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.
Happy New Year! We are enjoying the way this year is starting out. We have been playing with our new toys. Chad has especially enjoyed the rocket launcher he now uses to relieve frustration on his fellow Gmail coworkers. I loved getting two player games for Christmas too. I have been a little sick but it has helped that we have had a really relaxing holiday.
We took down our Christmas stuff and are looking forward to the next adventures we’ll have this year. If it is anything like last year we are in for a lot of challenges and a lot of fun too!
We have been teasing our friends, Dani and Alvin, about hanging out and we finally planned to have dinner with them almost a month in advance. I really don’t want to wait so long to hang out again because it was fun. We got together on Friday and had an excellent time. It helped that they made great food and I totally killed them all playing a new game Jordy and Chris got us for Christmas. I got pretty lucky. It was good that I did well since Chad has made me a big loser playing Blokus the last couple times. Elisa did fine at Blokus, but just a narrow loss felt to her like, my brain was two sizes too small?! … Make that three. So frustrating.
The other big news is we got our temple recommends renewed. In German. Oh man, that was exhausting! I told the bishop I was nervous. He said that there was no reason to be nervous, because we were just going to talk. That’s what I said I was nervous about.
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.
