It is Sunday morning 6:30am, very quiet and dark outside and the children are playing in the lounge next door while I am sitting at the kitchen table updating this blog.
We are getting better, three nights ago we woke up at 2:30am, the night before last at 4:00am and today at 5:00am. So we are heading in the right direction!
The boys received two more amazing parcels yesterday, one from my lovely sister Bonnie and one from the wonderful Pascale in Heilbronn. So now they have Lego to build, a thousand piece horse puzzle to complete before our departure from here in four weeks and creative games to play that they can do together or individually.
Thank you ladies!! It means I can sit here in peace doing this 🙂
Now last night I was going to catch up on a whole lot of individual emails to many of you and would you believe it I can’t access my mail & contacts part of the iPad. Yesterday morning I sat down to check my emails and it (the iPad) told me that I had 50 to down load (really? That seems a bit excessive) and then it told me that it is ‘synchronising accounts’. What the…??? It did that all day yesterday, so whatever it is trying to synchronise, it hasn’t happened yet. BIG sigh!
At least I have this form of communication with all you lovely people and we are still loving and reading your comments.
We did achieve quite a few things yesterday however. We took our very first German bus together, which the children were looking forward to as the poor deprived creatures don’t get to do this very often in Auckland. In fact Tessa told Birgit that she had never been on a public bus other than for school trips…clearly I need to leave the car at home more often back home!
Anyway, we found our way to the local 277, which is called the Herold Zentrum and we were standing outside waiting for the doors to open at 9:30am.
We had left NZ without any winter shoes for Tessa, she has been travelling just with her trainers. My theory being that here in Germany autumn is in full swing and they will have the full range of winter shoes in. Well, it turns out they do have the full range of winter shoes in but the kind of shoes that we consider a winter shoes in Auckland, you know closed in toes, just below the ankle, is considered a summer shoes here.
So in the various shoes shops we found in this Herold Zentrum they carried lots of shoes that fit the local idea of ‘winter shoe’ and literally not a single pair of what we would consider a winter shoe. So the local winter shoes is at least over the ankle, more likely a boot and in 80% of cases lined with fur to keep people warm. Once this was explained to me it was all ver obvious but of course I felt like a complete dingbat that this hadn’t occurred to me at all and realised that 21 years away form here is a long time after all!
Of course fur lined shoes aren’t going to be much use to us in Auckland so we decided to focus on the sports shoes, which both Tessa and Nick needed a new pair of, thinking that this would be pretty much straight forward…..well….
We went to ‘Karstadt’, which is a massive ‘Smith & Caughey’ with outlets in each Germany mall and city, and a sports department spanning the entire top floor. So I find this fun looking young guy who was very tall and muscly and tell him that I am looking for sports shoes for two of the children. May I add that in this country one can actually ask shop assistants questions and they actually know what they are talking about as they have all been trained in the stuff that they are selling.
So anyway, he asked me in the great local twang (which I love and yes I know those of you who come from up here, Karin, Sabine, Froedes think there is no twang and you speak the pure German, believe me when you come from my woods of the Vaterland…there IS! a twang) what kind of sports shoes we were after. “Well”, I said, “you know, the all round kind of shoe, good for most things”. Well, that just doesn’t work in Germany, does it now? So he asks: “What sport are you going to need it for?” “Oh, you know…tennis, running, a bit of hockey or soccer of the field”
He gave me this look that a patient Grandparent would give their Grandchild if asked to get the chainsaw out to help them chop up the pile of wood for winter.
“Ok”, he says, “Let’s start with tennis…is it for indoor or outdoor tennis?” So now it’s my turn to look at him as if he was from Mars “Indoor tennis? We don’t have indoor tennis where I come from…let’s go with outdoors” So he shows me specialised outdoor tennis shoes for Euro 80 (which is about NZ$110) and I said “Hm, how about you show me your running, more, general shoes as to be honest, the children will end up using them for most of their sports”. He then takes a look at the trainers that Tessa is wearing, which I have to say, ‘had it’ and asks me, more rhetorically and in a nice way with a smile: “Is that what you have been doing with these or are they just very old?” “No”, Tessa pipes in, “they are no more than a year old, probably less.” (how come they understand stuff all at the wrong time??) . “Well, that explains it then” he says and takes me to the running shoes.
