Some more reasons why not to have children

The last few weeks with the kids have involved the usual craziness. Last week, I worked quite a few more hours than normal but although I was scheduled to work on a Saturday night, Jana and Christian decided to stay home so I ended up with the night off. About a week or two ago, I was in charge of taking Jaime to the doctor. He had stitches in one of his fingers because that weekend he had cut it on a mixing blade. Probably trying to lick off whatever was being mixed. I am just glad that he did not do it when I was there because I get very nauseous around too much blood. Anyways, my job was to take him to the doctor for the removal of the stitches. I have to admit I was a little nervous because, as I said, I get have been known to get pretty sick when it comes to things like that. I was really hoping I wouldn't faint in front of the three kids while watching the stitches being pulled out and I'm happy to say that I did not.
However, the whole situation leading up to the actual arrival at the doctor's office was enough to make me feel sick. As usual, the kids and I finished lunch and I had to get them all ready to go. Sanja was taking forever to put on her jacket and shoes so I was helping her when Nick asked me for the key to unlock the car. I gave it to him and finished up with Sanja. Upon approaching the car however, Nick let me know that he dropped the key somewhere on the ground right outside the door of the van. Ok, well shouldn't be that hard to find then, right? WRONG! The kids and I searched under the car, around the car, in the car, all around the house and driveway, and no key to be found. I asked Nick if he was sure that he had dropped the key right around here. He assured me that he dropped it right outside the door and showed me the spot. Well, no key was to be found. By this time we were ten minutes behind. I started freaking out a little because this was the only key I had to the car and Jaime had to get to his appointment. I was just about to give up and make the call of shame to Jana, when I picked up Nick's hat that was lying on the seat of the car. And what do you know? Out fell the stupid key. Eventually we made it to the doctor's office just a few minutes late.

Last week, I returned from Vienna with some presents my mom had sent with Abbi for my kids. This included these 3D puzzles for each of them, a Muppets movie, and a princess tiara and chapstick for Sanja. They were super excited and Sanja and Jaime wanted to do their puzzles right away. Hers was a butterfly and his was a tiger. I have a picture of Sanja with her completed butterfly below. There is also a picture of Jaime with his completed Tiger above. And me wearing Sanja's princess crown while holding her butterfly (not my idea).






Last week, I had a sort of reviewal of things here with Jana and Christian. There have been some issues lately between mostly Jana and me. I think that these are largely due to the very different personalities we have. I'm hoping that the talk will prove to be productive.

Birthdays and Viennese schnitzel

Time for more travel adventures updates.
This last weekend I was in Vienna, Austria for my 23rd birthday. Heidi and I left Zurich around 22:45 on a night train bound for Vienna. This was a whole new experience in and of itself for the two of us. Although we consider ourselves pros on taking public transportation anywhere, the night train was a first for both of us. We didn't know what to expect. We boarded our train and found our compartment that we shared with four other people...all guys. Since the compartments are so small and one can do nothing but lay in one's bed, it was a little awkward for six people. Luckily, Heidi and I were in the middle bunks (they were stacked three high on each side of the compartment) and right across from each other. We didn't do much except for go to bed shortly after the train started moving. The two guys below us had been eating kebabs in the compartment so it smelled a little of kebab. A few compartments down, there was an older man, probably in his fifties, with long scraggly hair, who was standing out in the hall wearing a muscle shirt, drinking out of a flask. Needless to say, Heidi and I considered ourselves lucky that we were not sharing a compartment with him. And the compartment next to us was a four person one, however, there was a lady with a toddler and a little baby all sharing one tiny bed. Again, we were satisfied enough with our compartment.

The next morning we were woken up around 6:30 am to a breakfast of coffee, two rolls each, and some butter and jam. This was nice but next to impossible to consume since all you could do was lay in your bed. I returned from the bathroom to a chorus of Happy Birthday being sung by the guys in my compartment and Heidi. She had told them if was my birthday and asked if they would all sing for me. One of the guys brought out a box of chocolates (the really fancy and expensive Sprungli brand even!) and gave it to me! I thought this was very thoughtful and nice since we did not even know each others' names! He was Swiss and the othe two guys were from Brazil living and studying in Bern, Switzerland. All were probably in their twenties. Heidi and I enjoyed talking to them the last leg of our journey.

