Happy holidays 1 : Berlin

This winter we've embarked on a long driving holiday in Europe covering Berlin, Brussels and Paris. We wanted to spend winter in Europe ( last year we were in the States and the year before in Europe) seeing the wonderful festivities around Christmas- its like being in India for Diwali. Some Internet research showed us that the three top cities for Christmas was Berlin, Paris and Brussels and we are always game or long drives so off we set.
The girls have 3 weeks holidays and the hubby took off three weeks as well. I manged to get 2 weeks and 2 days :) So on Wednesday evening I got back from office at 6 and we set off for the first hotel at Nurenberg- halfway between Berlin and Zurich. We had chosen a hotel just off the highway and it was just a night stop to break the 9 hour drive to Berlin. We reached at 10:30 at night, and after a leisurely breakfast ( the girls discovered a children's play room near the breakfast room) and were thrilled, we set off at 11 am. After many breaks ( let me tell you the loos off the German highways are terrible) we reached our apartment in Berlin in the evening. It's a nice service apartment so we can have our own breakfast, have either lunch or dinner in the apartment and only suffer the tasteless European food for one meal :)
On Friday we walked past the famous Berlin sights- Brandenburg gate, victory statue etc and reached the Berlin zoo. The kids were quite sporting, except for the last 15 mins when A insisted on being carried.we realized it was a 3 km walk in the cold weather. The Berlin zoo was awesome and there were so many animals-seals, hippos, lions, tigers, rhinos etc etc and all quite close up. We ended up spending the whole day there. We got back to the hotel and after an evening siesta set out for. South Indian restaurant which was terrible. That night S got a stomach bug and spend the whole night throwing up and recovering the next day. Luckily it was 24 hour thing and by the next evening she was bouncing around. 
On Sunday we went to the national history museum which has the tallest mounted dinosaur on display in the world and it was great fun. The museum had  really informative stuff about the solar system, dinosaurs, animals and birds and evolution, and S was a bit interested in it ( gets better each time) but A got quite bored after the animals section. In the afternoon we saw Frozen in the cinema- a treat for the girls as they are not allowed in Zurich cinemas (even for children's films). Unfortunately that night A got the same stomach bug so we spend the night rushing to the loo, and the day recovering in the room.
Over the next two days we saw some of the famour Berlin sights - the Berlin wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Dome etc and on 24th night Santa visited and the girls were happy with the contents of their stockings on 25th morning. They had written a list of items Santa should bring and after a last trip to the shop on 24th evening (while the girls were asleep) we were able to get at least 2 items on each of their lists plus some additional small stuff (like Olaf the snowman).
We left Berlin for Brussels on Christmas day, more on that in the next post.

The fun stuff and the not so fun stuff

What I enjoy with the girls

1.     I love skiing with S. Yesterday we went for our first skiing of this season. A had her first lesson today and S brushed up on what she learnt last year. We went up to the top of the Hoch Y Brig mountain with the trainer and S and I skied down, and it was just amazing. Being able to ski with S, in the sun, gliding down the mountain and looking at the beautiful snow on the mountains

2.     Ice skating with S. S got very good at this last year but after she broke her leg while ice sakting i thgouth she might not watn to do it again this year. But she’s back on her skates and enjoying it. We went twice this year, and i want to try to go as much as possible. Again a lot of fun gliding through the ice with S.

3.     Reading books to the girls. Bedtime ritual is 2 books each. If daddy is in town he reads two books to them and I read two, otherwise i read all four. They chose their own books and sometimes A chooses really baby books, but we don’t mind. Its fun to be babies again

4.     S reading a book to us. S reading has really improved and with some help she can read books now (not  novels, but simpler picture books such as Gruffalo etc). She loves to read them to A and me and we love to listen.

5.     Swimming with A. A has a red crab which she around her chest with which she can float easily. She has started kicking and moving her arms around a bit and ‘swimming’ from the middle of the pool to one side (breadth wise). She is super excited to do this and S also swims along with her. A loves to play in the baby paddle pool as well and can happily crawl along the edge, slide down the baby slide and play with her rubber  toys in the paddle pool

6.     Playing board games with the girls. We used to do this a lot before I started working but nowadays there is no time during the week, and the weekends it is either housework or some activity outside. Also need to update the board games we have-seem to be playing the same games for the last year!

7.     Ok this is not the hubby’s list but the things he enjoys doing with the girls are

a.     Showing them animals – in the last 6 months he has taken them to Zurich zoo, Hyderabad zoo and Montreux zoo, all without me. They love to see the animals with Daddy and he enjoys seeing the animals with them. They have many extinct animals books which only Daddy reads to them and they see stuff about animals on the IPad together.

b.     Drawing and painting with S. The hubby is much better at drawing and painting than me and the girls have realised this quite early. He is the go to for any request to draw a uinicorn, horse, flower etc. He quite enjoys it too and the latest project has been to teach S to draw a self portrait using some technique they learnt together from Youtube.

c.     Cooking with the girls. They often make muffins and cakes together and we need to find a children’s cookbook so they can make other stuff together as well.

d.     Science talk. The hubby loves to talk about planets, stars and other science stuff. He is much more into the Youtube stuff than me and is always showing them interesting stuff on it.

