Swiss Catholic Potlucks

So you've heard of coffee and rolls, right? After church everyone goes into the cafeteria for a doughnut and a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Well, let me tell you about "Coffee" as it's called here. I don't think I've mentioned previously that this is a Catholic church in Zurich that has an English mass. I think the church is called St. Anton and it's really really pretty, very cathedral-like. I've really enjoyed the priests, too, who have all been British up until today (there was a guest priest performing the mass from Africa today). Anyways, last week I went to the Saturday night mass where they announced that the coming Sunday morning mass would involve "Coffee" afterwards. I thought that I should go to the Sunday morning mass this week to check it out thinking that there would be coffee and maybe some bread or pastries. Heidi even came with me this week which was really cool since she is not Catholic and I appreciated the company. So after mass, we headed into the forum next door and holy coffee! we were surprised at the amount of food that was laid out. Not only was there coffee and bread, but there was cookies, quiches, cobblers, fried rice, African doughnut hole-type things, pumpkin bread, chocolate chip bread, rolls, soups, chips, chicken wings, spaghetti, brownies, several other foods from other cultures that I don't know the name of but that were delicious, etc etc etc!!!! It was amazing. It wasn't like coffee and rolls, it was like a huge potluck after mass! Heidi and I went back for seconds because we wanted to try everything since it all looked so good and there was so much of it. I thought this was really really cool and something I have not experienced in this way before. Definitely great motivation for getting me up early on a Sunday morning for church!

Just to mention a little bit about my week. Thank goodness there's only one more week left of the kids' school vacation. One day I had to work from 7:30 in the morning until around 7:30 at night! Needless to say, it was a long Friday. Also, thankfully the weather has stayed really nice. The fall is a beautiful season in Switzerland, we've had an amazing October so far. On one of the longer days last week, I piled the kids up with some firewood and a bag of marshmallows and headed down to the lake. We made a fire (after quite an effort) and roasted some 'mallows. I've mentioned the marshmallows they have here before and I took a picture of them so that you can see that they are a little different than ones that we have in the States.








Although we've had great weather almost every day, there was one day last week that just poured down rain. I had the kids most of the day, of course, and they were pretty restless. However, I decided to do something with them to coincide with the Halloween season. We made bats! As you can see in the last picture above, the kids did a great job. Haha, I especially like Sanja's pink and purple bat and Nick's "scary" bat with a huge smiling red mouth bigger than the face. The kids loved this and it killed a couple of hours for me.

I have tomorrow off because I am working so much again this week. If anyone has any ideas of fun, entertaining ways to distract the kids during really long days, just let me know. I would love any suggestions!