Today was the most gorgeous day.  It was warm enough to wear a spring jacket and do away with the boots that I have been wearing all winter.  Good thing too – last Thursday the left sole of my my Aldo boots broke again!  Third time this winter.  Aldo used to be my favourite shoe shop, but bee will have to think again before buying shoes there next time!

Anyway, I wore my little slip-on shoes and my spring jacket with my ipod playing Laura Izabor and as always a little bit of Maxwell thrown in there for good measure, a good book in my bag and some orange juice (can’t get enough of that stuff these days) as I strolled down to the beach in our little Swiss town.  I could see the French Alps so clear across the lake and the water was doing that beautful sparkley thing from the reflection of the sun and for once there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  I found myself a little spot by the water, pulled out my book and read the afternoon away.

It was one of those days where you can’t help but say thank you for all the things that are going so right in your life, when you think there is no such thing as a coincidence, that something in the universe muct be pulling you in the direction you happen to be walking.

Today I felt like saying thank you to all the people I passed on my walk.  Of course, I didn’t, just in case they thought I was a little nuts, which of course I am, but I like to keep that on the DL, thank you very much.

That is what happens when you get too much Vitamin D all in one go.

I have no excuse for not writing.  I am terrible, I know.  This one is for “Tim”, who demanded I stop slacking off!

Last Sunday we went to Buddhist Meditation.

A new teacher started at the school in January (let’s call her H) and she is just lovely and quirky and teaches yoga and was just what I needed to find in this place.  She was the one who told me about this meditation and I begged her to take us the next time she went.

There is a little Thai restaurant in a nearby village and the owner invites a monk to do meditation once a month.  They sit on chairs, but H asked if she, F and I cound sit on the floor.  It was pretty funny with all these tall restaurant chairs in front and the three of us perched in the very back.  But it was a perfect little space for us.

The monk was a superstar (if I can say that about a monk).  He talked about how meditation can become part of your way of life and part of the way you begin to think.  I love the idea that maybe in this life time, maybe the next, I might be able to keep a calm, stable mind.  If you know me, you know that calm and stable really are not terms that anyone would use to describe me!  But the good news is, I can learn to be that way, even if I am over excitable right now.  And that the journey to that point and beyond is something that I might even enjoy.

Its not that I have not meditated before.  I have, it is just that this time, I felt like a little smile was inside my tummy the whole time.  The monk had asked us to imagine a light shining like a sun from our bellies as our visualisation.  I loved that one! There I was, spreading belly sunshine loving kindness all around the world.

On the way home, F said that no matter how hard he tried to imagine a sun, all he kept getting was a sunflower.  Isn’t that the most beautiful image, though?  A sunflower in your belly.

I am in.  Sign me up for the next session.

Oh, and by the way….in addition to the sunflower, I also have a baby in my belly.  Yep, bee is with baby.  Baby bee to arrive in early fall.

We were chilling out in class. Children were colouring the title pages of their autobiographies and chatting quietly to each other. Suddenly I heard a peal of laughter from across the room. One of the girls called out,
“Ms. B, S just said the funniest thing. And it’s true!!”
“So what did you say?” I asked S, who was sitting there looking bewildered at the raucous his comment had instigated.
“I just asked why Israel was bombing the Gaza strip, if they want to keep it.”
“Ms. B, don’t you think S should be in charge of the world from now on?” T chimed in.
Well, yes T, I do think so.

Just came back from the Christmas concert at school.

The day was pretty perfect. It has been snowing all day, but not settling near the lake where we are. Instead it has settled on the hills and mountains around us, so it looks really pretty, but we don’t have to deal with slush. I love it!

We all squeezed into the dining hall at the school for the concert. As always, the children never give it their all in rehearsals and then all of a sudden they pull it out of no-where during the real thing. I think they just do it to drive their teachers crazy. The concert was a pretty standard one – not like the ones I am used to and love in London – and was a mixture of very traditional Christmas carols. I managed to squeeze in a fun Christmas pop song with a little bit of dancing, but other than that, it stuck to tradition. Even still, I found it special since this was our first concert in this school and the children were so excited to share this moment with their parents.