What i don’t enjoy so much

1.     The stress in the mornings. I seem to be getting up earlier everyday but we are still late for school and I am late for work. Most of the morning i seem to be shouting at the girls and getting super stressed. I’m not even enjoying the car ride to school as I’m always calculating whether I’m going to catch a particular train or not. I need to find a solution for this as it does not look like the girls are in any hurry to drink their milk, eat their breakfast etc etc

2.     A’s eating habits – She leaves most of the lunch I pack for her (though i try to give her all the things she likes) so I try to make sure she has a good breakfast and a good dinner. Breakfast is super stressed as I am always trying to rush them out of the house by 8 am. Dinner is getting worse and worse. A knows I’m desperate for her to eat something so I have to feed her, and she’s gone from sitting at her table to lying down on the sofa and waiting for me to fed her. I know I have to break this routine but I am so worried about her weight and her not eating anything.

3.     A’s sleeping habits. A still sleeps with us. She goes to sleep in her own bed, but when she waked up will cry and then i have to go and bring her to our bed. She also wants me to lie down with her or sit with her while she goes off to sleep, which nowadays is getting later and later. I put her in bed at 9:15 and she doesn’t sleep before 10! The kids take a loooong nap in school and though I’ve told the teacher many times to wake her up early i don’t think that is happening. So net net by the time I’m free to read a book/watch TV/chat with the hubby its aleady 10 pm and I’m yawning!

Celebrations galore!

Last two weeks have been a series of celebrations. We try to celebrate Diwali every year, even if no one else does in this place. And Halloween is very big in the girls school. For Diwali, we had the (not so early morning) oil bath and small puja. Luckily it fell on a Sunday so we didn’t have to rush. We put up some Diyas in the balcony and also did hand sparklers, which the girls loved. In the evening we went to the nearby temple, and then met up with some Indian family friends for dinner. I was thinking of hosting a pot luck Diwali lunch at home, but the hubby’s lack of enthusiasm combined with my reluctance to spend the whole weekend cleaning and preparing and then clearing up, with no time to prepare for the week ahead, led us to suggest a dinner out instead. It was great fun, all the kids were from S’s grade in school and they had a ball running all over the place, playing, eating papads and nans, colouring and finally settling down to Dora when things got too out of control. I was surprised they lasted that long- dinner ended at 11 pm!

I went into the girls school and spoke about Diwali in both their classes. I read a book about Diwali (sourced from the school library!), showed them a Diwali story on Youtube, and then we lit a diya and they got a goody bag with chocolates and a Diya. The hubby had picked up some awesome diyas from India during a recent business trip and the children (and I were thrilled). In A’s class the teacher allowed me to do hand sparklers with the children and they loved it. I held their hand while they did it, some of them were quite brave and some were quite scared! Imagine if I had burst the one lakh ladhi! I miss those... And now we have a Diwali invite (2 weeks after the day) at a friends place. It might be snowing that night so will be interesting to have a snowy Diwali!

Halloween again had a series of celebrations. The first being the carving of the pumpkin by the hubby with the girls. They made a nice smiley face and lit a candle inside and that was in our balcony for about a week. I managed to wash the pumpkin seeds and roast them in the oven and offer a healthy snack to everyone, but no one took me up on the offer so only I was eating those for the next few days!

The day before Halloween the girls were invited to a Halloween party at one of their classmates homes. S’s friend, but A tagged along as usual :). S wore her pirate costume and A was a fairy. Themom had done up their entire home in a Halloween theme with cobwebs, spooky stuff all over, and even a spooky goody bag. I want to be a kid again. Hum bhi agar bacche hothe....
The next day was Halloween celebration at school and the girls went in the same costumes. There was a party in A’s class in the morning and S’s class in the afternoon. Both parties were very nice. One of the moms did pumpkin carving in A’s class, they had many crafts (ghost lollipops, spiders made from black wires and a lollipop), book reading and snacks. S class was a much bigger event coordinated across the entire grade. Each of the grade classrooms had different crafts and activities (one of them was pitch black and the kids had to draw by candlelight) and in the kitchen the kids could decorate cupcakes with green gooey icing and spooky jelly babies. Tons of fun. S did quite a few crafts (favourite being the ghoul cup with 8 legs!) and ate quite a few snacks. The kids then had a session with the librarian reading them a spooky story (she’s really good) and then it was time to go home.

