Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

School days are a bit of a nuisance for us to be honest as indeed they must be to most parents.

In our case, four days a week (he gets Wednesday off) we have to take James round to school before 9am, which gives us a few hours to get some stuff done (mostly blogging in the Winter as you may have noticed!), then off to collect him from school at 11.45am ie we’ve all of 2 1/2 hours to ourselves in the morning.

The afternoon isn’t much better, of course. To give us a little more time we usually drop him off at 2pm and head straight on for the shops or whatever though often it’s a bit of a race back to collect him at 5pm.

What we’re trying to do is to make the most of the Wednesdays by heading off somewhere when we collect him on the Tuesday evenings. Our first attempt at that was this week and we’d a very nice day in Arles.

Longer trips are more difficult though. In theory, we should set out on Saturday morning for Geneva but that would get us there in the evening and we’d have to go back on Sunday. Instead, we’re hoping to pick him up at lunchtime and head on then (he’s only at nursery school so it’s not a big deal if he misses an afternoon). That should give us all day Saturday and at least part of Sunday in Switzerland which is a nice little mini-holiday for us.

Aside from anything else, one thing that surprises me about this photo is that although I scanned it with a reasonably good scanner for its day, the resolution is much lower than even that of a cheap digital camera these days.

That aside, we’re planning on a trip to Geneva this Friday. As usual, it’ll be “weather permitting” though at the moment the prospects are looking quite good.

You might think that there would be loads to see in Geneva but in reality there isn’t a whole lot. Having said that, what there is, is pretty good in that you get the Red Cross museum, the Olympic museum, etc. courtesy of all the international organisations based there and, of course, there’s the scenery. Oh, and not to forget CERN where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 (that link is to the first ever website). Yes, it’s that recent!

Also potentially on the cards is Lausanne which is about 40 mins up the road from Geneva.

Wendy’s very keen on family history but we’ve only just got around to registering a domain for her to put her researches on.

You can look forward to seeing a constant stream of information on the Hamilton’s at Hamilton Family History which is just live as of today though already with its first post.

Over the coming Winter, she’s planning on putting the result of her researches over the years onto the site.

Jame’s bed has finally given up the ghost so we’re hoping to have a look for a new one today.

In France, bedding like all furniture can be very expensive and if you see something at a sensible price, it’s often just poor quality. This, of course, makes the search that much more difficult.

There’s also the not inconsiderable problem of the size of the beds. As anyone who has been on holiday in France will know, the beds are smaller than the norm in other countries. Still, we’ll not need to worry too much about the size of the bed we get for James for a while.

Anyway, I suspect that we’ll need to head off to IKEA at some stage although that brings with it the problem of how to actually get the bed back here.

This is our first “day off” for a while so we’re at a bit of a loss as to what to do!

Funnily enough, it feels very much like a Saturday so far, though why that is, I just don’t know.

We had our usual “Saturday morning” lay-in so everything is running later than usual. Somehow we’ve gotten to lunchtime already yet we’ve not done any of our usual morning things yet!

As we’ve been a bit lazy, we’ve all the rooms in the place to make up sometime between today and tomorrow morning so that’ll keep us out of trouble once we get going on it.

Wendy’s next in line for the computer (we’ll have two from next week: no more queuing!!!) so I’m off to have another look at the Spanish.