First Days of School




Ada and Lucy started school at BBIS (Berlin Brandenberg International School) on Wednesday 6th January. It was minus 7 degrees celcius and dark!

So far so good with Ada in a younger than expected group (for now) with a delightful teacher and plenty of support staff. Ada kept them all engaged on her first day telling lots of stories! Who knows who featured and what they were doing!?

Lucy tells me after day two that school is great but don't hold my breath as things could change! She has a male homeroom teacher - her first male teacher after seven years at school. She has already joined a group of girls and is enjoying the diversity of her peers and her curriculum having started german and french lessons on her first day!

The ice inside and outside of the car and on the roads at 7.30am in the mornings is rather a challenge in these early days. Finding that windows wont open, windscreen wipers wont work and that at minus 11.5 this morning it is just too cold to do much at all! Not to worry I can always Blog!

Popular posts from this blog

An Ascent of Sunanda Devi (Nanda Devi East)

Image
Climbing past the gendarmes between Camp 1 on Longstaff Col and Camp 2.  I am climbing in the middle distance ANZAC Day always bring back all kinds of memories, some good and some less so. Just recently I had some old slides scanned which arrived just before ANZAC day. It was ANZAC day 22 years ago today that I received a call to get on an immediate flight to India to join a Defence cooperation exercise in India which was to involve an ascent of Nanda Devi. The mountain stands at 7816 metres is it protected by a ring of peaks of which 12 are over 6,400 metres. The first ascent was by Bill Tillman and Noel Odell who were able to enter the Nanda Devi Sanctuary via Rishi Gangi Gorge. The ridge between Nanda Devi and Sunanda Devi The peak has a colorful history which includes the attempted installation of a nuclear powered monitoring device for Chinese nuclear tests. Turned back by bad weather, the device was lost somewhere on Sunanda Devi and was nev
Read more

Three Days in Lisbon are Not Enough!

Image
Lisbon definitely falls into the shabby but chic category. There is a real sense of dynamism here which seems to be a combination of entrepreneurial spirit, to start up costs and supportive government policies It should not have come as surprise to us that three days wasn’t enough time in Lisbon.  Both Lisbon and Porto have been Monocle’s poster children for urban gentrification and progressive local government.  This was combined the features of a one of Europe’s oldest but now faded trading empires: a beautiful port with a hilly shoreline; elaborate and still solid buildings constructed with the wealth of derived from international trade routes to South America, Africa and India; and finally a mix of ethnic groups that came to call Lisbon home. Lisbon is built on seven hills above a pretty harbour and this was a great opportunity for Kate and I to train for Corsica.  The narrow streets were home to lots of
Read more

Risk Reward and Skiing in Kashmir

Image
Risk and reward can be seen as two sides of the same coin.  Normally, when you go to a downhill skiing resort, the coins that you flip are small, small risk small reward.  One of the reasons that I love Gulmarg is that you play the game with bigger coins. Paul and Sam, my brother in-law and nephew, had heard great reports about Gulmarg from Jack, Sam's brother, despite Jack coughing up blood for most of his stay.  They decided that a visit to India was in order and, as Sam is a keen skier,  Gulmarg was the priority destination. The adventure started when we boarded the aircraft in Mumbai when I was informed by a Kashmiri on the same flight that Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri native who had been convicted of supporting a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, had been executed earlier that morning.  Needless to say things were going to be interesting in Srinagar as this had occurred after a number of fatal military clashes on the Line of Control. On arrival at the airport at
Read more