Spectacle: end of year school play

My eldest daughter's school held its end of year play over the last few days.  We went to watch it on Tuesday. Over the past couple of weeks she has been turned into a zombie with early starts and days spent in the theatre getting it right.  I'm impressed by the resilience of five year-olds that they can survive the demands of the schedule that meant on Friday, Monday and Tuesday they started at 8am and didn't finish the day until nearly 9pm. I made some notes on the things that really stuck with me during the performance and their preparation, here they are:
The lady who shushed us all when we tried to clap on the first three movement breaks.
The utter lack of understanding, because it was lots of French all at once.
The girl who did the free back somersault.
The dance lady who clearly didn't know her own lines.
The bored three year-olds who had come to watch their older siblings and were crying from tiredness.
The boy whose eyes were rolling back in his head as he watched.
The random arm stretch, with its expressive movement.
The random Russian words that I guess were meant to mean something, if only it was that the theme was Russian.
The casually bizarre costumes that look great on some and odd on others, because kids are all different sizes.
A daughter who spent put in her performance, all the while keeping an eye out for her parents.
The music - Stravinskii.
The utter sincerity in their carefully, but not expertly choreographed movements.
The late nights.
The early mornings.
The credit to their teachers.
The words from the Director about community; manifested at the end when dozens of kids and teachers took the applause of the parents.
Lots and lots of small children, who you'd casually under-estimate on a daily basis if you saw them on the bus, aged between 5 and 13, working together and actually doing enormous credit to their hard work.

Goodbye Lindt

Es kann ich nicht verstehen/ Je ne peux pas comprendre

Lindt & Sprungli launched a new range of chocolates in the past week, and there were a few things I noticed when I walked into my local Coop and was smashed in the face by the marketing campaign. The new chocolates are called Hello, and they are somewhat of a departure from what you'd expect from Lindt. On their Swiss website, the company claims that they are known worldwide for their leadership in the premium chocolate segment, which I found interesting, because I thought they were known for making an advert that is acknowledged to be cheesier than the Ferrero Rocher advert. But taking Lindt at their word, and assuming they are the leading premium chocolate maker in the world, the new line of Hello chocolates do not seem to reflect this positioning.

Kid's Skiing Near Geneva

Piou-piou, we look up to you

We took the girls to Valorcine over the holidays, a little resort some friends of ours recommended, 15km north of Chamonix and only 2km from the border with Vallais.  Neither of us had ever really considered skiing before we moved to Switzerland. For myself that's largely because I actually can't physically ski.
We've tried a few lessons last year, so we decided to go for a week  We enrolled them in a week long ski course with a giant yellow bird called Piou-piou, because hey, when you think of animals that might be good at teaching people to ski, you think of birds! Piou-piou is actually the mascot for the Ecole du Ski Francais' courses for kids aged 3 and older.
At the end of the week both girls received a little badge for completing the course. Though the big one clearly deserved it more than her little sister as she completed every minute of the course, whilst altitude sickness (literally: on Christmas eve) and bad weather, combined to make the little one less enamoured of skiing, and in the end she only completed about half the course. I think she was the smallest one on the course, perhaps if the weather was better she would have been ok, but I suspect now we'll have a tough time getting her back on skis.
It occurred to me that the Ecole du Ski Francais might be to skiing what the British Council, or Bell is to English. But then a friend tells me kids the eldest will start skiing with school in a couple of years and be taught by the Ecole Suisse de Ski, which, you'd think might be better (just cos it's Swiss), but according to the World Cup Standings, this isn't so. Anyway, the irony is that from Geneva they have to go to France to ski, as it's closer.

Cycling in Geneva II

Portable chop-sticks, whip 'em out, away you go. Not so easy to put back in

This is an update to my Cycling in Geneva post that featured some lamentations on the dangers of tram tracks. On the right is my wrist as it looked a few days ago after I'd had surgery to repair a torn ligament, note the two pins sticking into it. They are  holding some bones in place, and making sure my new ligament doesn't suffer damage.

What you can see is the result of me getting my front wheel stuck in a tram line and going over the handle bars. I didn't think much of it, but subsequent handshaking by an over-enthusiastic man with a beard and too many power cleans followed by pull-ups, sadly did for a wrist that I thought was only "a little bit sore".

Birthday Parties in Geneva

Visit lulaloo.ch for great invites

There's a song on kids TV that my daughters like to sing and dance to. Just before they do the birthday cards for the day they play a song and video, the words go something like "Birthday party, everybody's here; Birthday party, fun for everyone!"  The girls like to dance around shouting this at every opportunity. But since the big one's birthday party last weekend, we have heard rather less of it. This might be because we are mid-birthday season with the little one's coming up next week and the impetus for the song's performance has been lost.

French Lessons

We started going to French lessons provided free by the canton, because our eldest daughter goes to a local primary school.  I can't work out whether the idea of the free French lessons is benign, a gentle encouragement to learn the language so we can support our daughter in her school work, or aimed more at encouraging our cultural assimilation. The class is a ragtag of immigrants to Switzerland, a mixture of people from all over, but mainly, oddly, from Bolivia or Korea.  There are a few folk from the Middle East and one or two Europeans. None of us are very good at the language, we all try hard one way or another.

Healthcare in Geneva

I thought I should fire this thing back up, as the summer distractions are now well and truly gone. So this post is about doctors, in Geneva, and the one I'm seeing at the moment who is making me laugh. Way back in August I crashed off my bike, high siding and landing on my hand. At the time I decided it was only a flesh wound, so carried on with slight soreness that seemed to be getting better, that was until I was doing pull-ups in the gym (will cover in another post), and made me and the two guys I was working with almost throw up as my wrist made a huge cracking sound.  The sort of sound that tells you, really, you should go see a doctor. So I did.