Easter

 

Bit late for a post about Easter.  Perhaps I should save it and combine it with Christmas and do a ‘Celebrations of Jesus’ special!  Or not.

Easter tree at school

A few differences between Australia and Austria for Easter.  Australia:  aisle after aisle full of hundreds of brightly wrapped chocolate eggs in all shapes and sizes in various brands, mostly packaged in elaborate boxes accompanied with a toy or a gift of some sort at ridiculous prices, adorning the shelves just after Valentines Day.  Austria:  Milka or Lindt.  Small, medium or large bunny.  Couple of options for small individually wrapped chocolates in packets in the shape of eggs, chicks or bunnies.  Making an appearance a few weeks before Easter.  And that is all.  Australia:  Kids going hunting on Easter Sunday with a huge basket filling it with dozens of foil wrapped chocolate eggs and then receiving a massive egg with toy from every member of their immediate and extended family and even some from friends resulting in a pantry full of chocolate which makes mum fat and spotty and has to be used up in muffins before it goes off and before it’s added to at Christmas.  Austria:  kids with homemade basket the size of an adults cupped hand running around looking for coloured hard boiled eggs which they pile together in one big basket and then sit down together and eat one with a piece of bread for morning tea.  Accompanied by a tiny bunny (Lindt) and one gummy sweet given by the teacher.  Good Friday:  Australia:  Everything is closed.  You can only eat fish (fish and chip shop here we come).  Everybody chillaxes and eats and drinks and drinks.  Austria:  Everything is open.  You can’t buy fish, except a whole fish, scales and head and eyes and all, and there are no fish n chip shops.  Everyone goes to work, normal day.  Easter Sunday:  Australia:  Get together with family, eat chocolate, eat and drink and eat.  Do nothing.  Austria:  Go to church.  Eat boiled eggs.



We had boiled eggs coming out of our ears!  As with every season or occasion in Austria everyone puts homemade decorations at their doors and in their windows.  It’s a bit naff, but I like it, but then I am a bit naff myself.  Before Easter and at the start of Spring you can pick thin branches that grow by the water that bud little fluffy white things that resemble rabbits tails.  I can’t remember what they’re called but they’re lovely and everyone hangs decorated eggs on them.  Both kindergarten classrooms had one and each child had to bring in 3 blown out eggs to decorate to hang on it.  I had never heard of blown out eggs and so I asked the teacher to show me how to do it as Amelia needed to take some in.  If you don’t know, you get a pin, and carefully poke a tiny hole at each end (not as easy as it sounds) and then literally blow the gucky stuff out of it (not as easy as it sounds).  So this is what I did at home, and I felt like I was giving birth but trying not to, if you know what I mean.  Next day I went in to work where the teacher was preparing some eggs incase some children forgot to bring them in.  She used a little contraption not unlike a bike pump especially for blowing out eggs.  Well, why didn’t you tell me that before??  But I was impressed with the way she decorated them using marble paint, then threading through ribbon and beads to hang them on the tree.  The week before Easter we took the class out into the woods, had a picnic, and each child collected a stick with two prongs which we then took back to the classroom to make easter bunnies with, by adding two googly eyes and some fleece for the body.  Pretty cool idea. 

Easter hike with obstacles

Good Friday (school was closed and Maciek was unemployed) we enjoyed a bit of a sleep in (unusual) till about 7am and woke to a deer meandering across the field below us, from one bit of forest to another.  It was a wet and cold weekend, misty across the mountains, and we went out for a walk in the woods and a little picnic under the shelter of a tree.  It’s awesome in the woods on days like that, feels like being on the set of Lord of the Rings.  We had to negotiate our way around huge fallen trees, and all the debris caused by the heavy snow.  Easter Sunday the kids hunted for eggs, miniature kinder surprise ones individually wrapped in a packet is all I could find, and in all the excitement we didn’t even notice that it was snowing!  Nooooo!  We all said.  Amelia had been so excited about the prospect of being able to wear a dress and sandals, and we’d just packed away all our winter gear.  But it was pretty, and it didn’t last.  The next day it was gone. 

"Noah's got more than me!!"

Since then it has warmed up, so much so that for the past few days it has been 30 degrees, and this week it will be mid 20’s.  So Milly has realized at last her dream of wearing a dress again.  Also since then we have welcomed into the world our new little nephew and cousin, Lucas, born on Thursday 26^th April.  Congratulations Jo, Andrew, Jakson and Ollie!  Looking forward to meeting little Lucas soon.  XXXX

p.s  here is a pic of Milly dressed up as Pippi Longstocking.  Prizes for guessing how we got her hair to stand up like that!