We arrived in Vienna around 8 am and had several hours to kill before meeting up with my sister. Heidi and I decided to visit the Schoenbrunn which is a big imperial palace not too far from where we were. This was pretty cool. I enjoyed the half hour tour and learned quite a bit. It was so cool to see things that were used by kings and queens and princes/sses so long ago. The inside was beautiful and the outside as well, however, the gardens were snowed over and it was freezing cold outside so we did not linger in the gardens too long. We then decided to go to a coffeehouse for some coffee and something to eat so we travelled back into the center of the city. After a bite to eat, we headed to the church where we were to meet Abbi and her group. Heidi and I found the church with relative ease, and basically walked right into Abbi and her group. That was fortunate since we didn't have any ways of contacting each other. After meeting up, Abbi and her friend Emily and Heidi and I went to find a restaurant we were to meet the family that Abbi is au pairing for in the summer. We found them eventually and they were wonderful people! The two girls spoke English very well and the parents were very generous. They took us to a cafe where we ordered whatever we wanted and they paid for all of us! Then they took us on a tour of the city. The dad especially had a lot of historical information to share with us, and it was so great to have an insider's knowledge of the place. The family showed us to the apartment they let us borrow for the night. It was a cute small place not far away from the main part of Vienna. The parents also paid for the four of us girls' transportation tickets for the weekend! They really were such enjoyable people and I look forward to seeing them again.



We were then left to ourselves. Christian had told me about a restaurant in Vienna called Figlmuller that supposedly had large schnitzel. We found the restaurant and decided to eat my birthday dinner there that Saturday night. The schnitzel was soooo amazing! And it was huge! It was roughly the size of a small pizza. Heidi and I were unaware of how huge it actually was and ordered one each. We could have easily gotten away with sharing one, which is what Emily and Abbi did. After dinner, we stopped at a bar/pizzeria for a drink. It wasn't a very happening place so we didn't stay too long. Since the weather was so cold outside, we decided to just head back to the apartment to hang out for the rest of the night.





The next day, Abbi and Emily left early to get a train back to their school. Heidi and I had the whole day since our flight didn't leave until that evening. We figured we would do some more sightseeing so we went to Belvedere Palace which was very close to our apartment. This place houses many of Gustav Klimt's paintings, most famously, "The Kiss". It was neat to see the painting but this place was overpriced for what it had to offer. It took us about 20 minutes to go through the whole gallery and the other gallery was closed. We walked up the hill to the upper castle and were disappointed when we found out we had to pay another 9.50 euro to tour this part. Eventually we decided to head back to the apartment and start getting ready to fly home. It took us awhile to find the right train stop for the specific train that was to take us to the airport but eventually we found it...after we nearly froze to death walking around for an hour. The flight was nothing special and we were home about 22:30 Sunday night.

