Noah and Madame Kick Shins
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
The weekend afterthe slide show at Kai’s school we gave Noah the option of changing schools.
The weekend afterthe slide show at Kai’s school we gave Noah the option of changing schools.
Our first stop on the two-week Easter holiday was a small village on the France side of the Luxemburg boarder. I’d tried to get accommodation in Luxemburg itself but learnt that it is one of the most expensive cities in Europe to stay in and also much more in to couple accommodation than a family of six.
While the kids were off at school collecting their stories for the lunch time table Pete and I were at our own little school. French lessons fours times a week for an hour and a half in the morning.
School for Jack and Poppy was good. Jack’s teacher was the, ‘To Sir with Love,’ type except instead of being a gorgeous six foot Negro, he was a slight framed Yugoslavian.
I didn’t want to go back home, home now being the confines of level two of the Moggy Mansion. The thought of driving instead into Germany and exploring it for a month before we moved onto Austria and then Norway and then Sweden was appealing, so much so that it was hard to turn the car around and head back in the direction of Yverdon.
By the time the first school holidays came around we all needed a break even though it was only five weeks since the kids had started school. It had been a long five weeks in which we’d got lost, turned up late and been misunderstood more times than we ever had been in our lives.
Yverdon is a typical Swiss town. Cobbled roadways run through its centre, there’s a church with spires, a town hall with an intricately decorated clock that competes with the church bells every quarter of an hour for air space and there is of course your standard medieval castle.
Day two in Yverdon was about finding Pete and me a French school. Our first port of call was Migros. Migros is Switzerland’s favourite child, loved and adored by everyone, so much so that its ego is completely out of control.
I didn’t want to leave the chalet in Gryon. I could have quiet easily spent the next six months there wandering along the snow covered paths to the shops, dropping our kids off at a local village school (except Jack and Noah who would have had to go up and down the slippery sharp bends of the mountain in a bus four times a day, but they would have coped, well I would have anyway). I would have liked to have stayed and watched the mountains slowly turn green as spring set in and the flowers uncurled their petals to the sun.