Pippi





Spring has Sprung

 

The snow has almost all disappeared apart from a few die hard patches here and there.  The mountains are still holding on to it although even that has become patchy in the last few days and I think it’s probably the last of the snowsports.  Maciek has even packed his gear away (whaaat???) and has started out on his mountain biking already. 

Bye bye snow

It’s like the snow never was.  Hard to believe that a month ago the place was hidden behind walls of ice, and when the first bits of grass started to peep through it was quite exciting, as if we were seeing it for the first time!  People have been out sorting their gardens, all fences and fields, rooftops and rivers are fully visible and the first white flowers have lifted their heads to the sun.  I even had my first frightening encounter with ‘the first bee’ a month ago when everything was still buried deep in snow which was weird.  It ambushed me as I left the bank, waiting for me it was, the wicked little wasp!

Speaking of pesky insects, spring brings out the ‘ticks’ which live in the long grasses and in the forests.  They can carry a virus infects the brain and makes you very ill and I’ve heard of people who have died from it.  It’s apparently worse in other areas of Austria and not so common here, but everyone I speak to says they are becoming more common in this area and as we intend to spend time hiking and playing in the woods in Summer needless to say this has me worried.  There is an immunisation you can get to protect you against this virus but trying to find out the ins and outs such as side effects etc is difficult with the language.  But I have asked around as many people as I can and so we’ll be off to the doctors next week to get it.  I thought we left all the dangerous insects back in Australia!

The local brew

We have a birds nest in the eaves between our balcony and our bedroom and every morning with the first of the light one of them sits on our sill and tweets away.  Some might find this annoying but I love it.  It’s either that or Amelia and Noah fighting over a toy to wake me up, so I choose the bird!

The weather has been beautiful, a bit cold still in the mornings (-1, and we only have to scrape ice off the windows some of the time!) but warms up during the day and some days it’s reached as high as 20 degrees!  We walked through town on Thursday with some friends after school and bought ice cream, great value at E1.00 each for a delicious big scoop.

Damn you POO!

One thing that’s not so good about spring is that the farmers are back with a vengeance with their ‘cow poo spraying machines’!  The field directly below us was sprayed on Friday which meant we couldn’t even open our windows to air out the house let alone sit out on the balcony for our afternoon coffee.  I had to work late last week and to save maciek having to round up the kids again and pick me up, I decided to walk home, plus the sun was shining and it’s not like I couldn’t do with the exercise after months of hibernation!  Maciek warned me that it might not be so pleasant as the farmers had been out. ‘Meh’ I shrugged, and all was great until I reached the last leg of the hill that leads to our place!  Seriously, it’s like a cow has literally walked up to you, turned around, and farted in your face!!

On that note I shall leave you with greetings for a Happy Easter! Hope it’s enjoyable and delicious.  Until next time…..

Maciek boarding with Aussie mates

hot choc at mid station

The garden at school

The Native Speaker

Kids dressed up for carnival day, school in background

view from my classroom

It’s been three months now since I started my job.  I am really enjoying it although there are a few too many hours which left me exhausted at first.  The first week was great, I was a novelty.  Second week the novelty was beginning to wear off as the kids began to realize I couldn’t really understand them, and some of them became curious to see how far they could push the limits.  The third week was terrible!  If the teacher left the room, it was chaos!  It was like I was invisible, and mute!  They completely ignored me, and it was a real struggle with the language barrier.  In the first few weeks one little girl cried every morning about coming to Kindergarten – all because of me!  Because I only spoke English and she didn’t like me!  She gave me the foulest looks!  And one little boy wouldn’t even look at me when I tried to approach him, and apparently only referred to me as ‘that woman’!  It’s almost impossible to build a rapport with the children when you can’t speak their language.  Things slowly improved as the weeks went on.  I am picking up more words and phrases every day which has made a huge difference, but still half the time I have no idea what they are saying to me, and it must be frustrating for them if they need help with something, or have a problem with someone and I can’t help to sort it out.  There are 19 in the class, 3-6 year olds.  Some of them still ignore me if they are up to no good and I am trying to put a stop to their behavior, which is incredibly frustrating, but I think I am slowly winning them over with the gymnastics every second week in their P.E class, again extremely difficult and I am having to demonstrate much more than I am actually physically capable of at the moment having not exercised for months!  And miming and silly facial expressions and speaking broken English with a funny accent all seem to help!

