Das Erntedankfest

The Swiss Celebrate their Thanksgiving day, Erntedankfest (harvest thank festival) in October, this year it was the 3rd Sunday of the month. The church that we go to had a Thanksgiving brunch and short service. It was a powerful time to reflect upon things that you are thankful for, especially in the last year. John and I were really blessed by this time, as we have so many things to be thankful for over the last year.
Things we are thankful for:

The cows started the Thanksgiving parade off

* That all of the preparations for moving to Switzerland went smoothly and we were able to move here in 3 months time from when John accepted the job.... selling the house, 2 cars, most of our possessions, work visa, getting bear approved.

Traditional Swiss clothing

* That John enjoys his job, there is a whole set of frustrations as well, but he really does enjoy working on making this new airplane fly someday.

Baby sheep

*For a church and the Friends that have come along with it. We have been SO blessed to find a church family to call home. They are a Swiss church of about 100 people (at the most). With Pilatus being in the town there are lots of foreigners and so they have a translator (volunteer each week from the church) to translate from German to English. Most all of our close Swiss and Auslander friends have come from this church.

Lamas!

* For recently finding a place that you can drop your children off on Tuesday and Friday mornings for 2 hours for $9.... this is great because Hannah can hear Swiss German and I can go running or something by myself!

The crazy float... too much coffee schnapps for them!

* For having a real job interview with a Physical therapist the other week, I didn't get the job, but at least they were willing to talk with me!

Over sized Schwingers (like wrestling... Swiss style)

* Lastly, we are thankful for the hard days of being homesick, or wanting things to be easy (aka learning German... why must it be so hard!) because the hard days make the good days even better!! Yes, we do have hard days, but we really try to focus on the positives and so that is what I usually choose to write about!

Little boy schwingers

Brno, Czech Republic

 

The second city we visited in our week trip was to Brno. We choose this city because John had already been to Prague and we have a friend, Beth that lives in Brno.
Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic and is in the Moravian part of the Country. It was about a 4 hour drive from Salzburg. The landscape during the drive was rolling hills and vineyards as this area of Austria and Czech Republic, supposedly produce nice wine.

What does this menu say?

Hannah loves the play areas, John loves the Internet connection!

It was very nice to have someone to show us around Brno as it was a very nice city, but definitely still in the process of a "face lift" after communism took its toll. Beth lives really close to Old town and the big park in the middle of the city, so it was great to know what little shops to pop into while we walked around.  I love little unique shops with handmade clothes/jewelry and such.... the best one we stopped into was a coffee shop/handmade goods shop.

Really Switzerland, this coffee shop with play area is a great concept!! This was our favorite coffee of the trip.

We also stumbled upon a little "festival" going on in Old town while we were visiting. This was great because there were tons of street vendors serving up traditional Czech food. So, it was a great chance to have samples of several traditional Czech foods and treats.

Waiting to order a dessert that reminded us of Auntie Annes cinnamon pretzels!

There it is! So yummy!

As you can tell, we had a great week trip visiting three different cities.  The 8 hour drive home went much smoother than I thought, which is usually the case! I do think a 6 hour drive is a better maximum amount than 8 hours with a little one, we will try to remember that for next time!

Homemade chips at the little festival.

Festival in Old Town

Hannah has her own store :)

Beth's friend was a dog trainer, we met her in the park and Hannah loved it!

Bratislava, Slovakia

In the distance you see the UFO bridge- there is a restaurant up in the top!

This city, the capital of Slovakia is located 1.5 hours south of Brno (which was the second city we visited) and less than 1 hour east of Vienna. We didn't really know much about this city before we decided to go there, except we had some friends that had lived there for a year and we really want to visit more of Eastern Europe.

A nice pedestrian street in Old Town

The city is about half a million people, but didn't feel like too large of a city. And it had a great Old town, which is where our apartment was located. We literally walked out the apartment door and two blocks away was the Old town.

In Old Town, St. Michael's Gate

The weather wasn't the best while in Bratislava, raining about 30% of the time, but it was still our favorite city out of the 3 we visited.  I think the outskirts of the town probably aren't as nice, but the Old town (while still recovering from communism) was very nice. My favorite part was the coffee shops with little areas for children to play, not with dangerous things to climb on but simple buckets of toys (Brno was also full of these types of places). It was great, because we could sit for a coffee for 30 min and actually sit and not constantly wonder what Hannah was getting into.

