The difference between Nathan and William

I needed to take a quick "passport" photo (looking straight ahead, no smile or teeth showing) of each member of the family to renew our visas for another year. Just to show you how different our two boys are...I told Nathan to look at me and not smile - we were done with one shot!

With William, it was not quite so easy...

But in the end we got one that worked (just a bit of teeth showing).

Our First Visitors from the US

At the end of June, we had our first official visitors from the US - Dave's brother Paul and niece Sheila. Paul just finished dental school and decided to take a trip to Europe, and Sheila is going on a mission in August to Brazil - so she wanted to visit us before she left!

We had a great time showing them around, and it was fun to remember how we felt when we first got here. We definitely feel at home here now, but there are a lot of differences that we've just gotten used to. Elise got to use her German to help translate the menus, and we were able to revisit a few places we loved (even climbing the "Rock" at Rhinefalls - a bit scary, but we did it! We can't wait for more visitors!

A Few Days in London

We took advantage of a few days' school vacation at the end of May to visit London with the whole family. It's such a great city - with so much to see!

We stayed in a hotel in the Old County Hall building right next to the London Eye and just across the Thames from Big Ben and Westminster. We took a double-decker bus tour the first day, seeing the sights of the city, and stopping off at the Tower of London. What a great place - we took the tour and learned about all of the beheadings that took place there (not that beheadings are great, but the tour was very interesting), as well as seeing the crown jewels (pretty cool to us girls) and an military arsenal exhibit (a big hit with the boys).

We could have stayed all day at the Tower of London, but decided to see some more sights aboard the double-decker bus and stop next at Madame Tussaud's. What's a trip to London without going to the original wax museum (and none of us had been there before). Well, needless to say, we mingled with the stars!

We rode the London Eye on Friday morning - getting some amazing views of the city. The London Eye is a ferris wheel (built for the millennial celebration), with clear plexiglass "pods" that go around and allow you to get a view of all parts of the city (it takes 30 minutes to go around 1 time). It sounds great, and it was, but also just a bit stressful with William doing somersaults on the railing, pushing off with his feet against the glass window!

We then saw the royal guards marching behind 10 Downing Street, before marching down the parade route to Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard. This was definitely the highlight for Nathan and William. They could have watched the guards marching for hours. I must say, it is very impressive, and we all learned a bit more about this tradition.

In the afternoon, we took the Underground to the British Museum of Natural History - an amazing museum (and all of the national museums in London are free!). We saw so much - a dinosaur exhibit with a giant animated dinosaur that moved its head in response to heat and movement of people, a great bugs and insects exhibit (which was particularly relevant, as that was what Nathan had just studied at preschool), birds, jungle animals, all kinds of other things.

And, we went to a special butterfly garden exhibit, with butterflies flying all around us.

Outside, Nathan also had a chance to chase some pigeons - by the time we move back to the US, he may well have chased pigeons in every major European city!

On our last day in London, we went to the Courtauld Gallery, a great little museum with some beautiful Impressionist paintings, to Trafalgar Square, and to the Winston Churchill museum. The Winston Churchill museum was great - with 2 parts to it: a museum about the man himself, and the war room museum, where you got to see the actual rooms used by Churchill and his staff during the war!

London is a beautiful city, and we even had pretty good weather while we were there. Before we went on the trip, we watched "101 Dalmatians", as it is set in London. So, when William told someone we were planning to go to London, he said, "Yeah, they have a lot of dogs there!" (I guess it didn't work as well as "The Sound of Music" for our Salzburg trip did). But, now when we see Big Ben or the London Eye in the background on the news (all our English language TV channels are British), the kids all say, that's where we were!

Learning German

We've been living here in Switzerland for almost 10 months now - how time flies! There are 3 official languages in Switzerland - German, French and Italian, each spoken in a different part of the country. Here in Zurich, German is the official language. But, it's not "Hoch Deutsch" (high German) which is spoken in German and Austria, it's "Schweizer Deutsch" (Swiss German). Yes, there is a big difference! Swiss German is not a written language, so newspapers, most signs etc. are all written in high German. Swiss people understand high German and will usually change over to speaking high German if you ask them to. At church, all of the talks are usually in high German - just the little kids classes are in Swiss German, since that's what they learn first at home. As a foreigner, it's best to learn high German first, then try to learn some phrases in Swiss German.
Well, we've all learned a lot of German - and we've also learned what a difficult language German is to learn! It's important to us that people don't always have to switch to English - and it really is fun and rewarding to learn a new language. Dave had spent a year during college in Berlin, then he took a 2-week intensive course when we first moved here. So, he's doing pretty well. I started from scratch - listening to Pimsleur CDs a few months before we moved here. I take private lessons - 4 hours per week until Meredith was born, and now 1 1/2 hours a week. Elise has about 3 hours of German class each week at school, and Nathan and Will go to a bilingual preschool, where there are 3 German speaking teachers and one who is a native English speaker. So, they understand a lot! Elise signed up with a couple of her friends from school for a German camp for a week in August, which will be great for her. And, Will will continue at the bilingual preschool one more year (while Nathan will move on to ICS with his big sister!).
Dave and I were asked to give talks in our ward at the end of November, after being here just 3 months. We each wrote out our talk in English, then someone from the ward translated it for us. Dave, of course, did very well with his talk, with people commenting on his great German accent. I went through the German version of my talk in excruciating detail with my German teacher beforehand to simplify it and make sure I could pronounce everything and sound somewhat like I wasn't reading a foreign language! It went pretty well. We've been asked to give our next talks at church in August (they plan way ahead here), so more opportunity to practice! And, I was recently called to be the Relief Society president here in our German speaking ward, so I need to speak even more German!
We knew before we moved here that this would be a great opportunity to experience and appreciate different cultures. Learning the language is certainly an important and fun part of it - being humbled all the time (when my vocabulary and grammar sound like a preschooler's), and gaining incredible respect for so many people here in Europe who are multilingual!
Bis bald!