgeous 2 hour tour of the Nærøyfjord.

 The ferry arrived in Flåm, from which we took the famous Flåmsbana, a mountain train, a 20 km train trip going up about 860 meters and through twenty tunnels to Myrdal. From Myrdal, we took the train back to Bergen.

The second half of the week was spent at Morten's mother's house in the country.  Oliver and Nora both caught their first fish. Ola taught Oliver how to cast a lure in the river, while Morten took the girls out on the lake.

Katherine and I hiked all the way to the top of the mountain near the house, and Mike took a dip in the rather icy lake (there was still some snow around the edges!).

On Easter Sunday, after dinner around 9 at night, we rowed out on the fjord and laid a long net and scraped up a huge bucket of large mussels from the rocks. 

The next morning was Oliver's birthday. We rowed back out (everyone had to take turns bailing the boat!) and gathered us the net, which was full of starfish and about 6 cod! 

Oliver got his first lesson in gutting a fish, and then we grilled the fish on an open fire on the beach. Ragnhild met us there and brought a lovely Blotkake (Norwegian cream cake).

New Year's in Paris

We realize that it has been a very long time since our last post. Part of this is due to a busy winter, where Katherine traveled for six weeks for research in Brussels and Weimar and her parents visited for a month to help out, which was much appreciated. Now life has returned to "normal," and so we can finally share our wonderful New Year's visit to Paris.

Looking at these pictures makes us happy, and they pretty much say it all, but we'll try to fill in some of the details. We had the wonderful offer to stay in an apartment owned by parents of a friend, which meant that we had a real home away from home and could take advantage of all the great food shopping in the neighborhood. Although Mike and I know the city quite well, we wanted to introduce it to Oliver and Nora and show them the greatest hits. As we came up out of the metro at the stop "Pont Neuf" and looked out over the Seine to the Ile de la Cité, Oliver's first word was "wow." I hoped that he would be impressed by the city, and indeed he was. He was up for anything during the trip, and even asked to be taken to more art museums (which warmed the cockles of his mother's heart). Nora was a real trooper, but perhaps a little less ready to absorb all the history. After three days of serious sight-seeing, she declared that today would be a day with "no museums and no towers." This is hard to avoid in Paris.


We started our exploration of the city at Notre Dame.

From there we went to the Pompidou. Although the square in front has become rather subdued, the building never ceases to delight, and Oliver and Nora loved running up and down the escalators. We later returned for a look in the permanent collection-- Nora spent quite a while in front of three paintings by Matisse of windows painted in various levels of abstraction. Oliver enjoyed a show of Mondrian and De Stijl and the works of Kandinsky. It was enormously fun to see them engaging with the works.

Although Christmas-New Year's is a busy tourist season in Paris with long lines at the major attractions, we could not avoid the Eiffel Tower, which Oliver desperately wanted to ascend. En route there we visited the Arc de Triumphe.

From there we headed to the Eiffel Tower. Don't get me wrong-- the Eiffel Tower is a fine monuemnt, but in my view it is better viewed from a distance. The line to go up is interminable. We happened to pick a rainy, foggy day, and the views from the top were not very auspicious, but up we went anyway. We spent a total of about three hours in line, half of that to go up, the other half to get down. We had a good ten minutes at the top before the rain got to be too much, and we decided that we didn't want to wait in yet another line to use the bathroom. It was an exercise in endurance, but we very much enjoyed the view later that evening of the Tower from the new footbridge built across the Seine. We recovered from our tower experience by going to the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum for African and Oceanic Art located nearby-- it is an innovative building with  displays of objects that foreground aesthetics rather than historical information.

Day 3 consisted of a trip to the Louvre, which involved a line about a quarter of a mile long to get in.

In the "good old days" Mike and I used to be able to enter via side entrance for free by showing a letter that we were full-time researchers. However times have changed, and we now have to wait in the regular line along with the rest of the world. This being said, the Louvre courtyard offers certain pleasures while you wait-- it isn't the worst place to stand around for an hour, and we actually enjoyed the experience. Inside we saw some of the highlights-- Greek and Roman statues, Michelangelo's slaves, and of course the gallery of nineteenth-century French painting, where I am afraid that I talked Oliver and Nora's ears off. Oliver insisted on getting a look at the Mona Lisa, which basically consisted of us cramming into a crowded room and lifting him up above our shoulders so that he could see a small painting encased in bullet-proof casing-- he was content with this, although I doubt that he managed to see much.

From there we crossed the Seine to have lunch in the area around St. Germain des Près. The kids were tired, but managed to revive a bit after some steak-frites.
By now you might understand why after three days Nora proclaimed that she would visit no towers or museums. This was ok, and we took the opportunity to visit friends in the city. We ended up seeing a lot of friends, in fact. Our clock kept getting pushed back, and we returned home late (around 11pm) most nights, except for New Year's when we left the party "early" at 3am.

After rallying for the incredibly nice and fun New Year's celebration, Nora was pretty much out of commission, so Mike and Oliver embarked on their own tour of military Paris, which took them to the Invalides and Bastille.