Hannah happily playing while we enjoy coffee!

Switzerland needs to adopt this coffee shop idea!

Not sure if you can see the item "Bottomless Coffee"- reminds us of good ole' American Coffee Shops

We walked up twice to the Bratislava Castle that overlooks the city. We didn't make it out to the Devin Castle which is about 10k outside of the Old Town, you can see into Austria on a clear day! Next time!

A section of the Castle

We are already thinking of our next visit, as you can take a boat on the Rhine river and then to the Danube river which connects Vienna to Bratislava. It sounds like a fun way to see the cities.... next time, oh wait there are so many places on our list to see while living in Europe!

Also LOVING the cheap food!!

Salzburg

Fortress is up on the hill

This past week we went on a week long vacation, making stops in Salzburg, Austria, Brno Chezch Republic, Bratislava Slovakia. I thought I would do a little blog post about each location, mostly with pictures.


Looking down on the city

One of the churches and the old town square

Our first stop was Salzburg which is about 4:30 depending on traffic from our house. We rented a apartment about 1 mile from the Old Town of Salzburg from a really nice Austrian couple who lived upstairs. They didn't speak English so it was good German practice when we had to ask them questions. They had a little crib all set up for Hannah in our room.... which we promptly moved to the second bedroom as we just don't sleep well with Hannah in our room.

Salzburg is on the edge of the Alps and is also the place that some of the Sound of Music was filmed. We spent our walking to some of the sound of music sites, cheering on runners at a half marathon that occurred on Sunday, playing at the playgrounds, sitting in on a bit of mass at the big Catholic church in town.

 

 

Salzburg also sits right on a river with really great bike paths on either side, making it a great place to explore by bikes. We sadly decided not to bring our bikes on this trip, but next time. We also would love to go on a few hikes in the mountains the next time we visit. The town was the most touristy (but not too over the top touristy) of the three we visited, making it not quite and inexpensive for shopping as the other two. We found ourselves singing a few tunes from the Sound of Music while we explored the town :)

 Mirabell Gardens, in the Sound of Music

The Gazebo from Sound of Music

 

The Estate where the Gazebo was moved to after the movie filmed

Looking down on the Estate

 

 Hannah climbing around at a really nice park on the Estate grounds

 

Hannah 14 months

Ready to play in the rain with my rain suit!

It has been awhile since I last blogged, and again about a half month late for my monthly Hannah updates. My biggest excuse is that we just got back from a 9 day trip and I didn't feel like blogging on vacation!

I think this is a tunnel like at the park, oh wait it doesn't go anywhere.

 

 

So, Hannah is now 14.5 months old.  Crazy. We are loving how she seems to be more and more interactive everyday.  She looks right at you is clearly saying something... we just haven't deciphered much of what it is yet :) I have been casually been trying to teach her the sign for more, but she just laughs and claps her hands. Hmm. It would be great if she learned it because I need to find a way to know if she is full.... cuz this girl seems to be a bottomless pit (she loves to put her 8 teeth to work!).  She has definite food preferences... no dried apricots, apples, much meat, or cheese please. She loves the carbs, tomatoes, peas, fruit besides apples, and of course peanut butter!!  She can also chug the beverages, usually water or milk but the one time she was given juice she downed that very quickly as well. Hopefully she gets her Dad's metabolism! On vacation we actually had a scale in one of the apartments and she now weighs a little over 21 pounds. Getting big, and heavy for hiking!

She is still a little sleeper.  We decided on vacation that Hannah had to cope with one nap in the crib. It went fairly good, although she was sleepy enough to catch about a 30 minute cat nap in the Ergo Baby every morning. I am hoping to keep working on the transition to one long nap as most playgroups that we could go to happen in the morning.

 

 

We have been working on walking lately, as in the physical therapist in me decided it is time for her to walk. She can sort of keep her balance to walk with one hand, but I think she is going to continue her trend of slower gross motor skill development. I am not actually worried since she is making progress towards walking! She has become more exploratory at all the parks though. She loves crawling through tunnels, trying to crawl up the slides, and trying to bounce on the in ground trampolines.
Enjoy all the pictures!