On Monday all the Americans got together for a BBQ. One of the families has moved back to the states this week and it was a going away party. Most of the time we end up talking about how things are different in the States and when people are visiting home again. We also talk about how difficult German is for Americans. I wonder how many years those will be the main topics of conversation.
Elisa got me shoes on Tuesday and I am so excited! I have to give you a little background on that first, (so forgive the long story). I had been looking for new shoes for awhile and I finally bought a pair (size 43). After I wore them for a day they had stopped feeling like they fit. But the store wouldn’t exchange them for a different size by that time. I was really sad, because I had wasted the money on shoes that were going to be so fun but that weren’t comfortable. After that, Elisa and I went to the mall near our house to a different shoe store run by the same company. We went because we also wanted to look at dress shoe styles. I brought my first pair of shoes just in case they could do anything about it. No one in the shop spoke English. So Elisa chatted with them in German. She explained how I had gotten the wrong size before, and we wanted help to make sure we didn’t make the same mistake with my dress shoes. The ladies chatted with her for awhile. Elisa has learned so much German! They ended up going down to their cellar and finding a pair of size 42 casual shoes to exchange with me. It was especially lucky because they didn’t even carry that shoe style. I was so excited, because the shoe style is my favorite. I never could have gotten by in English like that. Thanks Elisa! π
This weekend is another three-day holiday weekend in Switzerland. We get Whit Monday off, even though nobody knows what that is. Well, people know that it’s some Catholic holiday. Elisa and I decided to take a trip to Munich. It’s about 5 hours away by train. We’ve been walking around seeing the sights. Our feet are kind of tired. Some of the things in Munich that were fun are the Glockenspiel, which is like a giant cuckoo clock. And the Olympic park, which was used in the 1972 Olympics. And the Nymphenburg Palace, which is enormous. Unfortunately we weren’t prepared for the weather to turn cold and wet. Today we wore shorts in a cold drizzle. Yesterday while we were on a train Munich even got hail.
When we arrived on Saturday we took a train to Dachau. Elisa’s grandpa Walter Stabler was in the 69th Rainbow Division with my grandpa Jack Parry during WWII, and that division was the first of the American forces to arrive there and liberate the camp. Dachau was the only camp to be used during the whole time the Nazis were in power. They had a good museum. But the whole thing was really unsettling. We didn’t see anything that was graphic. We saw a lot of cells and barracks and read some sad historical captions.
On Sunday we did an excursion to Salzburg. The Old Town there is a good place to go walking around. I loved Salzburg. I tried to get Elisa to sing the Sound of Music soundtrack at each of the historical sites. She sang for a few of them but she was too shy to be on camera at every one. π I was really excited because I recognized so many of the places. There is a staircase in a garden where the movie shows the family leaping up and down the stairs and singing. We got Elisa on camera for that one. She thought she had sung the wrong notes (“do,” “re,” “mi”) during part of it, so she spent a long time singing it to herself to transcribe it from memory. She admitted to being a little obsessed. I do the same thing though. Sometimes I take hours to run through a math problem in my mind until I have it figured out. Elisa pointed out that music is all based in math too, so we decided that we have the same obsession but we just give it different names. Also in our tour group we met someone who had worked for Maria von Trapp after she had emigrated to Vermont.
Wednesday was a part-day at work. Elisa and I went to the zoo with two coworkers. Elisa went sliding down the slide at the kids’ playground. I had to be the grown-up. π You’ll have to imagine what that means for Chad.
Thursday I was off work for some Catholic holiday. We went with the Mascaros on a trip straight south to Genoa (or Genova), Italy. Genova itself was not that interesting. It’s kind of dirty, like a lot of Italy we’ve seen. We enjoyed the rats and the graffiti sight-seeing. We won’t mention the smell. (Don’t touch the subway walls). They have a great aquarium though. It’s one of Tony’s favorite areas. He served his mission there so he showed us around. We met some of their friends who still live in Genoa. Paulo brought us Italian chocolate. A warning to everyone else: you have to be either brave or stupid to give chocolates to someone who lives in Switzerland.
After Genoa we went down the coast to Santa Margarita. That’s where we got to play on the beach. The water was just barely warm enough to play in. The gelato is really good there. Santa Margarita is what I imagined when I thought of Italy. On our last day we went home through Como, Italy. Como is another of Tony’s favorite places. It’s on a lake in some mountains bordering Switzerland. No matter where we go, we never regret that we are going home to Switzerland because it is so incredibly beautiful here.
I got lots of comments on Elisa’s primary lesson today. She’s a superstar here. We’re learning the song about the golden plates being hidden so last night Chad and I made some golden plates. And then I had the kids write their favorite scripture stories in it. We hid the golden plates around the room while they played hotter-colder singing louder and softer to find it.
Our little garden is coming along. Next week we’ll report on whether the spring onions we planted are already dead. This week we also planted fennel and zucchini and squash and tomato. Our neighbors’ garden plots really look good–we are going to be the ghetto of the garden.
Elisa sang in church today. It sounded really good. She sang in English. All of the ward could understand because the song was “I Stand All Amazed.” She’s indispensable in the Primary too. Teaching lessons in German is going to cause a lot of anxiety though. I tried to bear my testimony today in Primary. We’re learning the song, “Im Glaube Ich Folge Ihm,” (“I’ll Follow Him in Faith”). I was able to say one or two sentences about the message in the song. I still have a long way to go. Next week is our stake conference, so she’ll get a short break. And I got to use my Portuguese today at church. A Brazilian sister got food poisoning and wanted a blessing. She doesn’t speak German, or much English. BTW, one of the weirdest sensations today was when I was talking to Telma (the Brazilian) in Portuguese, and 2 feet away an American was talking to Elisa in German, and my brain just about shut down trying to take in both conversations. I thought I was going to start seeing spots.
Since I’ve been struggling with Primary, I joined a Yahoo! group for Primary Choristers. One of the things that is hard is that Elisa likes to share her testimony, and she doesn’t know all those words in German. Also, she was asked whether she would lead the children in a song that a leader had found off a CD. It made Elisa kind of uncomfortable because it wasn’t church music. So she took the CD home to listen to it. Then she was really uncomfortable because it sounded like rock music. π So she was torn between doing rock music in the Sacrament program or else turning down the Primary presidency’s request. The Yahoo group asked me to write a little bit to introduce myself. I explained my situation and the challenges I’m having and asked for some counsel. The next day, I had seven long responses full of ideas. And each one of them were so encouraging and many of them said that they’d be praying for me. It meant a lot to know that people who don’t even know me want me to be successful, and are asking Heavenly Father to help me be so.
We went to Bern yesterday. Tony and Rachel went to a temple session while we watched their kids. We all played on the rope swing and the slides at a playground nearby. There wasn’t time for us to do a session also, but we didn’t care because it had been a fun day for us anyway. (The last temple session is at noon on Saturday. Bern is two hours away, so you kind of have to plan ahead.) We planned to wake up early so we could both get a session in while we took turns watching the kids. But around midnight, Emeri (1 yrs old) woke up very sick. So we didn’t know if we’d go at all.
