You know, Wednesdays always seem to get a bad rap, and for good reason. You wake up on Wednesday morning thinking that you still have THREE days to go until the weekend. It's not like when you wake up on Thursday morning and think, "Oh good! Only one more day until Friday and then it's the weekend!" And if you wake up on Wednesday morning and the weather is bad, ugh, it seems even longer until Friday night!
You may ask, where is she going with this? Well, let me elaborate. Usually we have activities during the week that help us to look forward to our day. Some of us have a job, some have school, we have volunteer activities, after school programs, ballet, piano lessons, soccer, clubs, coffee with friends, lunch with friends, play dates, the list goes on and on. When you move to a foreign country, getting these activities going can be a massive challenge.
Obviously if you have a job to go to, this paves the way to meeting new people and establishing new relationships. If you go to school, this facilitates the same sort of connections. Of course, if you don't like the people at work or at the school, or if they are difficult to get close to, this can be much more of a challenge. On top of this, language and cultural barriers pose yet another challenge when one wants to get involved in other activities. Yes, I know, I signed up for all of this willingly. It still doesn't change the facts that moving to another country is overwhelming in positive and not so positive ways.
This isn't to stay that Duke is having problems at work. He likes his co-workers very much. But it is a commentary on the kids' school. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be very compatible with the children at this particular school. Ross has found a friend that he gets along with quite well, but Kim is having a harder time. Between the language barrier and the reserved nature of the little girls in her class, she is having a hard time finding that girl friend that she so desperately needs too feel accepted and included during playground time. (I must say that they are both making a valiant effort despite the odds and are, in my humble opinion, enormously successful thus far.) On top of this, they need after school activities, but with the language barrier hanging heavily over my head, I have been dragging my feet about finding places for them to go. (The language, at first, was kinda fun to see what I could remember. Now I am just remembering how I could only get so far with a conversation and then I run out of vocabulary. VERY frustrating.)
So what does this have to do with Wednesdays? Luckily for us, Swiss schools have an early out on Wednesday. So we have taken the opportunity to use this to our great advantage! Every Wednesday afternoon has now become a time for an outing to downtown Zurich. The kids and I drive back from the school to our train station in Erlenbach where we park the car and hop on the train to Stadelhoffen Bahnhof . This train station is one block from the Zurich Opera House and the lake and most importantly is 30 seconds from MacDonalds! Now, normally I call that MacYucks but after being away from your home country for a long period, you start to crave even the crappy food of your motherland. And on the plus side, the burger they use here is much better than in the US. Maybe that's why it costs three times as much....
After indulging in high calorie burgers, chicken nuggets and fries, we explore local shops. Yesterday we found a store that carries foods from other countries, which of course includes food from the US. I finally found some brown sugar to make chocolate chip cookies and El Paso taco seasoning! After salivating over all the cheeses and chocolates, we finished the afternoon with gelato (Italian ice cream) that we ate by the huge fountain in the park across from the Opera House.
This is why Wednesday no longer fills me with dread of "hump day". I think I am going to rename it to "weekly skip day" or "hooky day" because it feels like we are skipping school and playing hooky but it's totally legal! On top of it, I get to spend amazing quality time with my outstanding children. You can't beat that!