Florence, Milan, Lugano in December

Although a few weeks late, I thought I should write about my holiday adventures. After the Christmas party on the 25th, Heidi, Amanda, Cody, and I got up early early early on the 27th to fly down to Florence, Italy. After reaching Italy unscathed, we walked to our hostel which was a few blocks away from the train station. Well, after finding where the hostel was, we searched all over for the reception desk to check in. It was about 10 a.m. and we had read on the website that we could check in at all hours. Unfortunately, the reception desk was nowhere to be found. We called and called the hostel many times within the next two hours while trying to find someone who knew of this hostel and could tell us something about what the heck was going on. Several hours later, someone finally answered the phone and informed us that the check-in desk was on the other side of the street and down a ways from where we were told to go. Naturally, we were pretty annoyed that we had to walk around for several hours with all of our stuff and in freeeeeeeeeezing weather just because someone was not answering their phone and the directions to the check in were incorrect. We politely made our frustrations clear to the hostel worker and we ended up with an free upgrade! The upgrade was really nice because the room was basically an apartment with kitchen and bathroom and sitting room. So in the end, it was worth waiting around for a few hours. We were in Florence for two nights. We had lots of pizza and ravioli and wine! The 28th was Heidi's birthday so after celebrating at a restaurant we ended up going back to our apartment. It was so cold so it was really uncomfortable to stay out and there weren't a lot of places to hang out at anyways. But during the days, we walked all over the city. We found some amazing views of Florence that were really gorgeous. We walked over the Golden Bridge, and visited the Duomo and several other beautiful old churches. We actually went to mass in the Duomo that night and ended up being asked to do the collection. This was funny since Heidi is not even Catholic but she was a sport and helped, too. The priest who asked us was older and did not really speak English but he was quite a character. The next day, Amanda and Heidi went to the serial killer museum while Cody and I walked around the city some more. It was a little nicer weather that day and we looked at all the fancy Italian shops. A few hours later we were on a plane to Zurich where we hopped on a train to Lugano, Switzerland. Lugano is basically on the border of CH and Italy and is set next to a beautiful lake and mountains. It was one of the prettiest places in Switzerland I've seen so far and that's saying a lot! We got into Lugano really late at night and had to take a taxi to our hotel, which was just on the other side of the border of CH and Italy. We walked across the border the next day which was fun. Although Lugano was gorgeous, we took a train the next day to Milan, Italy. In Milan, we walked around the city a bit and visited the Duomo there. I actually thought the Milan Duomo was prettier than Florence's. I think that I liked Milan better in general, but it was pretty touristy. After a night in Milan we headed back up to Zurich on the train. Since the train was full, we ended up having to buy first-class tickets, or else we wouldn't get back into Zurich until really late that night, and since it was New Year's we wanted to be there. First-class on trains by the way is a rip-off. It's almost the exact same as 2nd class but more expensive. Anyways, after the train ride which was about 3 or 4 hours long, Cody and I went back to my house. Cody really liked playing with the kids and the kids were enthralled with Cody. They told me often to go to Korea and Cody could stay here with them.
We had dinner with the Bergers and Christian's parents. Cody was able to speak to them in German a little and so it was fun to interact a little more extensively with the grandparents than what I'm usually capable of. The kids had a couple of "tisch boms" which are "table bombs". Basically, one lights the fuse at the end of a cylindrical shape (about a foot long and half a foot in diameter) and out flies random little party favors and toys and streamers. The kids had lots of fun with these. About 11 p.m. Cody and I decide to go into Zurich to meet Heidi and Amanda. Apparently Zurich's main street has a bunch of outside bars and tents set up all over and there is a huge fireworks display over the lake after midnight. It started snowing like crazy a few hours before midnight so the walk to the bus stop was really pretty. However, we ended up sitting at the bus stop for over half an hour waiting for our bus that never came. That's right, we were in a little plastic bus stop at the New Year. Apparently there were lots of transportation problems that night because of the snow and lack of people to clear the roads. But it was still pretty nice because the church bells were ringing for half an hour or so and there were lots of fireworks going up around the lake by my house.
The next day, Cody and I just hung out around the house relaxing after our long trips and playing with the kids. The day after that though, I had to work. Cody helped me out a lot, the boys really listen to him. And then the next day was the last day for Cody in Switzerland. I took him to the airport around 14:00 because he said his flight left at 4 o'clock. Well, Cody misinterpreted the time since it is always in military time here and he is not used to it.... the flight didn't leave til after 18:00! So we were four hours early at the airport. Ah well. It had been a great week so I couldn't complain too much.
Below are another slideshow of our trip! Click on them to enlarge the pictures....

The Real Christmas

I thought I would write about my Christmas day this year.
It began with waking up at my house in Maur with Heidi. After collecting all the peanut butter balls that I had made with the kids a few days pior, Heidi and I walked to the edge of the lake behind my house to take the boat to the other side. The other side of the lake is Uster which is about 15 minutes from where Heidi lives. Taking the boat across is a much faster route than taking the bus and trains into Zurich and then into Uster. Unfortunately, the boat does not run very often. But anyways, this was the first time I had done this and it was really fun! It's only about a five minute boat ride but the lake was so pretty that morning! It was cold but it was a clear day and it all looked so beautiful. I have a couple of pictures below.
Once we got to Heidi's family's house (they were all away so they said it was ok if we used their house to cook our Christmas meal and celebrate), Amanda arrived shortly after. We set about putting up the few decorations we had and setting out our presents that we got for each other while listening to Christmas music. A few hours later we all put on our Christmas outfits and I had to go to the airport to meet Cody! He was arriving late in the afternoon and since the buses and trains were on holiday time, there weren't as many as usual running as many routes so it took me longer than I would have liked to make it to the airport in Zurich. But he arrived safe and sound, and not a little tired, and the two of us returned to the house. Amanda and Heidi had been putting together our Christmas meal while we were gone. This consisted of schnitzel, green beans, mashed potatoes, and bread and cheese. We also had lots of delicious cookies that Heidi made (called spitzbuben) and my chocolate peanut butter balls. Dinner was great, thanks to Amanda's schnitzel cooking skills.
After dinner, we had some of Heidi's neighbor's kids come over and sing us Christmas carols! This was really cute and fun. The three girls came with their father, who is British, and sang us three or four songs.
We then decided it was present time! The three of us girls decided to get each of the others something small so that we would all have presents to open. They were mostly funny presents and so this was quite entertaining.
After this, we pretty much called it a night. We watched a little bit of German television for awhile and called it a fairly successful Christmas abroad.
I have attached another slide show of the Christmas pictures I took that day! (if you click on it, they will pop up in another page and be larger)

Frohe Weihnachten (Merry Christmas)