And finally on the following Saturday was the Halloween celebration at school with the whole trunk and treat and haunted house etc. A still wanted to be a fairy but S was tired of being a pirate and wanted to be Belle. After much negotiation that Belle could wear a white shirt inside her dress and still be a princess, we set out for school. The girls enjoyed the trunk and treat. A was not happy in the haunted house and I had to carry her some of the way. S was scared too. They enjoyed making the crafts again- I’m telling you we have so much junk related to Halloween in the house now. I managed to give away most of the candy and have been surreptitiously disposing off the spooky crafts. Here’s
wishing everyone a Happy Diwali and a spooky Halloween.

Greece Glorious Greece 2

The third port was Santorini, one of the most beautiful islands in Greece and my favourite. The whole island is covered in black sand as a result of a volcano erupting there centuries ago. The houses and villags are all built on the cliff tops so you have a panoramic view of the sea, steep cliffs and white houses. In fact when i first saw the hills from the ship I mistook the white houses dotting the clifftops for snow and wondered how Greece had snow covered mountains. But as we went towards them I realsied they were white houses. 

The ship does not dock at the harbour, but rather at a little distance away so we had to take a small boat to reach the port. There was nothing at the port itself so we could either take a cable car to reach the village above, or a donkey ride up (no!) or do day trips to other islands. We decided to go to the village of Fiao, a typical Greek village. It was a 45 minutes ferry and bus ride and we reached very hungry to this beautiful greek village at the top  of the  mountain. The view was just amazing and we had a lovely lunch overlooking the sea and the hills. Greece surprisingly had tons of vegetarian food  (unlike Spain and Portugal where I had to really struggle to find anything to eat) so I feasted on Greek salad and Spinach pie. We then walked around the village, the girsl played in park there and we admired the view and resolved to come back and spend a week in Santorini sometime in the future (one day is not enough).

We took the bus to the next village and bought some local wine and sun dried tomatoes there- its all grown on the volcanic soil so the wine actually tastes a bit smoky. We finally decided to walk down to the port as there was a big queue for the cable car and the girls did not want to ride the donkeys. It was a tricky walk down, pretty steep stairs and trying to avoid the donkey poo! and the donkeys!! S was a sport and walked all the way down but A insisted on being carried a lot of the time. To be fair, she was quite unwell and on antibiotics so overall she was a good sport about being out so much.

The next day we docked at Kusadasi in Turkey. We decided to head out only after lunch and only for  a couple of hours as it was getting too hectic for A. We hired a taxi to Ephesus (an ancient city, decently preserved) and walked through the ruins. We managed to visit the site of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world, but there was only a column standing there and we had to imagine the rest of the temple. Historians write that it was one of the grandest structures built and I wish it had been preserved. This trip we managed to visit three of the seven ancient wonders of the world- the Temple of Artemis (Kusadasi, Turkey), the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (Greece, near Katakalon) and the Colossus of Rhodos (Rhodes, Greece) so it was a pretty educational trip. I wonder how much the girls will remember of it though! We declined buying any carpets or leather goods and it was a bit cold to walk around in the town so we got back to the ship pretty early around 4 pm . The girls enjoyed the kids club in the evening and S admonished me for picking her up too early- they had a pirates theme that night and she wanted to take part in the treasure hunt.

The final destination was Rhodes in Greece. We took the Hop on Hop off bus and went around the small town. The sea was a beautiful azure blue and we were tempted rightly to get off at the beach. It was too cold to go into the water but the girls had fun collecting the stones at the waterfront and we just enjoyed gazing into the blue water. It was a long walk to the site of the ‘missing’ Colossus statue and then back to the ship. The hubby did some hectic shopping in the old town and managed to buy all the three wonders of the ancient world across our various stops. They are gathering dust on top of our bookshelf now.

The girls enjoyed the evening in the swimming pool (running between the pool and the hot tub) and I managed to catch up on my book reading. This trip I’ve managed to read two full books and two half books! Am quite happy about that because in between all this rushing to office, getting up early to get thh girls ready for school, coming back and giving them dinner and putting them to bed, my reading and exercising had nearly stopped. I fiished reading Buddha of Suburbia on this trip (very ok book, doesn’t really go anyweher), read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray  Bradbury (interesting and very topical to today’s environment), read The Expats (lovely spy thriller) and half of Lean In (some good insights, but no real game changer).

The last day was in Athens. We saw the Acropolis musuem (had seen the Acropolis the previous week) and spent the evening in the national park with the girls to make up for all the boring historical stuff they had to see! They had fun feeding spaghetti to the goat, fawning over the rabbits and running around in the playground. We had a typical Greek dinner at a local restaurant and went to bed early to catch the early morning flight back to Zurich.

Lovely restful holiday. Back to the old grind now..