They both truly enjoyed this, and Mike fed Oliver's enthusiasm for the history of the Revolution and World War I.

Mike also got in touch with his masculinity at the École Militaire.



Nora and I met the boys at the end of the day at Sacré Coeur before meeting a friend for dinner.





By this point our trip was almost over, and we cheated by celebrating epiphany a few days early so as to sample a "galette du roi," a nice flaky pastry with a little plastic king hidden in it-- whoever finds it gets to be king/queen for the day.

We were quite sad to leave, but some of Katherine's nostalgia wore off when she experienced a nightmare scenario trying to change their reservation on the TGV. Weather had been an issue all along, and we wanted to leave on an earlier train so as to make our connection in Mannheim. The problem was that we had made our reservations in Germany, and the French attendants couldn't read our tickets, let alone figure out how to locate our reservation within their system (so much for Franco-German partnership). After traveling to three train stations, speaking to five attendants as well as three policemen who forcefully evacuated the ticketing area due to a "suspect package," she managed to find someone who knew what he was doing, who changed the reservation in about 2 minutes. From there she raced across the city to meet Mike and the kids at the train with not a minute to spare!

It was nice to get back to Göttingen, and fortunately, our friend Sylvie had prepared us by playing us a recording of the song, "Göttingen" (1968) by the Parisian chanteuse Barbara--it is worth looking up if you don't already know it.

Is it still snowing???

One thing has remained constant since we arrived in Goettingen: stuff keeps falling from the sky. As the temperatures have dropped, the stuff has turned from rain to snow. Now snow is a lot more fun than rain, and we have even discovered new uses. We built an igloo with our Finnish neighbor, for instance, which provided daytime enjoyment. Then we added a snow bar and a snow table, where we met for Glühwein (hot mulled wine) in the evening while the kids sled down the unplowed street. (Riding our bikes to the University has turned into an extreme sport.)

Socializing in the winter here normally involves standing around in the cold drinking alcohol, and so we have acquired some long underwear to partake in the festivities. One highlight is the Weinachtsmarkt (Christmas market), a large outdoor market with many food stands and a few stands selling ornaments, hats, scarves, etc. There is even a small ferris wheel for those who really want to freeze their buts off. We stayed on the ground and consumed our fair share of sausages and chocolate-
filled crepes.

In addition to end-of-the-year tests, the kids in school prepared a Christmas presentation. Nora's class recited a poem-- different groups memorized different verses, and the whole thing came off quite well. Nora was quite tickled to have recited two verses of "Das Renntier" ("The Reindeer") in her now very good German. Oliver's class read a Christmas story and some children played musical instruments. Oliver read his part with great dramatic expression.



We are staying put for Christmas, and will travel to Paris on Dec. 26th. The "Weinachtsman" (Santa Claus") arrives on Christmas-Eve here, and we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of him emerging throught the forest, though sadly after the kids had gone to bed.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Halloween or Martin Luther??

Since Advent starts tomorrow, we thought it would be a good thing to write about what we did for Halloween. That way you can expect to hear about Christmas sometime around Valentine's Day! Since Halloween is not widely celebrated in Germany, and is even frowned upon in some quarters, we figured that we had better host a Halloween party so that Oliver and Nora could mark the holiday. It also provided an opportunity to invite the kids' new friends to our home. Our apartment is rather small, and we ended up having eleven kids in all. Oliver thought that we should turn the whole evening into a disco party, but we figured that our neighbors downstairs might not like this idea.  

To make a long story short, we survived a 3 1/2 hour party with 9 German kids plus Oliver and Nora! Ages ranged from 6 to 10.  We have learned that to do a home party, one needs to structure activities in order to avoid the event declining into body slamming and yelling, which seems to be the natural state of circa 9 year old boys. Highpoints included a scavenger hunt with two teams that followed visual clues to a treasure box; a "monster lab" in the basement (hat tip to Molly Pasco-Pranger), where Mike took kids in groups of three, blindfolded, and invited them to see a monster that he had taken apart. It was very important that they not look at the monster, he told them, or it would come alive again. He had them touch the monster's finger bones (celery), finger nails (corn flakes), tongue (dog treat), teeth (wet pumpkin seeds), eye balls (peeled grapes), snot (corn starch and water), and brain (cooked spaghetti with olive oil). It was quite something! Lastly, I invented a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-devil.  Of course the boys immediately saw that the tail could double as  devil's penis (The German word for tail, "Schwanz," has two meanings...). Oh well. We all had fun. 

The kids did go trick-or-treating the day after the party with some neighbor kids, and were rather shocked when some people turned off their lights or closed the door in their face. 

The booty was rather meager, although it did include "Martin Luther bonbons," which a man had procured from his church especially for the occasion, since Oct. 31st is also Reformation Day.


Oliver and Nora had more success on St. Martin's Day (Nov. 11th), which children celebrate in Germany by processing with beautiful hand-made lanterns through the neighborhood and singing songs about St. Martin. They received a much more positive reception from neighbors, who filled their sacks with candy and even sang along.