Christmas Eve with the Bergers! In Switzerland, Christmas - or Weihnachten as it's called - is celebrated on the 24th. I decided to spend this time with the family since I was having real Christmas the next day with my friends. Heidi came over to celebrate with us since her family was spending time at their mountain cabin. The night started with Christian, the three kids, Heidi, and I attending church just down the road. This church must be some kind of Protestant because Christian called it the German word which sounded something like Reform. It was only about 45 minutes long and there were lots of kids there. All the kid had their candles which were lit at the end of the service. The service mostly just consisted of singing and what seemed to me to be the story of Christ's birth with a projector showing somewhat random paintings/pictures. Jaime of course didn't do so well during the 45 minutes of sitting still but the other 2 were fine. After the service, we went back to the house where Jana had set out all the presents for the kids under the tree. The family's friend, Phillip, also joined us. Dinner was wonderful as usual. We had turkey which was a huge deal since people do not have turkey meat here. A few days earlier, Christian had told me we would be having turkey and asked me several questions about cooking it since they hadn't done it before. Since it is in Christian's area of expertise, the dinner was fancy and very nicely laid. The salad before the main meal was so good and looked really pretty. After dinner, it was time to open presents! The kids opened the ones my parents sent and they actually really enjoyed them. Especially Sanja, who has worn her pink sparkly Princess sweatshirt almost every day since. The kids had quite a few presents to open. The big presents from the parents were as follows: Nick = dirt bike.....crazy I know, Jaime = Heelys Roller Shoes (the shoes with skates on the bottom), and Sanja = a pink sled. The kids were all super excited with their new toys. They also received these kid laptops (mostly educational) from their grandparents which was one of their favorite presents. I had gotten the kids each a present as well: for Sanja, a Diddlina coloring book and markers, and the boys each got an airplane they had to construct themselves. It was a fun night with the family but I was very anxious for the next day which was when Cody came! Below I have some pictures from Christmas Eve if you would like to see some visuals of the night.

10 More Days til Christmas!

Not a whole lot going on here. Last week it snowed pretty much constantly for the majority of the week so it's rather cold still. I can't wait for April. I finally ordered a Swiss adaptor for the Wii so hopefully I will be seeing that in the mail soon. Nick and I are stoked. I spent some of this last weekend in Zug again. Heidi, Amanda, and I went to Zug fairly early Saturday in order to walk around the city and enjoy the decorations and the scenery. It's a really pretty little town with a great lake. We stayed with Jill again, who made us a delicious fondue dinner which we washed down with gluhwein (a popular warmed red wine this time of year here). Except for the semi common occurences of the house almost being burned down by children because Swiss parents let them play with things like lighters and knives and other dangerous tools, last week was fairly average. The whole family has been sick and coughing all over me and my food so inevitably I also have a bad cough right now. I am trying to get all of my Christmas vacation travel plans organized since we are only 10 days from Christmas! Right now it looks like we will be heading to Florence to celebrate Heidi's 23rd birthday. Today I was supposed to have off except for sending the kids to school in the morning but Jana and Christian decided to do some Christmas shopping together for the kids so I got to spend the afternoon home. Of course I was annoyed by this last minute change of plans that seems to happen often, especially since I am working so much this week already. I just can't wait for next week.

However, I took (or rather was forced by the kids to take) a couple of videos of the kids at the lake from this afternoon that I thought I would share. First is of Sanja, who found a crooked stick and thought it was hilarious to walk around like an old lady. I did, too actually and here is the video:



Also, the kids had so much fun with this fallen tree branch. We were down there for about an hour or so and they were playing on this branch most of the time. They would sit on it like a teeter totter and rock back and forth and they would also act like it was a horse. It was rather cool. But here is a video of Nick that is pretty funny:

Ja, Si!

