Today was a crazy morning. As Natalie had already left for school, I was in charge of sending the kids off to wait for the school bus. So they set off in time (like they would). About 25 minutes later I heard someone at the door. It was the kids, the school bus hadn’t arrived, some of the neighbours had driven past them with their kids, others were seen returning to their houses. So I tried to phone up Natalie so she could pick them up. No answer. I phoned up the school. They told me that the bus had broken down and there would be a new one from Kirkwall, but she couldn’t give me a time frame. So because the children were all wet from waiting so long for the first bus, they quickly changed trousers and shoes and headed off again. One minute later they were back at the door. The backup bus had just driven by their stop and they hadn’t been there yet. Luckily we can see the whole bus route from our house and saw that it was doing it’s regular loop, which meant that the kids would get a second chance about 500m from our house if they reached that spot before the bus had finished its loop of 2.5 km. So they started running, all against the strong wind. I was sitting at the window in the bedroom, following the bus’ every move, unfortunately I couldn’t see the children. Just as the bus came around its last corner, I saw Nanouk approaching the crossroads. Phew! That was too much excitement for one morning!

We’ve always liked the wind and storms (despite the wind pressing water into several creeks of the walls and causing small leaks in different places of the house... But this time we had the buckets ready and knew where to put them, so it was actually more exciting than annoying!) But back to the wind: I can honestly say I’ve never had this much fun with wind in all my life! We were just about sitting there, held only by the wind! Unbelievable!




(There are more photos on the flickr page on your left)


Tap dancing was exciting - but also a little annoying: Knowing you are the youngest person in the room (by about 20 years!) but still being the slowest! Hopefully I’ll do better next time (the other folk had had two lessons before I started, so I’m hoping to make up soon...)

Craft club was fun, too! And I finished Matt’s jogging head band, a little pouch for my crochetting hooks and got a lot further with Maleah’s legwarmers...

So, now for another round of cards with my family - hoping I won’t stay last (argh!! when did that happen?? Children beating me???) and then an early night - as there’s another exciting week ahead!


Maleah's First Blog Entry:

we hade lotes of fun in the Wind. I nierli fel ovr . I bilt a tauer aut of Sand.
It was neis in the Shool. the Wave from the See are weri hei.
It is weri neis in Orkney. We hafe a neis Haus And a ne is Bedroom and a neis Bed wed Bedwormers

Time flies, but I’ve said that often on this blog. There are so many new things every week. We have found semolina and apple sauce, thank you for all your tipps! Semolina is even sold in our village shop - we were just looking for a wrong package at a wrong place! And yes, I know how to make apple sauce myself, and I have made it. But it’s just frustrating, to go through all the work and then hear: “well, the one from the jar we have with Papi ist just sooo much better!” So I’ve stopped making it myself...

So, why are we so busy all the time? Well, here’s our agendas (only if you’re interested - if not, just skip this paragraph)
Nanouk: chess club, Netball, swimming, crafts club - where he comes with me - and he’s the only child knitting, all the others do cross stich pictures
Maleah: tambourine club (she was already performing this week!) chess club
Nat: tap dance (starting tomorrow), swim club (not started yet) crafts club
Matt: assistant at the athletics club

As you see we’re getting quite involved, meeting people and doing interesting things! Also I’ve been at school most of this week, being there two thirds of the lessons. This week I was in P4 most of the time, and because it was so nice, I’ve asked to go back to that class next week!
For today I want to start looking at what I need to write up, filing my notes, because I’ll have to hand in a report after the six weeks.
But I’m having a great time, and it’s interesting to see, how many things are different, even if the children and the teaching itself is very similar!
I will keep you posted on my findings (if you’re interested :o)

M&J have arrived well at our house, they are settling in and have already had the reporter from the newspaper interviewing them. Today they’re going to meet my class again (they met for a glass of wine in autumn) but today they will teaching them, so I’m hoping they’ll like them as much as I do!)

Today the weather is not as beautiful as usual, so I’m not too sure if I’m going to the shop by bike. Of course, going to school by car has enabled me to pick up some milk, or a cup from the buffalo farm (for Matt’s birthday) on my way home, so I was hoping to do some cycling today. But, hopefully, the tap dancing tomorrow will not only be fun but also exercise.

And, of course, tonight we’re going for a good meal as it’s Matt’s birthday! I’ve organised a babysitter and for Christmas we got this voucher for a restaurant in Kirkwall from a good friend. It’s called the foveran. And whenever I mention it to anyone, their eyes light up and they start raving! So we’re really looking forward to that! Thank you, Kathrin!!

We’ll keep you updated about all our clubs, the meal and our life! Somehow, everytime I write I think, this is probably the last long blog. After this it’ll just be: “Nothing new or exciting this week”. But somehow we still seem far from that point...

So keep watching this space!

