No-Car Update: It's No Accident. Pun Intended.

Look out.

*hauling out soapbox*
*stepping onto said box*

Living without a car is not an afterthought or add-on to your life.  It's not a lifestyle aspect you can graft onto your existing life after you've chosen all your other priorities.

You must intentionally set up your living situation ahead of time in order to accommodate this lifestyle.  There are sacrifices involved.  You might have to give up a bigger house and yard for a smaller place in the city or closer to a bus route, workplace, or school.  You might have to take on fewer extracurricular activities and commitments, or choose them carefully based on travel requirements.  You will surely need to clear more time, space, and flexibility in your schedule--to live a slowly-paced life.  You must be willing to ask for help when you need it, and be ready and available (i.e. not over-booked) to offer other kinds of help in return.

So please don't tell me you would LOVE to be able to live without a car, but you can't because you live outside the city, or not close enough to bus lines, or school is too far away, or work is too far away, or your partner needs the car for work, or you've got to get you and your kids to a-b-c-d-x-y-z.

It's likely that you had some choice in where you live and the activities you participate in--that they were not forced upon you.

So instead of flippantly stating, "Oh, well I'd love to do that too, but..." perhaps instead say that you would like to live without a car, but that you didn't purposefully set up your living situation and make the sacrifices necessary so you would not need a car in the first place.  You simply had different priorities.

I'd totally respect this response.  I've never heard it.  But I'd respect it if I did.

(Other answer I respect:  "You're completely nuts.  I love my car and I love having a car.  I couldn't live without it." No excuses.)

*stepping down from and (temporarily) storing soap box...*

photo credit

German Schoolwork (Winter/Spring, 1st Grade)

I have to say, it feels like Luxembourg expat blogs are popping up all over the place right now!  Which is great!  Still, I haven't seen too many (any?) that delve into the public school system or curriculum from a participant's perspective, so I'd like to continue to fill that role in the "market" in case anyone is curious.  Plus, as a former teacher, it just interests me.

I've taken a few sample snapshots of Daphne's German tests from December, February, and April.  Before I share these, however, I'd like to share a few things I've learned (or at least understand better) about the curriculum over the past few months:

1. Just a few years ago, the curriculum was altered in that they teach German, beginning in Cycle 2.1 (1st grade), with a new approach : as if German is a foreign language to all the students.  For Americans to wrap their minds around that, it would be like going to school in which all the kids are in the ESL program.  Apparently, they used to treat it more like a native language.
2. The students do not learn letter names.  Rather, the approach is phonetic.  In other words, they don't learn the name of the letter "E."  Instead, they learn three different E sounds and vocabulary words that go with each, plus a representative word they always associate with that sound for reference.  So for E, they learned E as in Ente ("eh" sound in the word for duck), E as in Esel (long ee sound in the word for donkey) and E as in Katze ("uh" sound at the end of the word for cat).  Now they are learning the Ei sound as in Eimer (it's a long "I" sound in the word for bucket)
3. Part of the reason the school years come in groups of two (Cycle 2 = year 2.1 and 2.2, Cycle 3 = year 3.1 and 3.2, etc, often with the same teacher for both years) is that learning objectives are set on a two-year basis. When you discuss your children's progress or are given a report, you will see their progress on a two-year scale.  So if your child is in Cycle 2.1 or 3.1 and it looks like s/he is quite low on the scale, this is not cause for alarm - s/he has another year+ to get there.  This system makes a lot of sense to me in light of the diverse and transient nature of the Luxembourg population.
4. It is possible for children to work on material from the next Cycle in a subject if they are very advanced and have already met the objectives for that subject in their Cycle. (No, Daphne is not doing this! I just discovered it.)

In the fall, I posted on Daphne's German work here.  Many of the types of activities and assessments have remained constant...

what's the first letter sound of each word?

which words contain the sound, and where in the word does the sound occur?

Other methods have continued, but with an added degree of difficulty.  In these puzzle-train activities, as seen below, they now must spell the whole word instead of just coloring the spot where the one specified sound goes...

We've also encountered a few new assessment techniques.  Here, they must take the mushedtogethersentenceandseparateitintoindividualwords.

Um, but I'm pretty sure German actually has individual words that are this long too! ;)

Here's a choose-the-correct-word-for-the-blank...

so some reading comprehension involved here

As in the example with the puzzle-train, spelling is becoming more important.  Here are some dictation examples...

from the winter

and here from the spring

Below, they must highlight and correct the misspelling...

And understand some of the more subtle differences in spellings and meanings...

hmm, must ask Daphne the difference between isst and ist!