The thing I love the most about concerts is the parent’s faces when they are watching their little darlings. They cannot smile enough. I might be sick of practising for the concert, but for them it is the first time they are seeing it – and even if it comes out a little wobbly, that makes it even sweeter. The kids too – I love to see their little proud-of-themselves-smiles as they sit down after their songs.

And guess what – when the children sang, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”, out of the window I could see the snow falling gently over the vineyards and the hills and villages behind them and it was one of those take-a-picture-in-your-mind moments (well, take-a-video-in-your-mind, really, since we need the song as the soundtrack) and it all felt a little bit special to be here in Switzerland working in a little school at the bottom of a mountain.

And at the end of the concert, we all drank mulled wine and ate mince pies – I tell you, you don’t get more storybook than that!!

p.s. HAPPY 20th BIRTHDAY HERMITAGE!!!

We moved into our new place on Tuesday. It is soooooo good to call somewhere home. Already, it feels like things are getting better. I didn’t realise how yuck it was living in the land of temporary housing and how lovely it is to have our own space that we can make into home. Unpacking the boxes and finding all our lovely things was like greeting old friends. The books aren’t unpacked yet because we are waiting for the shelves, but I can’t wait to get into those boxes. Once the books are out and sitting on the shelves, I will feel like we have really arrived!
We made our final trip to Ikea! Yay! I have been to that place so many times now, I think I know the entire layout by heart. Not that we don’t love the opportunity to be herded around the showroom like little shopping cows all in the name of well priced furniture, but you know, there is a limit to the number of Saturdays a girl can spend in that place! (On a side note, though, I have to say that this morning, we were served by a fabulous guy who sorted all our delivery out for us and helped us out so much. So Swiss of him. Customer service here is awesome!)
Furniture has been carefully chosen and ordered and it will all arrive in the middle of January. So when we come home from Toronto and NY for the holidays, we can look forward to parts of our living room, dining room and bedroom arriving. How fun!

I am quite excited about turning this apartment into a home for me and F.

I stayed late at school today and by the time I left, the sun had gone down and it was pretty dark.  I mean really dark, by the time I was walking home.  And guess what? I could see the stars!  Not even just a few; like loads of them.  It wasn’t like you see in the city either, when you can just see some of the bigger stars and the little ones don’t show up because the city lights are too bright.  I could see all the stars, even the little itty, bitty ones and you know, it was so pretty.

When I was working in London, we used to take the children in Year 6 on a residential trip to the countryside.  The best part for me was when we took the children on a night hike through the farm fields and the forest and watching the children look up into the sky and see all those stars in the sky.  Most of them had never seen the stars so bright because most of them had never really been away from East London.  The looks on their faces and the sighs of amazement were just so great that it made up for the fact that I never got more than three hours of sleep a night for the entire trip!

It felt like that today, and I guess I felt grateful that I will get to see that every day here.

If anyone reading this has a spare plane, I know some kids in London who would love a ride to Switzerland to see the stars   We will carbon offset of course!

P.S. I have decided that I will learn to snowboard. Yikes!  But how cool does that sound?

What do these three things have in common?

Montreux, Swtizerland, that’s what.

Today was a freezing cold, dull day in Switzerland.  F and I had argued about how I keep saying I want to go home to London (its true, but I need to get over it already) and we had the bright idea of going to Montreux which is about a 45 minute train ride from our town.  The scenery from the train was more beautiful than you can imagine.  The further east we went, the closer the French Alps looked.  They were so majestic and as F said, imposing.  They were dusted in snow and the peaks hidden by grey clouds pregnant with snow flurries.  I do hate anything to do with cold and snow, but these mountains were really something.

Montreux was strange.  It is supposed to be this “magical” town, quaint and pretty.  I found the lake front to be more like a cheesy sea side town than a quaint Swiss town.  I found Montreux cool for other reasons.

First of all, at least twice a car drove by playing loud Arabic music or some kind of hip hop.  What is cool about that, you say?  Well, it is just not a done thing in Switzerland to drive around disturbing everyone with your music.  People are just too polite here.  It was just nice to see people acting a little more chilled out, and I quite enjoyed the music too!

Second cool thing, F found a Moroccan restaurant that had great food!  No offence to the Swiss, but we just can’t find good food here – that is why I dream of Nandos.  That is, until today.  We ate hummous, lentil soup and chicken and couscous to our little hearts’ content.  Yum!  That is where we saw the palm trees, btw.

