The Shifting Sands

Dear Friends, by now many of you now that just after all the excitement of Amsterdam and a stunning Berlin/Potsdam Autumnal season we took a trip to Mumbai in India. Chris has a work opportunity there and we thought we had better all go and look, see and smell for ourselves what a life in India might be like. Well with that trip and plenty of soul searching we have decided to move to India. You know we love an adventure and the week there showed us that India will be that. Not the four or five star kind we have become used to in Europe of course, but an adventure none the less. Of late, we have had sleepover parties for Lucy, lots of friends here for Ada's 6th birthday and also celebrated my birthday with duck feeding, sledding and hot chocolate. So now we are travelling head first into Christmas. We have Grace, my cousins now 18 year old daughter with us, Kimlie and Dan and Scarlett and Reilly, our friends from Singapore and a goose and a turkey ready for the ove...

Well after such a boring title to this Blog Post one might expect the last two months to have been a bit on the boring side too. Especially compared to our first eight plus months living in Europe. Of course that has not been the case. We have had many many visitors, a trip to Amsterdam and our first really full blown Halloween. Our guests included Trish Murphy, my wonderful friend from Williamstown, Melbourne, a Chinese Exchange Student - also called Lucy!, who stayed with us for a week (she is our Lucy's exchange buddy and hopefully Lucy will go to Shanghai for a week late April and early May 2011). We then had the Giorgini family from Melbourne also. Lots of fun for the girls having extra girly company and someone to carve pumpkins with. We had three days in Amsterdam recently, staying on a house boat. Chris and Lucy went to the Anne Frank Museum and we all enjoyed several hours at the Van Gogh museum. What an amazing collection of art, not just Van Gogh...

Well it is different, that is for sure. We have been here for eleven weeks and in that time Chris has been away at least for five, almost six weeks, mostly in the States. Living in Potsdam, which is old East Germany, means different things on different days. If I am shopping it shows to me just how little German I have learnt in my two and a bit months here and highlights why I must start lessons this week! Potsdamers speak German and Russion and the Berliners who have come here for the quieter life speak some English, as does anyone under 30 years of age - needless to say I have a few favorite shops now and when in supermarkets make a beeline for the younger checkout girls and guys. I have started my cultural immersion program - each week I go to a palace, art gallery, museum or exhibition. So far I have been on an english speaking tour of Schloss (Palace) Chalottenburg, seen the most depressing and probably enlightening exhibition of Kathe Kollwitz art work and on Wedn...

Our Lake, Holy Lake, is fast becoming the centre of our recreation. The girls now have Ice Skates and have had a few opportunities to skate around one of several rinks that locals come and shovel for their own and everyone else’s pleasure. Lucy had eight girl friends sleep over for her twelfth birthday on the 6th of February. Many of them skated too. It is absolutely wonderful that within six weeks of landing in Berlin and only four weeks of school Lucy can have eight girls to sleep over! And now we are on our next adventure. Having driven via Baden Baden only yesterday (some 600km) with a further 500plus km’s today we head for a weeks skiing in Allevard, near Grenoble then up to Disneyland in Paris for the weekend. WE are all very excited, but for different reasons! Post script - Chris wants me to mention that yesterday my tolerance level was for 140km per hour max on the German Auto Bahns but that today he got to 170km per hour and I didn’t flinch!

It has been an interesting few days. Chris arrived home from Denver Colorado on Saturday, just in time to prepare for Ada's birthday. We were lucky enough to go to a yoga class together on Sunday, Bikram Hot Yoga. Yoga done in a 38 degree celcius room. How welcome was that?! Snow was falling outside and I felt like I was in Melbourne - well almost - the instructions were in German and if I was in Melbourne I would have been swimming not doing hot yoga! That afternoon it was time to try the lake - it had looked frozen for a few days and there were a few tentative footprints around the edges - enough to encourage Chris, Lucy and Ada to want to walk across it! When we got there another family was Ice Skating in the middle - that should be enough of a go ahead. We did walk on it - quite a lot really - every so often though, when the ice softened to slush - I took a little run for it! Chris and Lucy just kept throwing the baseball to each other! We found Ice Skater...

