Venice

No one told me the first week of kindergarten would be so tiring! And I'm not even the one going!
Anyway, let's not talk about that now. Let's talk about Venice.

The Engineer has wanted to go to Venice for ages, but I've been several times (most recently when I was 18 though) and was rather underwhelmed, so we've never got round to it. However, as our big family holiday to Greece fell immediately after his birthday, and as flights from Switzerland are unsurprisingly expensive, we looked into alternative means of transportation and found… car ferries. Ah, how exotic, I hear you say. Well, no, obviously not. But The Engineer does love the sea, and since working in the aviation industry he has developed an interesting dislike of planes. And the car ferry leaves from Venice, a mere five-hour drive not including stops.

So we booked a Novotel on mainland Venice where things are cheaper and have parking spaces, and that was that.

As everyone knows, the ancient part of Venice - the part you actually want to see - has no room for cars, but you can still get to it by car via a huge bridge, which gives you an excellent view of the ferry terminal and multi-storey car park where you will be leaving your vehicle (the car park isn't related to the terminal, anyone can park there). After that, you hop on a vaporetto, or boat-bus, which takes you round the outside of the city to drop you off at one of various bus-stops. We would have loved to stop at several places just to have a look round, but we had to be back at the terminal to board at noon, so we settled for the traditional Piazza San Marco. Thankfully it wasn't flooded - it's the lowest point of the city - but the queues for the Basilica were so long, even early in the morning, that we decided it wasn't worth it with two children in tow. A shame because I wanted to see if the floor inside was as undulating as on my previous visit - something I assume wasn't part of the original design. However, the children thought that chasing pigeons was vastly entertaining, and there was a live band playing outside one of the restaurants, so everyone was happy.

The tower was boarded up for repairs of some sort, and the bridge of Sighs had some bizarre sky-blue boards with adverts for some watch company or other on either side of it so you couldn't get a good photo (see picture above, on right!) But no matter. We bought ice-cream and wandered through the back streets, vaguely in the direction of the Rialto bridge. Froglet and I spent most of our time admiring the glasswork in the shop windows, to try and keep his mind off the fact that he "really wanted to go to the ferry right now", but The Engineer managed to get some nice shots of things we didn't even realise were there. So when you go to Venice make sure you look up as well as into shops. (This is even better advice when in Prague, where some of the loveliest paintings and embellishments are right under the eaves).

Venice must have a wheelchair-friendly route around it, as some little staircases had locked stairlifts on them. I imagine one has to go to the Tourist Office to get a key. However we managed without - this sort of thing being what we bought the lightweight pushchair for in the first place - and eventually made it to the Bridge. It was quite crowded so we admired it from a distance and then got in the queue for a Vaporetto back to the car park. This one took us through the centre of town, along the Grand Canal. I don't remember doing that last time, but it's definitely a lovely route.

I want to write about boarding the car ferry - I realise that sounds utterly boring, but if you have never boarded a Greek ferry at an Italian port, you are missing out! Anyway I'm out of time, so that will be for my next post.

A Grecian holiday, part one

Have you ever heard of Gerald Durrell? If you have, chances are you're either a naturalist, or you've read one of his books (or, in the UK, seen the TV series). Or possibly you're thinking of his older brother Lawrence, the famous author. Gerald Durrell was an ardent lover of nature and animals in particular, who became a great conservationist, founded one of the first zoos dedicated to conservation, on the island of Jersey, and incidentally wrote a great many very entertaining books about animals and his life with or near them.

As you may be able to tell, I'm something of a fan. But what does all that have to do with Greece? Well, everything. It's the reason we chose our holiday destination. (Well the reason I chose it anyway. Everyone else just thought my suggestion was a good second-best to theirs, so democracy ensured I won.) But back to my point: Gerald Durrell spent 5 years of his early life living on the Greek island of Corfu, and at least three of his books deal with memories from that time. And if you've read them, you can't help but want to go there and see what it's like now, nearly 80 years later.

So we did.

It's quite different. There are more cars, fewer donkeys, and considerably less in the way of wildlife - in our time there we found one shell on the beach. One.
Things are more organised. There are more fences - his books give the feeling that in the early 1930s you could walk from one end of the island to the other without "trespassing", although I imagine that wasn't really the case.

Fortunately, I was mentally prepared for this, and thus not disappointed. After all, who expects a member state of the European Union to be exactly how it was before the war that gave birth to what would eventually become the EU? So, disregarding the changes, I focused on the things that had remained the same. Of course I made sure we had the books with us too!

So that was one exciting thing, for me. (No one else shared this, despite all my family having read the books too. Ah well.) The other exciting thing was being with my whole family - parents and three sisters, some with husbands and kids in tow. Froglet loved having someone almost his own age to play with. Actually his little cousin is almost exactly halfway between him and Nutmeg, but she mostly played with him. Nutmeg mostly clung to me, at least the first few days. I can't blame her though, as it was surprisingly cold and windy. We had thunderstorms and rain for a whole two days, and then for part of several more. (Great for me - I'm not a hot-weather person).