They have, in theory, learned the articles (der, die, das...) with each vocabulary word all along, but now they are assessed on this knowledge...

sticking with the yellow, blue, and red color-coding system from day one

We can definitely observe what they mean by teaching German as a foreign language.  At the beginning it was all about vocabulary - massive word lists without much attention to spelling at all except one or two letter sounds.   They must get all the kids as close to on the same page as possible in terms of understanding and speaking the language.  This is the most urgent objective, considering how many "mother tongues" are represented in any given class.  Soon, they work on writing a few very simple sentences.  Now, they are gradually introducing the spelling and grammar pieces, reading comprehension, etc.

Daphne's spelling is quite amusing at the moment (but you must not tell her I said that!).  At home, she still writes in English, because it's her native language and she learned a bit of reading and spelling in kindergarten in Oregon.  If you are familiar with the phonetic spelling of a Kindergartener, though, you'll know it can be a bit difficult to decipher.  But now what we have is an interesting combination of German and English phonetic spelling of English words!

As a small example, she just wrote a story at home about a little fish, spelled "Fich" - and with a capital F as in German.  For the record, that's not correct in either language.

She'll get there.

Turbans or Teepees?

A few weeks ago, James casually mentioned that his class watched and/or did some "Indianer dancing" at school.  I asked him a few questions about it, but before I could elicit much out of him, he gave me his typical shut-down-the-conversation answer: "It's kind of hard to tell."  So I mentally pictured his class watching a dancing clip from a Bollywood movie, thought that sounded kind of cute, and moved on.

A few days went by and he brought up the "Indianer" once or twice more, and then started talking about their hats.  He said they had feathers on them.

Hmm...

Then I remembered that a couple of Daphne's very first German vocabulary words this year were the words for "India" and "Indian" (they learned words with the letter "i" very early on).  I also vaguely recalled seeing a tiny black-and-white picture of what looked like a Native American on her vocab list.  I'll admit, they struck me as rather odd vocabulary words to start off with, despite the fact they contain two "i"s a piece.

But now we were curious, so we pulled up some images of both Actual Indian-Indians and Native American Indians on Google images to show James and settle the issue.

Result: inconclusive (perhaps because some of the turbans had feathers too?) - but still leaning toward Native Americans.

We received the final proof the other day, however, when James mentioned a word that sounded a lot like "moccasins" in a Luxembourgish accent, and then said they lived in "teepees," straight-up.  Okay, mystery solved.

So in other words, my son came all the way to Luxembourg to learn about Native Americans.  Wow, cool - we have no problem with this.  But still...it is just us, or does it also seem a bit, for lack of a better term, random?

If you read this previous post, you'll know that the class can spend several weeks on one topic, and it appeared that, indeed, James' class has spend several weeks studying Native Americans, culminating with a field trip this past Monday.

Wait, huh?

Ah, the magic and mystery of field trips here.  Emphasis on mystery.  Remember the forest trip from this time last year?  Most of the time we get a note home saying a trip is happening, and what the kids should bring, but it's not really a formal permission slip.  Sometimes we're given an address.  Parents are not invited (allowed?) to participate as chaperones, so you only find out what happened via the verbal account of your small child.  It's also an account of something that has just happened to them in a different language than they're using to explain it (and in this case, the subject is a culture that is neither of these).

Take a moment to wrap your mind around that.

Anyway, we received the note a few days before informing us that the class would partake in "Une Journée Chez Les Indiens."  They listed a website for details: tipi.lu

Do yourself a favor and go to this site, set your browser to translate, click around and enjoy the translations from German. :)

And sure enough, James came home from school on Monday looking like this:

can anyone make out what his Indian name is?

He had a great time and wants to know when we can all go back.

We're curious, does anyone else think this is super cute but super random like we do??  Are Luxembourgers "into" Native Americans?

German or Luxembourgish: You Make The Call

Okay, German and Luxembourgish speakers.  Which one is this?

James is learning Luxembourgish only, and he said he understood a lot of it.  But that just could be because the two languages are very similar.

Perhaps some native speakers could tell us.

Some Spring Visitors

Hi there!  

You may have noticed I haven't been blogging as much lately.  The primary reason is that I'm trying to spend less time at the computer.  Also, I'm attempting to ease off that mode of thinking you fall into when you blog a lot, in which every part of life becomes a potential blog post in your brain.  That frame of mind gets kinda annoying after awhile.  So, I plan to keep it up, but perhaps a bit less frequently.  We'll see.