I LOVED Spain.
I can't really say why exactly I liked it so much. It was wonderful being able to use Spanish a little bit and actually understand what locals were trying to say to me. I guess I just didn't feel as helpless as I do here in Switzerland. I also very much enjoyed the weather. It was December yet the sun was warm and shining every now and then. It did rain a little the Sunday we were there but it didn't last long and it was still waaaaay warmer than it is in Zurich. Except for one instance in a lame cafe with an extremely rude hostess, the people were generally pretty friendly and helpful. We even had a couple of people stop us and ask if we needed help when we were looking confused and holding a map on the streets. People in Switzerland definitely do not go out of their way to ask if you need help, they are known for their stand-offish style. The hostel we stayed in was very nice. It was clean and the staff was friendly and helpful. The three of us - Heidi, Amanda, and I - had a room to ourselves with a shared bathroom just outside our door. The hostel was also in a pretty good part of town where we only had to walk a few minutes to the main areas. We were a few blocks back from the beach and towering above us was the Castillo de Santa Barbara.
When we got into Alicante on Saturday afternoon, we checked into our hostel and found a place to get a bite to eat. I have to say that I am not a fan of Spanish food. I'm not sure what I was expecting (tacos, enchiladas, salsa, guac?) but there did not seem to be anything very unique on the menus. I did have paella one day, which is a Spanish dish, and which was probably the best thing I ate the whole trip, but this was not really anything special. I ordered a hamburger at a cafe before we left and I received two plain beef patties without any bun or vegetables and some french fries. Even the ketchup was not very good.
The three of us decided to hit the town Saturday night. Unfortunately, we did not realize that most people in Spain go out really late at night, like midnight or later, and we were already pretty tired by this point. We went to several different bars and just walked around the downtown area but were back to the hostel relatively early.
The next day we headed out to do some more sightseeing. Our goal was to go to the castle but the lift to take people up there was not working. So we decided to just walk around town instead and we actually ended up making our way up to the castle on our own. It was a little bit of a hike but it was worth it once we got to the top. We could see all of Alicante and the ocean, it was beautiful. And the castle itself was also very pretty. I wanted to go down into the dungeons to see if there were any dragons down there but unfortunately this was locked.
After touring the castle and hiking back down to our hostel, we took a little break before heading out to explore the city some more. We walked along one of the main roads near the beach. There were some really pretty parks along the way and we had fun taking many pictures. Alicante is a big tourist city and so there were not a lot of people around this time of the year. There is a big casino there but when we checked it out it was all closed, which we found odd.
Again, we went out on the town Sunday night. Amanda, Heidi, and I went to a really cool restaurant/bar. It was called Lizarran I think and it was pretty unique to anything I'd experienced. The servers brought around large platters of food with toothpicks in them and you just grabbed some when they went by. When you were finished they would add up your toothpicks and charge you this way. The food was pretty good and the atmosphere was fun. After this place closed we went back to our hostel where Heidi and I had a nice chat with some of the other people staying there as well. Amanda was having problems of her own because she had stepped in dog doodoo on the walk back and ended up getting it on her sheets.
The next day we woke up to check out of our hostel and do some more touring. We went to a few cathedrals, namely the cathedral of St. Nicolas. This was gorgeous! It was so pretty inside and very plain looking outside. We also wanted to check out this market we had heard of. After finding it, we were extremely disappointed. It was mainly just a market of fish and meats and vegetables/fruits that the locals would purchase. We were expecting more of a Saturday's Market but we were very wrong. We walked around a different part of town looking for a big mall. The mall wasn't anything special by the way. After purchasing some postcards, we sat in a little square in the middle of the city to write on them and then managed to find a post office to send them off. By this time we were really craving some gelato so we took off to find a gelateria. For some reason, we could not for the life of us find one and we ended up walking way farther than we meant to. Anyways, by the time we had gotten something to eat, we had to catch the bus back to the airport. You would think that this would be the end of the story, right? Well, not quite.
After our flight, we arrived in Basel around 22:30 and had to catch a train back to Zurich. Well, even after running with our bags all the way from the bus stop to the train gate, we missed our train by a minute. It's a good hour's train ride from Basel to Zurich and we had to wait for the next one, hoping and hoping that we would get to Zurich in time to catch the last bus to my house, which is outside of Zurich. So we got on the train and ran off as fast as we could to the tram stop that would take us to the bus stop that would take us to Maur. Well, even after running with all our stuff to the tram stop, we missed the last tram by 2 minutes. We tried running to the next tram stop to see if we could catch it but alas, we did not. We had about 6 minutes to get to my bus stop before the last bus left. After that we would be forced to take a cab to Maur which would cost more than 60 francs. Heidi then had the great idea to take a cab to the bus stop which was only a few minutes away. After scrambling around trying to find a cab, we finally got this really old lady cabdriver to take us to Klusplatz, the bus stop. We explained to her our situation and that we only had about 4 minutes. This was not the best idea since she then decided to go sooooooooo slow the whole way. We're pretty sure that she wanted us to miss our bus so that we would have to pay for her to take us all the way to Maur. We were still a block away from the bus stop when we told her we were getting out. She actually told us no but we did not care, we had a minute to get to our bus and she was stuck at a stop light! We ran to the bus stop and actually made it on time!!! It was quite the ordeal but we were very happy to not have to pay a ridiculous 60 francs. We ended up getting home at 1:30 AM and were very tired.
It was definitely worth it though. It was a fun trip and I really really want to go to Spain again! Below is a slideshow of some pictures I took of our trip! Enjoy!