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...

Happy New Year to all our family and friends. Or as the Germans would call it - Silvester. Hmm, I will know what that means by next new years I promise. So far I can assume it means - buy masses of fireworks and let them off in the streets from midnight en masse, then at exactly 1am STOP what you are doing, drink a glass of champagne and then go home. Do not pick up the empty cases and do not let off any more fireworks - at least that is what I saw from my window. Backtracking a bit though we took the girls into Berlin to Legoland and to see an OV (original version - english speaking movie) at the Sony Centre a few days ago. Loved Lego land and can't wait to take my nephews there - even the grown up ones! Sony Centre is built on the site of the 'no mans land' between east and west so is quite new and is surrounded by monuments to The Wall. It is 60 hectares and is quite amazing to have such a large area available for construction in the centre of a large c...

Christmas wasn't so "white" as most of the white stuff was turning to ice and slush. Alan, one of Chris's work colleagues, and his wife Donna joined us for Christmas lunch. In Germany, the traditional lunch is a roast goose, potato dumplings and red cabbage. We decided to avoid the red cabbage but the goose and dumplings were superb. Thanks Kate. The girls loved all of their presents especially the sled. We also enjoyed a number of saxaphone solos from Ada. To walk off the excess of lunch we went for a stroll down to the main pedestrian street to visit the local markets. It was only around 3.30 pm when we left home so, as you can see from the pictures, it gets dark early. Yesterday, the 26th, we went for a walk around the lake which is next to our apartment building. For the history buffs, the tudor-esque, neo-Prussian building is Schloss Cecilienhoff where Stalin, Truman and Churchill signed the Potsdam agreement which determined the occu...

This is our apartment and streetscape in Potsdam. Our apartment is one of 6 and we are on the bottom left as you look at the building. Kate has been working hard on her driving skills and we plan on heading out again this afternoon to practice the drive to and from the school. As a result of yesterday's practice run everyone else in the family now has a few more colourful expressions in their vocabulary.

We landed in Berlin on Sunday morning with an outside temperature of minus 19 degrees celcius. Nothing works in minus 19 degrees celcius! It has been a whirlwind four days with city hall registrations, banking bureaucracy, shopping at Ka De Wa for Goose and all the appropriate trimmings like kartoffelklosse (which look like mashed potato balls with fried bread inside!!!), exploring Christmas markets and drinking gluwein, throwing snowballs at each other, marveling at the beauty of snow flakes the size of Ada's hand and of course driving on the other side of the road. We are all a little worse off for that experience! We have been blessed with the most wonderful relocation agents and have not found anything too hard to cope with. Our Christmas tree is beautiful - at least we think so. Happy Christmas Friends and Family - thank you for your support in our moving to Berlin - you will love it when you visit!

Well today we really do leave Australia. We have just spent two busy fun days with relatives in Queensland and now our 115kg of checked bags and Lucy, Ada, Chris and Kate are in the Qantas lounge awaiting our flight and avoiding all last minute requests for more shopping! The sadness and excitement are palpable and the German social(?) systems evident as a stream of emails have hit my inbox saying we cannot register at City Hall as we do not have health insurance in Germany and we must get medical certificates in Australia in order to do so! Too late she cried! Friends and Family this is simply a farewell as we go on our next adventure. Love and Happiness

In just two short weeks we will leave Australia for Germany, via Singapore and a short visit with our friends Kimlie, Dan, Scarlett and Reilly. This is my very first Blog Post and I really dont know what to say other than we are all excited, busy and a little nervous about it all; mostly excited though!! The hardest thing will be seeing everyone we want to see, making sure Emma our cat settles with my Mum and that Lizzie our dog starts her journey to join us safely. Not only do we start our move from our house next Tuesday, Lucy also has her last day at St Michael's for a while and ada has her all important Kinda picnic PLUS a few other things - don't you love the way the universe works!!!!