The week before Easter, Pete's parents made their second visit to Luxembourg.  They were here from Saturday to Saturday.  

This is not nearly long enough.  But we'll take it.

It was snowing when they landed, and remained very cold (20s-30s Fahrenheit) the whole week.  The kids and I were beginning two weeks off our respective schools.  We eased into our week together by hanging out around town.   We all went to church on Sunday, and the first Monday of spring break, what did the kids want to do?  Go play at their school playground!

balancing together.  took a few tries to get this shot.  it's harder than it looks!

It wasn't long before the bitter cold and wind got the best of us, so we took refuge in the cafe at Merl Park near our apartment.

Unfortunately, above is the last known picture of Daphne before she became very ill.  So we canceled our planned outings and spent the better part of the week reading and resting in our living room with our sick little girl.

Grammy, James and I ventured out to IKEA to get out of the house!  We were happy to see the meatballs had returned after the great horse meat scandal.

Pete took Thursday and Friday off work.  We had booked a rental van for the second half of the week and planned to make an overnight visit to Maastricht (about 2 hours drive) in the Netherlands, but this plan came into question in light of Daphne's condition.  After much debate and indecision, we decided to first take Daphne to the children's clinic, as by midweek we suspected she might need some antibiotics.  

We promptly crashed our rental van into our building's garage door motor while trying to exit our tiny parking space, obliterating the van window and the door motor in one fell swoop.  

Oops.  (I won't say who did it!)

So we called a taxi to take us to the clinic, and took the rental van back.  Amazingly, they gave us another car.

(Just found out the bill for the door motor is 1500€.  Joy.)

And yep, Daphne had strep throat.  So with antibiotics and fever-reducers in hand, we made the decision to go through with the trip and take it easy while we were there.  In retrospect this might have been a risky and unwise choice.  Looking back now, I feel like a pretty bad parent for dragging her along, but I guess it worked out okay in the end.  We took a scenic route and stopped briefly to show Don and Connie Vianden Castle.

Luxville(A) - Vianden(B) - Maastricht(C)

Connie found a great little bed and breakfast in a village outside Maastricht for our stay, called Le Passe Partout. We'd highly recommend it for families, since a couple of the rooms had enough beds for 4 or 5 people, as long as your kids are old enough to manage loft/ladder-type stairs.  They even had toys to play with and a backyard trampoline and play area.

common kitchen

common dining/living room

Another selling point: the kitchen is self-serve anytime during your stay.  You can order the breakfast if you like, but you can make your own for less!  That's what we did.

Check out more photos of the rooms at their website.

We ventured out into Maastricht on Friday, but Daphne didn't last long before she was on Daddy's shoulders.

Connie in the square

close up of that red church tower

Because of the cold, and poor Daphne, we didn't see much, but it was okay.  One striking aspect to observe was how bike-friendly the city and villages were;  cyclers were out and about everywhere, even in the freezing cold, and bike lanes were clearly-marked and ubiquitous, even out on windy country roads.  

We did visit this famous-ish bookstore, converted from a church.

See this website for much better photos than mine.

We never knew Miffy (the bunny) is Dutch!  That explains why the books always seemed slightly "off," like they'd been translated.

It wasn't long before we took refuge in McDonalds.  It was a very nice McDonalds, though.

Pretty much sums it up.  (feeling like a bad parent again)

But by Saturday, we were back in Lux and Daphs was really on the mend, so we made it out to the Chocolate House by the Duke's palace. It's become our tradition with any visitors to Lux, and Don and Connie requested to go back on this visit too.

she's walking on her own again!

 hot choco-spoons! 

aw. much better now
(looking across the way at the palace and Lux flag)

5 Years of Blogging!

I realized today that we've had this blog for just over 5 years.  My first post was March 27th, 2008.  Daphne was 2 and a quarterish years old, James was just 5 months!  (Now he's 5 years!).  In that post, I said I'd try to post at least once a month.  I just checked, and we've only missed 5 months since March of 2008.  318 posts in all, which is an average of about 5 posts per month.

So lots of 5s involved, I guess.

Anyway, it's a milestone.

We're Calling it Castle Park

Picnic lunch.  So what if it's 35 F and windy?

Luxembourg knows how to do parks.  They just upgraded this neighborhood playground that's walking distance from our place, so we stopped by on our way to the grocery store.  Just don't tell too many people about it.  It's going to be swarming with kids once we break 45 degrees someday.

must be Luxembourgish for prison?

more Luxembourgish? 

see-saw was the favorite 

proud to be a Luxembourgish castle.