Swings and roundabouts

A German playground (spielplatz) is a lot like an Aussie one.  There’s a slide, some swings and some of those weird animal shapes on top of big springs that kids sit on and bounce.  However, there is always a sandpit, which I think is a bit different.  Having said that, I could be wrong.  I never had kids in Australia so my knowledge is limited!  But I’ve been to a few Aussie playgrounds on visits home and they either have grass or wood chips (I think they rock) but not sand.  Georgia LOVES the sand.  The kids all take their sand toys and of course only play with the other kids’ stuff.  But they have a really great time.

Georgia and Thomas on the slide

In the sandpit

Today we met our two local Aussie friends (also married to non-Aussies) plus offspring in the big spielplatz in a corner of Bad Homburg’s Kur Park.  This means “spa park”.  It’s a large, beautiful park.  When the leaves change colour in the autumn it is spectacular!  Bad Homburg is famous (apparently – I’d never heard of it) for its champagne luft (air), which supposedly is very good for one’s health and the place abounds in medical facilities.  And the odd spa.  While my favourite babysitters were here (thanks Ma and Pa), my handsome fella and I spent an evening in the Kur Royal (the Royal Spa).  Oh yes.  A very nice date!  My favourite part was called the “hay steam room” (or something like that).  Steam was puffed through hay at our backs and it was all nice and steamy and…well…hay-y.  I had very vivid flashbacks of the many hours we spent as kids, playing in the hayshed on our farm.  I will definitely have to pay the spa another visit.  It’s a little easier to get to than the farm!

Today’s the day

During our recent trip to visit the grandparents in the UK, Georgia fell in love with a book about a teddy bears’ picnic (not particularly well-written but with cute pictures) so yesterday afternoon she decided that it was time for our own.

We had a lovely time, snacking on popcorn and strawberries and chatting about the weather (which means Georgia was repeating ad nauseum: “do you think it’s going to rain, Mummy?”).  It was a fun activity to set up.  Over lunch beforehand we discussed all the aspects of it: catering, entertainment, invitation list, schedule etc.  Ah, an events manager in the making.  Hopefully this means Georgia can now organise her own birthday party at the end of the year and I can just turn up and eat cake.

Summer Loving

I’ve never experienced a European summer before. Well, not properly, anyway. I did the requisite 2-year stint as a backpacker in London but the first year I was working 2 jobs (temp. secretary by day and West End usher by night) and the second year I was running a theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe and barely saw daylight for 2 months.

And besides, everything is different in the countryside. I was amazed at the big bloom that occurred in the space of a couple of weeks in April. Beautiful!  And then everything just kept growing and blooming. 

And man, do things grow. In our rented house we have a very lovely but fussy garden (that’s us above in the front garden). One for grown-ups, not a family with 2 small children. We couldn’t pull up any of the roses/lavender/many other unknown varieties of flowers, so we have added some pots instead. And today, wonder of wonders, our first tomatoes are ready. Hooray hooray!

Julian and Georgia have been tending them carefully over the last few months:

We shall have a celebration of our small harvest tonight!

We’ve been to the zoo, zoo, zoo

The big question of today is: how do I tell the lovely father of my children that I allowed his firstborn to be scratched by the European Wildcat at Opel Zoo? Oh yes, today’s BAD MOTHER award goes to…you guessed…yours truly.

Apart from the “incident” we had a very lovely morning with Georgia’s friend Iris (there they are pictured above) and Iris’ delightful mother Harriet and baby Arthur. And the firstborn survived the scratch. There was barely any blood drawn!  I think the cat was getting me back for laughing out loud when I saw it. So ferociously named, it resembles in all ways your basic garden-variety tabby cat. I hereby officially apologise, o’ Felis silvestris silvestris, for any offence caused.

Besides, I think the whole “incident” was far more traumatic for the poor mother. On coming home, in order to lift my dampened spirits I made my favourite salad (yes, I know it was half-eaten by the time the photo was taken but I was very hungry):

1 whole beetroot (grated)
1 whole apple (grated)
a big handful of rocket/arugula
a small handful of sunflower seeds (roasted while you do the grating)
generous splash of olive oil and a decent amount of lemon juice

Yes, who was I kidding?  I followed this with a bacon and egg muffin.  Now that hit the spot!

Yum, yum, yum.  All thoughts of vengeful pussies faded from the mind…for now.

Let’s start at the very beginning

In another blatant attempt to avoid improving my German I am starting a blog.  And why not?  Every second person in the world seems to have one and I love a good bandwagon.  Welcome to my inaugural post.

This is my hat:

And in a very exciting, yet embarrassingly recent development, I have learnt that it is reversible.  So here is my hat again:

It was a very useful discovery given that I wear a lot of red.  The pink just didn’t go, even for this fashion unconscious chick.  But I wore it anyway because I’m Australian and we have a weird thing about wearing hats in the sun…all the time. 

My hat currently resides in a lovely little country town about 30 minutes out of Frankfurt, Germany.  It came originally from one of my favourite shops ever: Barefoot, on Galle Road in Colombo (Sri Lanka).  Ah, the fabric!  We were living there for a couple of years (in Colombo, not in the shop).  It now seems like a pretty amazing (and long) holiday I once took.  We moved to Germany almost a year ago.  We’re pretty good at moving.  We do it a lot.  More on all of that in a later post.