We stayed at a lovely all-inclusive hotel in the north of the island, with several saltwater pools and its own beach. Most of the tourist attractions are elsewhere to be honest, but as we drove down and got the car ferry across we were able to drive into Corfu town for a day, and visit a couple of other little places nearer at hand too. I definitely recommend hiring/bringing a car if you're not staying in the capital of the island, as Greek public transport can be quite infrequent (not to mention slow). That's Froglet on the car ferry on the left, with the island behind him. The photo above is the view of the Old Citadel in Corfu Town, as seen from the ferry while we were docking.

And that is all I'm going to say for now, but at some point soon I'll write more about Corfu itself. And Venice. Have I mentioned Venice yet?

Spring and summer non-posting

My friend MaryLeigh at Blue Cotton Memory was asking where I've been. Well several factors have combined to make posting more difficult.

First we got a new computer - an Apple. It took us quite a while to work out how to sync our camera with it (apparently it doesn't like Canon G10s), and even longer to work out how to put the photos somewhere where I can get at them from my blog to post. For a while I posted sans photos but it's not as nice, is it? But hopefully that is now solved.

Secondly, Froglet starts official kindergarten this August, so we took him out of nursery at the end of May to give him a summer holiday (and save some money!) Not entirely a brilliant idea, as I now have no free time at lunchtimes when Nutmeg sleeps. But then again, children in Switzerland come home for lunch every day anyway once they start kindy, so I had to get used to it sometime. Now I have to learn to make 20-minute posts, like this one!

And thirdly we have had both visits from and visits to family, including a holiday in Greece, so that has kept us busy and offline. The photo is one I took outside our hotel room there, and I will be posting about the trip soon. With pictures. :-)

Review: the voice of psalms

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

The voice of psalms is a paperback retelling of the Biblical book of Psalms by the Ecclesia Bible Society, published by Thomas Nelson. It's part of a larger project called “the voice”. Like many Bibles, it includes some commentary and some daily reading plans but that is pretty much where the similarities end.

The first thing that struck me was that here is a very beautiful book. The text is laid out like poetry, with a single column per page, and the pages themselves have a lovely background design giving a feeling of sacred art that the plain-white, onion-skin pages of a standard Bible never really conveyed to me.

Additions to the text have been inserted in italics rather than footnotes, and I found myself in two minds about this. The translator in me understands the need to expand on a phrase because the English equivalent doesn't convey the subtler nuances of the original. At the same time I find the voice in the back of my head going “aha, italics: an optional extra” very distracting! However, having finished reading a whole passage I could then look back and see what the italics had really added, for instance in the 23^rd Psalm a sense of present danger, which isn't so tangible in the more traditional versions, with or without footnotes. Of course, I'm not a Hebrew scholar, so I can't really tell how accurate that sense is either!

I did appreciate that the translators didn't feel the need to modernise the language all the way into slang, which was something I found very off-putting with the Message version of the Psalms even though I was in my early twenties then.

All in all I like the book, but I wonder if the format – especially the italics - will be too hard to get used to, so I won't ditch my NIV just yet. I wouldn't buy it as a first Bible for a new believer, but it's good as a fresh look at a too-familiar text, as long as you're looking for a narrative rather than a constitution-type document to be taken literally.

Just two more things (which I didn't put in my amazon review): some of you may remember I was looking for a program of advent readings last autumn. Well the voice of psalms has one with readings from Psalms and other books! And also a Lent program! Pretty cool huh.

And secondly, they also do various other books, but the one that attracted me most is called the voice from on high, which contains excerpts from 19 Bible books referring to Jesus as the Liberating King. That one sounds really cool and I think would work well in this format, not to mention that Brian McLaren, one of my favourite authors, is involved, so I'll get it and keep you posted. :-)

First words

Froglet's first word, at the age of about 13 months, was "Cake". Prior to this he was using the sound "neng-neng" to mean food or more often drink from the age of about 9 months, but that robably doesn't count as a real word.

About 4 months ago, Nutmeg started emitting a very piercing shriek if food or drink was too slow to arrive, so we began actively encouraging her to say "more" instead. I can't remember exactly when she first said it, but I guess by the time she turned one she was saying "maaa" and meaning more. (She actually said "more" properly once, but it seems to have been an accident because she hasn't said it again).
Now she has acquired a second word. "Nana", for banana. She says the first n a bit strangely, as if she was trying to get the whole "ban" syllable into one letter.

There seems to be a theme here. But at least banana is healthier than cake - if we had a third child perhaps its first words would be "wholemeal bread"?

Lent Bible readings for kids

Haven't had chance to blog for a while. Life takes over...