Third cool thing was that we found a little bar called Jazz Cafe.  We walked into a warm, cosy little place, filled with people from Switzerland, Canada, South Africa and the States enjoying the rugby game, talking and joking with each other, a friendly owner (well, we think he was the owner) and even a resident dog! Loved it!  We found that in Montreux there was a much better mix of cultures than where we live, so it was nice not to be the only brownish people on the street.

I guess what I am figuring out about Switzerland is that I don’t really like what it is famous for (chocolate, snow, mountains, cold weather, cheesy chalet restaurants, bad fashion, shops that are closed on Sundays….) but I am finding some special things about the place that are not really on any websites,  in any guide books or in anybody’s list of suggestions.  Maybe it’s just that I am stubborn and refuse to do what other people tell me to…(don’t respond to that, F)

I’ll keep looking for things to do off the beaten path and by the time you get here, I will have a list of my very own.

My happy place is Spittalfields market in London.  It has the perfect mix of people, a good lack of west end chain shops, lots of vintage and one of a kind clothing, new designers just starting out, hand made bags, jewellery, clothes, and lots of brown rice and veggie food.  Yum!

Even though it was raining on Sunday morning (actually a dirty London drizzle) and the exact tube lines that we needed to used were shut down for “scheduled engineering works”, we went to my favourite market in London.  I was so happy, I thought I might burst.  The vibe was awesome.  London just has this way of having a place for all sorts of people, with all sorts of lifestyles.  You can just be who you want to be in London and that is why it is home for me.  Especially in places like Spittalfields.  It is so squeaky clean here in Switzerland and London just has that right amount of grime and grit to make it cool.

By the way, we were in London for just 2.5 days and managed to go to Nandos twice.  Now that is dedication!

Science is so fab.  We are almost finished creating our erupting volcanos.  We are going to make them errupt with baking soda and vinegar.  Yesterday the children built the shape of the volcano with crushed newspaper and this afternoon we covered them with papier mache.  Tomorrow we will paint them and varnish them.  It might seem like a small thing in the universe, but I could never describe to you the satisfaction on the children’s faces when they had finished the tiring and sticky job of papier mache-ing.  They looked at their newspaper mountains with such pride and excitement that it made me remember why I never want to give up being in the classroom and why I don’t want to become a deputy or head teacher of a school.  I would miss out on the volcanos, you see.

And by the way, after all the glue and newspaper everywhere, the kids did the best job cleaning up too!  Have I told you that I love my class yet?

Hey there ladies and gentlemen,

We have a home!  Yay!  We found out a while ago that there was about an 80% chance that the girl who is really the tennant in this house may be coming to Switzerland after all.  Bum, I know.  But it is okay because we started looking right away for a new place and came across quite a nice place in Nyon which is the town next to this one.  It is a ten minute walk from the train station and trains are much more frequent than from Rolle, which is great news for us.  So we move in on December 2nd.

There are four bedrooms (goodness knows what we are supposed to put in there!  But one will be my closet, I am calling it from now!), a nice open plan kitchen and a light and airy living room.  There are lots of windows, which I love.  It is just the right size for us, as Goldilocks would say.  There is a terasse that stretches the length of the apartment. Woohoo! Finally, space for a barbeque!

The style is more modern than this beautiful house, but in a nice way.  Hey, there is a glass elevator, I almost forgot to tell you!  I am sad to leave this place, but we have noticed a few things that we will not be sad to leave.  It is so echoey – you can hear a whisper from one end of the house to the other.  Not a good plan if we have visitors   And it is so huge that we would really need to buy lots of furniture to make it look like home and to be honest, I don’t really think we are going to spend forever in Switzerland, so it wouldn’t really be worth all the money to furnish.  I would rather take that money travelling!

So off to the new place it is, and I am so much looking forward to meeting all our lovely books and kitchen wares that have been hiding in boxes for the last three months.  It is going to be a great reunion!

We have loads of room as you just read, so we are opening the doors to all of you from the end of January!  If you are in the area (or not), please come by – I will make banana bread.  Or cookies.  That is a promise.

p.s. Yay for Obama!  So excited!