So with great shoe knowledge he sells us two reasonably priced running shoes, one pair for Tessa and one pair for Nick, then he helps Nick to spend some of his own money on German goal keeping gloves in Nick size and Ben desperately tried to find soccer shorts that would match the England soccer shirt that Birgit’s husband Marek had gifted him the night before, in Ben size! White shorts with the white T-Shirts simply looked really bad and pale on him, so he tried black which he wasn’t happy with as the writing on the shirt was navy blue and really he wanted red shorts. The only red soccer shorts in his size however were from HSV, who are the local heroes, but Ben decided, and rightly so, that this would do a disservice to the England top and that we need to find the shorts in another way, perhaps eBay…we will check with Marek. Tessa finally managed to find sports leggings to just below her knees which she was ver y happy with as this means that she doesn’t have to be cold in shorts anymore during hockey practise in winter…I am such a bad mother.
SO so far so good but we still didn’t have any proper shoes for Tessa to wear to school on Monday! So off we went to the apartment and had some lunch. I think we kind of have decided to go with the local custom of having warm lunch and ‘Abendbrot’ for dinner, which literally means ‘evening bread’ and is the common thing for most Germans to have at dinner time. Salads, cold cuts of meat, cheese, bread, tomatoes, that kind of stuff. Our lunch that day was ‘Maultaschen’ which is a kind of dumpling or ravioli. Ingird had put some in the fridge for us, and they get warmed up in a vegie broth. The children all loved it and Nick can eat them, too. The once that are left over I will try and fry in egg, my favourite way of eating them. It’s nice to be cooking a new food that everybody loves, yeah!
Then I spoke to Birgit and Ingrid about our shoe dilemma and Ingird took the boys for the afternoon and Birgit and Jana took Tessa and me to yet another shopping mall with more choice of shops yet.
Now Tessa generally hates shopping and gets quite grumpy after the second or third shop while Jana apparently loves shopping (much like her mother in years gone by!! :-)) So Jana kept finding new shoes for Tessa to try on and was very helpful in encouraging her. The whole ‘winter in Auckland is a bit different to winter in Norderstedt’ dilemma became very clear again very fast, but we were lucky and found a pair in a light grey colour with purple ribbon as laces (it also came with proper laces in the box) which looked really good on Tessa, will go with everything, were a quality brand and, being considered non seasonal, were reduced from Euro 100 to Euro 42 (around NZ$60 or NZ$65), so were a bargain on top of it all. Success!
Now that I am sitting here writing this (it is now an hour later, I have day light outside and two of three children have had their shower…yes you guessed correctly, Ben is having his last) I am suddenly wondering if by the time we get to Munich and it is the middle of December if those shoes will be warm enough….aaahhhh?!!? So if anyone in Germany is reading this and has a warm pair of boots or shoes in Tessa’s size 36 spare in the cupboard…please do contact me. I can swop excellent child labour in dish washing, vacuum cleaning, younger children minding, dog walking and similar kind of jobs for the use of warm shoes for a couple of months, or even just one month. Thank you!
We did also venture into H&M which is great shop for children’s clothes before we even embarked on the whole shoe adventure in the morning and managed to buy a whole pile of clothes for the children for Euro 71 which is around NZ$100. A couple of the T-Shirts for the boys were from the summer range and they were reduced to Euro 3 and 5, which is about NZ$6 and 8, really cheap!!
So, after buying couple of writing pads for school and a pen, but not a ball pen as they are not allowed to use that (German children use fountain pens) we are all set for school and after breakfast we will do a trial walk to the boys’s school while Tessa will cycle with Jana to her school a bit later in the morning when the Michalskis are awake.
We are also planning ‘Italian’ for lunch so Ben in particular is very excited.
First school day tomorrow…
Cheers
Tanja