Since we’ve arrived in Orkney I’ve been doing some running, always having to monitor my knee which has been acting up for some years now. Now that I’ve got quite a lot of time on my hands, I can do a session every day, even if it’s only a 10 minute warm up and strech. So I’m still somewhat confident to be running the Hoy Half Marathon in the middle of June. Running in Orkney is somewhat different than in Switzerland. I’ve got a small loop around our house that I’m running, but the running times are very difficult to compare. I had to start writing down the wind direction and speed in my running log book. Depending on the direction of the wind, the first half of the loop is very fast and the second very slow or the other way round. The other day I even ran a 8k stretch home from Nanouk and Maleah’s school, a lot of times facing a 50km/h wind and constant rain. What a workout that was! At least my knee held up, which could also be attributed to the glass of wine I had before. That doesn’t mean, that I’ll be standing at the starting line of the Hoy Half Marathon with a bottle of Whisky in my hands...

Another quite funny thing is, that when you drive a car past a herd of sheep or a flock of geese at 100 km/h, they don’t move an inch. If you leasurely jog past them, they run/fly off as if I was the resident butcher or hunter. The geese particularly dislike me, the fly off, when I’m still 100m away. Just glad they haven’t seen the movie ‘The Birds’ by Hitchcock yet.

I’ve also gone back to my sandpit roots of sports and have started helping out at the local athletics club. I was surprised at how many kids take part in training. Dozens of highly motivated kids (at times there are more than a hundred) run around. Yesterday I had my first long jump training session. It’s such a long time since I’ve done it myself that I had to spend a lot of time on Youtube to figure out how to teach the kids to long jump. So I hope I can do these sessions with the same kids for this half year so I can pass some of my expreriences on to them.

Luckily I’ve been for my run today already as now it is pouring down like crazy. We can’t always talk about the nice weather, sometimes it really is quite miserable. But I have to say, so far there have been very few days where the sun hasn’t been out. To be fair there also have been very few days where it hasn’t rained. But I’ll take this weather any time over two weeks of Swiss fog.

So another week almost over, time is racing and soon our house swappers M&J will arrive in Switzerland. The house swap is in full gear!

So, our second week has started and we’re still fine! I’ve just come back from an hour long bike ride to the kids’ school to bring Maleah her snack which I had forgotten to pack. (Some mornings are really easy and we’re ready ages before the bus leaves - but others are similar to Switzerland with cranky kids, unsuitable clothes (at least it’s only the trousers, as they wear a school T-shirt and jumper) and running off for the bus in a hurry... Today was one of those mornings! I persuaded Maleah to try a new meal at school today, instead of the “safe option: sandwich”, but not sure if she’ll like the dumplings, so I wanted her to have a good snack in her break. And as the weather is gorgeous (again!!) I decided to go by bike! It’s only about 7 kilometres per way, but it’s all up and down! But still, it was wonderful, and I wish I’d brought our good camera! So now, all you get is a put together photo taken with my mobile: It’s Deerness, the whole peninsula, on the right of the photo you see the road that leads on to Deerness.

Yesterday we all went on a very adventurous bike ride to the Brough of Deerness. (Link here: http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/broughofdeerness) Matt had been studying the map and found “quite a short way, maybe some bumpy roads and we’ll have to walk a bit”. So off we went!
The roads (paths?) were very bumpy indeed, but we all had fun, either avoiding the puddles or riding right through them, but then the road stopped and we had to walk. Well, we had planned that. But what we hadn’t thought of was that there was no path or anything leading from the dead end road to the Brough, so we stomped through fields, which would have been perfect for water buffaloes, but more difficult to negotiate for humans, who weren’t even wearing wellies!
But, we got there and had a great time at the beach, finding the most beautiful stones:


On our way back, as the excitement was diminishing, exhaustion was rising and we were all happy to be back at the house and sit in front of a lovely warm fire!

I’ve just read Matt’s German blog again. We try to write more or less about the same things in the German and English one - so I’ll try to cover some of the things he wrote about:

Shopping: It’s still a challenge finding all the products in the shops. In Switzerland, for instance, the eggs are with the dairy, took us ages to find them here, and only “bumped into them” while looking for some flour in the baking section! Mostly fun, and quite adventurous, but also very time consuming! Still do a lot of shopping in our local shop, which is very nice, but does not stock half the things we’re looking for - but we’ve managed to cook delicious meals every day, so we’re not complaining! Have not found semolina yet, took us long enough to find out what it’s called in English, but are still hopeful, they’re probably somewhere we’re not expecting them, like next to the wine or with the washing up liquid :o) Also had quite some problems finding mashed apples, which we eat a lot of in Switzerland, as a desert, but also to accompany various main dishes which go amazingly well with mashed apples/apple sauce/??? We’ve found two things which are similar (even if lumpy), but I’ve now been told they might be somewhere close to the pasta sauce, so we’ll keep on looking!

Nanouk had a good playdate with a friend, playing hockey on the muddy road and I had a good Saturday evening with knitting, stitching and crocheting ladies at the community centre! It’s great to work together and not home alone!

So, I think that’s all for the moment. I’ll leave you with another beautiful picture taken this morning. Just beautiful whenever we look out of the window!