Every second week during the winter we took the kids Eislaufen (Ice skating) at the outdoor rink.  This entailed helping 19 children put on all their snow gear including helmets, (this took 30 minutes), traipsing to the ice rink in town, helping 19 children take off their snow boots and put on their ice skates (all have different types of clasps and buckles etc which I am now an expert at!)(this also takes 30 mintues), being the tea and snack lady on the sidelines (beats making a donkey of myself on the ice!), and then helping them all take off their ice skates and put their snow boots back on (this takes another 30 minutes), and then traipsing back to Kindergarten, before helping them all get their snow gear off again and get ready for lunch.  All this for 20 minutes on the ice.  And I always broke a nail!

Everyday they play out in the garden (again during winter this entailed helping them all get dressed up in snow gear which takes about 20 minutes for a 20 minute play!).  The garden was under nearly two metres of snow.  The boundary, in the way of a fence, was invisible.  So much of the time was spent making sure kids didn’t wander into the carpark.   One of the weeks some areas completely iced over, and I went over on my bum a couple times.  Somewhat embarrassing!  And then the snow began breaking up and becoming unstable once March arrived, and most of us became half buried if we took a step in the wrong place!  This was funny because is happened to everyone and not just the silly ‘English’ teacher who had no water proof pants (that would be trousers for ‘English’ readers, not underwear!)  Speaking of pants, there is a doctor nearby called Dr Pantz.  And whatsmore, his wife works with him, so they are a ‘pair of pantz’!  As you can imagine this had me in a fit of hysterics when if first heard about it! (and while we’re on the subject, there is a law firm also called ‘Schlapper and Fuchs’!!)

So back to Kindergarten - Amelia had trouble at first with me being there and not being able to see me whenever she liked, and there were a few tears to begin with, also from Noah who could see me from his classroom when I was in the garden, which broke my heart!  But then Amelia’s ‘English’ teacher told her she was the luckiest girl in the kindergarten because nobody else’s mummy worked there, and after that she was great!

A few things are hard to get my head around, there are things that go on which in Australia and England would be unacceptable and leave me wide eyed and speechless, but it’s hard to know what is simply cultural difference (which I have to leave alone) or what is actually unacceptable only nobody is doing anything about it!  I am constantly asking ‘is that okay?  Is that allowed?’  Some examples:

·         Lunch is cooked at the school, lovely fresh organic food (my favourite part of the day) and sometimes during lunch the food runs out, and little 5 year old Annie (not her real name) is sent down to the kitchen to fetch a refill, carrying a hot casserole dish for which she was told to pull her sleeves down over her hands so she wouldn’t get burnt.  Another time 6 year old Susie (not her real name) brought up a steaming hot heavy pan of soup, which she was just about to drop before she laid it on the table.  The kitchen is two flights of stairs down, by the way.

·         In the snow filled garden kids use ‘slidies’ which they sit on to slide down little hills formed by the snow, one of which ended with a wall.  No-one told the kids they shouldn’t do this, or that it was dangerous, until one kid actually smacked into the wall which ended in tears, but the activity was still allowed to continue.

·         At gymnastics the kids are allowed to run around in the gym hall in socks, which has resulted in quite a few slippages!  They also played a game in the classroom where they ran around with their slippers on and at certain signals had to remove a shoe, the removed shoes being left where they were taken off, resulting on kids tripping over left right and centre.

·         We went to the park and six kids had climbed up a big tree at once.  I don’t think kids are even allowed to climb trees in Australia anymore?

·         ‘Kid A’ aggressively bit ‘Kid B’ and I jumped into the situation making out that ‘kid A’ was in serious trouble.  I took them to the teacher so that she could sort out the problem only to be told ‘well that’s because ‘kid B’ was waving his photo in ‘kid A’s’ face and ‘kid A’ doesn’t like this, so, that’s what happens’.  And that was it.  Whaaat??

Some of you may read that and think so what, not a big deal, but it’s a struggle for me after working with kids for such a long time in a place overrun with health and safety do’s and don’ts!

Anyway, I’m grateful to be able to work here instead of cleaning toilets in a hotel!  Apart from a few frustrating bits I really enjoy it.  My job is to expose them to as much English vocabulary as they are ready for and as much as they want to learn.  Some kids are really interested and want to do the English work all the time.  For a bit of fun I might start to teach the ‘How Now Brown Cow’ and ‘The Rain in Spain’ stuff, just to see if they can say it, and for even more fun I might teach them Maciek’s favourite – One smart fellow, he felt smart, two smart fellows, they felt smart, three smart fellows, they felt smart, and they all felt smart together!  Too inappropriate? (If you don’t get it try saying it quite fast!)

P.S  The little boy who wouldn’t look at me and called me ‘that woman’ at the beginning of the year, actually blew me a kiss the other day as he skipped out of the classroom to his mum!  Which was nice!

my little English section!