Lazy Sunday in Bavaria

Thought I'd post a non-exciting blog entry for your enjoyment. Just a little of what we did this weekend.

Friday afternoon, I left work early to have a meeting at the school (no biggie), and we had a nice family evening. Very non-eventful.

Saturday morning, David had a friend over to hang out with until Sunday morning. He's in the 4th grade, but very close to David's age. He's from California and his family got here just after we did and they plan to be here for 2 years. He and David hit it off well and they play MineCraft together while they Facetime all the time. They played great together the whole time and even let Katherine join in too. We let them have McDonalds on Saturday for lunch and John made Schnitzel and Pomme Frites for dinner.What is that you ask? Schnitzel is thin (usually lamb) meat that is breaded and baked. Very popular in this part of Germany and Austria as well. The schnitzel we had was pork, but it can be veal or lamb too. Pomme frites are french fries. I'm gonna weigh as much as a house by the time we go home. The food is great and John is doing very well adjusting to not being able to read directions to cook!

On Saturday morning while John went to pick up David's friend, Katherine and I ventured out for a little shopping. It's supposed to get colder this week and Katherine doesn't have a heavy enough coat yet. I was really just looking for a particular store that we've liked before, but stumbled upon a nice little mall about a 15 minute drive from our house. It was great! It was raining a little bit, but there was a parking garage attached to the mall, and we got there early enough that they weren't too busy. We successfully found a nice, warm coat for the princess as well as a few other things. I think she'll at least be a bit more equipped for the weather this week. David still needs some warmer things, but we picked up a couple of warmer shirts for him too. All in all, we're ready for this:

Those temperatures are all in Celsius, but you get the idea. It's getting colder and we have the first chance of snow!

Last week, the kids asked when we might see snow, and I told them sometime over the next month. David was excited at the prospect of cancelled school coming soon...until I had to burst his bubble to let him know that they don't cancel school here for a little snow. Poor kid. He can't imagine having to sit in school when there's snow on the ground! We are ready with some snow sleds we had in Dallas, but they take sleds to a whole notha level here. I think we might need to invest in one of these super cool contraptions with steering and braking. The park a few houses down from us has a couple of decent hills that looks like they might be fun to sled down. Brakes especially might be necessary.

Anyway, Katherine and I had a successful shopping trip Saturday morning. I was re-reading some of the older posts on the blog today and remembering what we felt like our first month or so here. Shopping really is difficult, and I've confirmed that with a co-worker who had an expat in the US a couple of years ago. She agrees that it's much easier to shop and find what you need in Dallas than it is here. However, everything really does feel like it's falling into place now - we understand how things work a little better and we're certainly much more settled now than we were. Now I'm looking forward to skiing!!

As we've mentioned before, Sundays here are quite different than in Dallas. Pretty much nothing is open and everything is pretty quiet. Personally, I've found myself looking forward to the relaxation that comes on a Sunday. We rarely leave the house, and didn't today because the weather is cloudy and cold. We catch up on TV shows, I read, the kids play, and we mostly just take it easy for the day. It is really nice! Today and yesterday I even dusted off a German language program, so I'm going to try to do better with that now. I did notice a couple of times the differences with "Bavarian" and "German." I'd heard, even before we left the US, that northern Germans talk different than in the south, but of course, I don't know enough to be able to tell. There were a couple of phrases in my German lesson this afternoon that I've heard differently here. Some of the people I work with are from other parts of Germany and they also confirm that some words are different, but they understand 95% of what the other is saying. At lunch this week at work, a northern German pointed to the people next to him and said, "that's not German" although it certainly sounded German to me. Apparently they were talking Bavarian. Who knew? Of course, I can't tell. I also think it's interesting that the Germans I work with often have a very hard time understanding the Scottish people we work with. They don't have any trouble at all with Brits, but they really struggle to understand Scots when they're speaking English. I don't have a problem at all, so I don't understand what is difficult about their accents, but apparently they're different enough that communication (even in English) can be dicey.

Enough with language...

David's friend left this morning, but by 3:00 in the afternoon, they were back on Facetime together.

Katherine is now asking for when she can have a sleepover, so we'll look forward to that in the coming weekends.

This evening, we'll get ready for another busy week - get the kids packed and focused for school and get mommy packed and focused for work, and get Daddy ready for the million things that we still need to do. He said the other day after we got home from our trip last week that every time  he looked around, he found something else that he needed to do. I told him to quit looking around :-).

So - that's life in Bavaria for the Fergusons! We miss our friends and family in the US, so Skype/Facetime when you can!