It’s not Switzerland Day everywhere–just for Elisa and me. This time last year we were sitting at Tara and Larry’s, watching the Pride and Prejudice movie. Plane tickets were in hand. All the bags were packed. We were just waiting to head to the airport. We arrived here on Jan 18, and for as long as we’re here we are going to celebrate it. It was a very windy day and they lost our bags. Basically the whole start was really hard. But so many good things have happened and it keeps getting better.
I got my Swiss driver’s license in the mail! It makes me feel so grown up! Maybe I wouldn’t think it was such a big deal, but it took three months of visiting offices, calling the US, faxing, and so on to get it. If I couldn’t get it by tomorrow, I would be required to take a driving test and a written test, both in German, which I couldn’t pass. Rahel told me they are difficult to get here even if you do speak the language.
This week at work another package arrived containing… a… white… lab coat! Yep, that’s right. I have my own lab coat with a little “Google Labs” logo on the breast. It came with a plaque saying that the Gmail team got a “Founders Award” from the powers-that-be at Google. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We’ll have to upload a photo of me sporting the coat in the kitchen.
New Year’s is called Silvester and it is celebrated the same in Switzerland as in the U.S. (except that the church bells all go off for the new year). Elisa and I had a fun LOUD trip to Interlaken with some friends and friends-of-friends. Interlaken is about 2 hours away and we had been meaning to go see it ever since we moved here.
Pretty much we sledded with the kids to entertain ourselves. It was perfect snow for snowball fights. I haven’t had so much fun in the snow since I was a kid. We didn’t ever get around to skiing or paragliding because the kids were too fun to play with.
For New Year’s, someone (ahem, Nik) had the bright idea of giving torches to all the kids to carry around for an evening walk. 😐 And then everyone went indoors to light off fireworks in the dining room. 😕 The fireworks blew toys out of the top, so all the kids sat around looking down the barrel, fighting each other to get the first goodies. 😯 Much good crying was had all around. Elisa and I left the room when the gunpowder smell reached us. We hid out in the kitchen–again–where we could be by ourselves. We really had a wonderful time.
We got to see a lot of pretty stuff on the way home. It was a really beautiful train ride. On the way there it was in the dark so on the way home we realized how pretty it was.
This year was the first time we spent Christmas away from our families (other than mission years). It didn’t feel like we were isolated though. We got to spend some time with our parents and almost all our siblings on the webcam. It was fun to wake up early in the morning so we could see my mom and dad open up their Christmas/30th anniversary present. We put some money toward a big trip they’ll be taking in a couple months. We’ve had the stupid webcam for over a year, and we just now got around to setting it up. It was so much more fun than regular phone calls, so I think we’ll use it a lot more from now on.
On Christmas Eve we went with the Mascaros to the Cook’s. On Christmas Day we spent the evening at the Mascaro’s at a loud kid-filled party. The Baumanns, Sannemans and James Gardiner were there. I think playing so much with the kids is starting to force me to learn some Swiss German too. Elisa gave SO many airplane rides and horsey rides to the kids! Christmas felt good because of the quality time with friends.
We received some 2-player games for Christmas, and I love playing games with Elisa. He especially likes playing games with me when I do not get mad because I am losing. These games are not so competitive so I was all smiles, and so was Chad! We also got some new warm clothes, Swiss-German books and American condiments. If anyone is thinking of shipping any other packages to Europe, please just wait until we visit or until a friend can take the package in a suitcase. Shipping costs are just way too expensive.
We put up a recipe site to give to our Moms. It has all our family recipes that we could find. Elisa spent many a long hour typing in recipe directions. Any family and friends can use it: http://recipes.parry.org/. Chad is my little genius, I am so proud of the cool things he managed to do for our families this year.
