Thanksgiving

I completely missed Thanksgiving (although the real Thanksgiving is not until Dec. 5th this year so there is still time)--I guess I am getting used to being in Germany. Dec 5th is also a German holiday (shoes get put outside the door and filled with candy in the morning) that M is looking forward to.

We are still waiting to hear back from the new school so they can meet with our kids and see about a transfer.

Big news! V is pregnant and due in ~March! The kids are very excited and debating how they will raise the new baby. The obvious question that comes up is citizenship, as far as we understand it at this point, since I do not have a permanent work visa, the baby will not get dual citizenship at birth. However, this seems to be a moot point anyway as Germany does not allow dual citizenship in general, and she will loose German citizenship as an adult if she decided to keep US citizenship (I suspect this is all related to the idea that people should visit Germany to work but not to live).

The weather has turned dark, and cool and rainy now. The sun has come out a few times over the last few weeks but in general it has been very shy. In a way I like this kind of weather, but it would also be nice to get a break for a few days. One of the people at work brought in a crate of fresh smoked herring the other day. He catches them out on the Baltic, soaks them for a day in salt water, then smokes them and we ate them right away. I am used to smoked fish being hard and dried out but when it is fresh it is very good. From the smell of smoked fish, people appeared out of nowhere and started chatting and soon the whole table was surrounded by people eating the fish (I suspect we all also have a vitamin deficiency from the lack of sunlight and this makes the fish more appetizing as well).

PS - There is some snow falling now mixed in with the rain. The first of the season!

PPS - OK, two people from the US said it is on the 25th (today) this year; just goes to show how out of touch I am. And, St. Nicholas Day is actually on the 6th here in Germany.

Schools, again...

Once again there is a problem with the school situation. I mentioned that there was a takeover of control of the school council last school year. All the current teachers were fired and there are all new teachers this year. We didn't want to move the kids again, but it looks like this is not going to work out. We met with the teachers before school a month ago to ask what was going on. It seems the the school has been split into two groups, older students that are receiving regular classroom instruction and younger students that are doing some projects but are largely unsupervised during most of the school day. Our kids are not being taught (which echos the situation we had in the public schools before). We pointed out to the teachers that our son is in the age group that is receiving classroom instructions and they said that he was not included for nonsense reasons (he didn't request it and thus was not selected in the placement decision). I asked if we had any choices about our kids education (as apparently the other parents have) and we were told no. I also asked again for a username and password for the school website so we can communicate and stay on top of events and the volunteer schedule. All of the other (German) parents are able to access the website but we have been excluded and continue to be excluded and kept in the dark. So, we are looking for another school to transfer the kids to. There is another private school that we just learned about. It is farther away, but has regular classroom structure available for all of the kids, and many of the kids from this school transfered there during the takeover, so our kids will know other kids there. We have contacted the school and have a meeting with them in a few weeks, but if there is a transfer it might not be until the end of the year until it can happen.

Name change

I've fallen behind again in blog entries. A lot has happened and I will try to catch up again. Also, I've changed the title so that it is less specific and more general to northern Germany. Because of our commuting and the kids school location and so on, we really live in a region in Schleswig-Holstein, so I have renamed the blog "Norden."

In Oslo

Once again I am back outside of the EU. I just arrived in Oslo, Norway this afternoon and will be here a couple days on business. After checking in to the hotel I walked down to the harbor to have a look around. The central city seems very busy/crowded compared to a lot of cities in Germany. People were fishing in the harbor. Also, on the flight up here we passed directly over the Skagen peninsula. I got a good look at it from the air. The countryside around Oslo is already hilly in contrast to N. Germany, but I am not near the big mountains yet.

V has her driver's license!!!

At last! After many months of paperwork and waiting, V's test was scheduled by the driving authority for this afternoon in a nearby town (after phone calls to see what the hold up was--they were waiting for her driving school to contact them, but we don't have a driving school...). I dropped her off and waited for the results. She did great and we were both a bit shocked she passed on the first try (reminder, some of the answers to the questions are very strange to non-Germans). After the test they handed her a stamped piece of paper, she asked to clarify to make sure she passed and half the class responded "yes." I took her straight to the Kreishaus and after some waiting she was handed her new license after handing over her US one. Then I had some fun making her drive me around the county for a while. It is the first time she has driven in Germany. This is in the nick of time too. School starts back up on Monday and finally I don't have to commute the kids back and forth all day!

In Reykjavik

...

In Helsinki

Actually T and I are in Vantaa, Finland, a town just outside of Helsinki where the airport is located. We are on our way to meet uncle D in Reykjavik, Iceland for a much needed vacation. It is bright and sunny here in Finland. We spent the night at a hotel because we had a 24 hour layover. There is an entertainment center nearby "Flamingo" that we walked to last night, got supper and walked around. It has an indoor pool, bowling alley (that we walked over and looked into with a glass panel floor/ceiling), spa, movie theater, restaurants and attached hotel. We ate in one of the restaurants that overlooked the pool, and people on the other side of a glass wall were in the pool area ordering from the same restaurant. T wanted to see the new Shrek movie but it was only available in Finnish so we did some window shopping instead.