Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Although we’d quite like to go to see the German Christmas markets at some point, it’s obviously going to be pretty cold where-ever we go in Germany.

That being the case, we’re also looking towards the south and Rome sounds like a place that would be pretty much ideal at that time. Christmas clearly would be a “big thing” there of course but there’s always lots to see in Rome at any time of year and it’s going to be quite a bit warmer than Germany too.

I thought that it would have cost a fortune to do Rome at Christmas but I was wrong and flights are available for around £20 a few days ago (they’ve jumped to £50 now) plus hotels in the centre are still quite reasonable.

We’ve also got Switzerland in the frame too though Wendy’s a bit worried about snow on the roads if we were to head into the mountains which you pretty much have to do in Switzerland.

We’re just back from a spin round Switzerland which took in stops in Geneva, Interlaken and Zermatt so expect to see “some” posts about the trip over the next week or two.

One thing I’d not realised during our last trip to Switzerland is that the waterjet isn’t actually on all of the time and ordinarily runs from 10am through to 10pm. It’s also off for three straight weeks in November for maintenance each year. Funnily enough there aren’t that many photos of it that include the rainbow that you see here yet, of course, it’s visible every day that the sun’s out if you’re standing in the right spot.

Something that might catch you out too is that there are very few ATMs in Geneva in comparison to other major cities around the world.

Anyway, more anon.

We just had one of these days when everything seemed to go just right.

To begin with, we’d some people drop in who might be interested in buying our place. Early days yet I’m sure but at least they seemed to be making all of the right noises.

Then we realised that we were going to have a problem with our Swiss trip this Friday as the car insurance would run out in the middle of it. So we called the previous insurer and they, for once, came up with the goods in terms of the certificate that we needed to hand to the new guys.

Next problem was that the car needed re-registered as that had already run out. Off to the garage and they not only handed us the new papers but had the new license plates on as well within 30 minutes.

Onward to the new insurers with all the paperwork and we didn’t even have to queue!

Finally, we’ve managed to close our place down without somebody booking when we want to be away ourselves.

Oh, and we’ve even got ourselves booked into a lovely place just outside Geneva which we thought would have been gone by now!

By special request from juniors 1 & 2 we bought them a “ladder-bed” (ie bunk bed) which just arrived this morning.

Junior 2 supervised the assembly whilst junior 1 was at school.

Of course, now that it is here, the question is: who is getting to be on the top bunk?

Now, you might think that it would be best to have the eldest on top but in trials in hotels that has resulted in him falling out as he engages the legs well before he’s awake enough to control them whilst the little guy generally stays in bed until he’s actually awake.

Still, at least it’s not so far to fall from this one!

We have been incredibly lazy over here on the whole but we’re planning on getting back into the swing of Tai Chi and Tai Combat in the not overlly distant future.

The snag is that when you’ve had a bit of a break from it, it can be quite extremely difficult to get yourself fired up to do exercise classes or even the thought of them for that matter. Not only that, but it’s obviously pretty crazy to start straight into a class at the gym when you’ve not done any serious exercise for a while.

So, the game plan is to ease ourselves back into it again and to start with we’ve already started on a little bit of hill walking which, much to our surprise, didn’t finish us off. After that, we’re going to work up via the treadmills and other machines to a nice gentle class to begin with (definitely not Tai Combat!).