Nonetheless, I wanted to write a bit abut what we're doing for Lent. We haven't given anything up (although I am working on giving up shouting at the children!) but rather we have picked something up: Bible reading. I've never felt like Froglet could really follow the Bible itself, although of course we have Bible story books. But since we enjoyed having daily readings over Advent, I thought we'd have daily readings for Lent too. These are (mostly) from the Gospel of Luke. I tried to pick stories and things Jesus did rather than too many of the straight teachings, because Froglet is, after all, only four. On Sundays we're reading the bits where Jesus talked about his death. We have a great illustrated book that was also mine as a child, published by Ladybird, and called The Easter Story. Froglet loves it. As he already knows about the death and resurrection, I thought it was worth showing him that Jesus knew this was coming. But you could easily just leave out the Sunday readings (or replace them), as they aren't in chronological order with the rest anyway.

We are reading these out of a copy of the Good News Bible which was mine when I was small - it has more pictures than my NIV, although not many, and the wording is a bit simpler.

Today (Wednesday) is day 25. Sundays aren't counted in the 40 days of Lent so I haven't numbered them.

Day 1: John the Baptist - Lk 3:2-22
Day 2: In the desert - Lk 4:1-15
Day 3: Nazareth - Lk 4: 16-30
Day 4: Lk 4: 31-44
1st Sunday: Who am I - Lk 9: 18-27
5: Calling the disciples - Mtt 4:18-22 and Lk 5:27-31
6: Skin-disease - Lk 5:12-16
7: Paralysis - Lk 5: 17-26
8: The Sabbath - Lk 6: 1-11
9: The Apostles - Lk 6: 12-19
10: Love your enemies - Lk 6: 27-36
2nd Sunday: The transfiguration - Lk 9: 37-43
11: The house on the rock - Lk 6:46-49
12: The Roman officer - Lk 7: 1-10
13: Raising the dead - Lk 7:11-23
14: Forgiving sins - Lk 7:36-50
15: The parable of the sower - Lk 8:4-15
16: The storm - Lk 8:22-25
3rd Sunday: Predicting Jesus' death - Lk 18: 31-34
17: Jairus' daughter - Lk 8:40-56
18: Feeding the 5000 - Lk 9:10-17
19: The boy with an evil spirit - Lk 9: 37-43
20: Sending out the 72 - Lk 10:1-11, 16-20
21: The Samaritan woman - Lk 10:25-37
22: Martha - Lk 10: 38-42
4th Sunday: The tenants in the vineyard - Lk 20:9-18
23: Prayer - Lk 11:1-13
24: Don't worry - Lk 12:13-31
25: Healing on the Sabbath - Lk 13:10-17, 14:1-6
26: The lost sheep - Lk 15: 1-7
27: The lost coin - Lk 15:8-10
28: The lost son - Lk 15:11-32
5th Sunday: the rich man and Lazarus - Lk 16:19-31
29: Forgiveness - Lk 17:3-4
30: Healing the ten lepers - Lk 17:11-19
31: Always pray - Lk 18:1-8
32: Pharisee and tax collector - Lk 18:9-14
33: Children - Lk 18:15-17
34: Rich man / widow - Lk 18:18-27, 21:1-4
Palm Sunday: Entering Jerusalem - Lk 19:28-40
35: The blind beggar - Lk 18:35-43
36: Zacchaeus - Lk 19:1-10
37: Parable of the talents - Lk 19:11-26
38: Passover meal - Lk 22:1-23, 31-34
39 (Good Friday): Arrest and death - Lk 23 (I will use the afore-mentioned book here)
40: Burial - Lk 23:50-56
Easter Sunday: the Resurrection - Lk 24 (book again)

Happiness is...

Watching my four-year-old chase my just-turned-one-year old so he can snuggle her, then seeing her turn round and throw her arms round his neck delightedly.

Snow sparkling in the lamplight outside our bathroom window.

Time to do lots of reading (most recently John Ortberg "Everyone's normal till you get to know them")

Nutmeg having her check-up and MMR jab without crying or complaining at all, then waving her cookie happily at the doctor afterwards, as if he hadn't just stuck a needle in her arm.

Froglet finding words for me to help him read wherever we go.

Lying on the floor with a happily-squeaking Nutmeg crawling all over me.

Froglet stroking my arm and saying "I love you Mummy".

Nutmeg wandering about saying "yeah, yeah" and "oo-ah-oo". If she says it fast enough, it sounds like wow.

Getting a little box to store paperclips in, complete with paperclips, as a free gift from the pharmacy. I'm always short of paperclips.

Watching Nutmeg dance to the strains of Cuban music.

Nutmeg following Froglet wherever he goes.

An elder brother's love for his baby sister: "She is my little sister, Mummy. Don't smack her."
(For the record, I had no intention of smacking her. I must have looked like I was gearing up to it though!)

Going to our first German-language parent-teachers' meeting to find out what school will be like for Froglet when he starts in mid-August. Evidently it will be wonderful. The Swiss are remarkably Waldorf in their attitude to education. (In fact the school down in our cantonal capital is named after Pestalozzi, who once worked in the canton).