Lichterschwimmen

Morning came a little too early, but I was proud of the kids for how well they did, adapting to our unusual morning commute. Bakeries in Switzerland all seem to be open by 6:00, so we had no problem finding fresh pastries in the morning. Conveniently, there's a bake shop just around the corner, and we loaded the kids with croissants and apple juice for our bus ride back to our neighborhood.  The kids were a little disoriented and worried that it still as dark as night out, but they're generally trusting little things, and so went with it.

Passing the half-hour before school.

We were a little too cautious, and the kids were unexpectedly efficient, so we had a half-hour to pass before they needed to walk to school.  Dennis continued on to work, while the kids and I hunkered down in our increasingly airy apartment.  I thought it was cute that, even though there is no furniture in any of the rooms, the boys automatically went to their room, and Ella curled up in a corner of her room.

When it was school time, Ella walked Alex in, and Joey and I got on with our chores for the morning.  We had a few last bags of things that were claimed by some Googlers. Dennis had offered to deliver these to work, but Joey and I decided to save Dennis some time by carrying a load of stuff to work, and then join him for a heartier breakfast afterwards.

That was a dumb idea. For one thing, there was a steady rain all day today, but it was heaviest in the morning.  Also, I don't have a stroller or even scooter for Joey right now, either, and my arms were full so I couldn't  scoop him up.  The poor little guy put his head down and trudged through the rain, through the kilometer-plus walk from our tram stop to Google, while my arms and shoulders got more and more achy from my soggy baggage.

Ah well: at least there was porridge, at the end of the hike.

Joey was pretty tired when we left Google (read: weeping uncontrollably), so we took our time getting back to our neighborhood and then spent some time recuperating in our shopping center, me with a cup of coffee and a chapter and Joey with a restaurant playground and some cheerful two-year-old playmates.

Joey, dampening his clothes more thoroughly on the wet playground equipment.

After we left our temporary shelter, we stopped at our apartment and talked with the one cleaner who was left today, a really cheerful and helpful man who agreed to bring some extra things to the dump for us (stuff that wasn't picked up last night), and offered to take out the ceiling lights we'd installed for free as well, assuming the new tenants didn't want them.

And then Joey and I ran to Alex's school, to meet him for lunch.  Remember, the kids come home for ninety minutes for lunch, but today I had no home to give them.  So instead I'd grabbed some food for them at the shopping center.  Ella prefers her chicken in nugget form, but for Alex and Joey I bought a whole roasted chicken, which they devoured, tearing it apart with greasy fingers.

We ate our picnic out in the only dry place I could think of, the community center.  It was mostly empty, but there's a Mittagstisch there, a lunchtime table for neighborhood children whose parents both work. So after we ate our lunch, Ella and I played cards, while Alex and Joey played floor hockey, sort of, with the rest of the children.

Joey, playing hockey with the big boys.

Ella was only returning to school for her supplementary German class, while Alex had a full afternoon of Kindergarten; Joey and I waited for them both in the community center, which was pretty cold and drafty, but at least it wasn't rainy.  It will be some sort of miracle if Joey and I escape today without catching the flu, I think.  But Joey insisted he wasn't cold, and spent a long, happy time, dropping a little parchute toy from a balcony into the pit below, and then running to retrieve it, and then doing the whole thing again.

Ella met us when she was done with her tutoring: since it was her last session, her teacher had let her and and her classmate, Erzhan, bring in games from home to play this afternoon.  Ella chose something really long and complicated, of course, but she says she explained the rules (auf Deutsch) and that they played a whole game, which I think is kind of impressive.  Indeed, the last thing she and I talked about tonight is how much she loved her German tutor, and how much fun playing games was today.

When Alex was done, we waded through the rain to collect him, and then we headed downtown.  We were meeting Susannah's family, including her lovely parents, visiting from Seattle, at the Zeughauskeller for dinner.  Since we had a little time to spare and a little rain to avoid, I took the kids for one last visit to our favorite toy store, first, to buy them a candy treat. Tragically, unlucky Joey fell asleep right before we went into the store.

My kids were rowdy at dinner, hyped from the excitement of bubble gum and Christmas time, but at least the Zeughauskeller is a generally loud restaurant, too. And fast, when you need them to be, which we did: we had plans for 6:00 sharp.

Each year in Zürich, a few days before Christmas, they have a dear little tradition called Lichterschwimmen, or "swimming lights".  School children get to launch little boats, each carrying a candle, into the Limmat.  There are close to a thousand candles that float down the river, making a merry little parade.

They're hard to spot, but there are little floating lights on the river, here.

Unfortunately, it was still raining buckets tonight, which exctinguished a significant portion of the candles and made us unwilling to watch for long, but we did pause for a couple of photos, and to grab warming cups of the hot spiced tea and some cookies that the city was distributing, gratis.

The kids could care less about the cookies: they were much more excited about getting into a warm, dry tram.  I could tell they were exhausted after our odd, disorienting day, and none of us wasted much time crawling into bed.