What colour is your house?

Scaffolding went up around our building about two weeks ago, but we've only seen the workers for a few odd days. It's a bit disconcerting to live in an apartment with no curtains on the street-side windows and men repairing stucco outside on the fourth floor at 8:30 a.m. It reminds me of the time we built the addition on the house at Tchesinkut Lake. Sleeping on a mattress in the middle of the living room, we often had to scramble to get dressed at 7:00 a.m. when Fred Carpenter, the carpenter, and several of his eight sons cheerfully arrived to start their day. But I digress.... For as long as we've known it, our Strasbourg apartment has been a washed-out orange colour, but apparently it's destined to be bright yellow.

Europeans aren't as reticent as we North Americans about painting buildings with bright hues. And just like a little kid, I'm always thrilled by the jeweled colours of the houses that we have seen as we have travelled around Europe, especially France and Germany. Last week I was in building-picture-taking heaven when we visited Colmar, a small city south of Strasbourg about 30 minutes by train.

Mark had gone to the train station the day before intending to buy tickets for St. Dié, a village in the Vosges mountains. However, no one at the train station really knew St. Dié, and everyone there agreed that Colmar was a very good place to visit, so Mark caved in to his insecurities about St. Dié (does it have two train stations or one? and what if we end up getting dumped off the train in the middle of nowhere?) and came home with tickets for Colmar. (But we're still going to do St. Dié!)

Initially somewhat disappointed, we were happily surprised with Colmar and its tourist experience. The Alsatian half-timbered houses that we see in Petite France in Strasbourg are numerous in Colmar, and even more brightly coloured. Most of their important buildings are signed in French, German, and English, which always makes it more meaningful (literally!) for us. (Even though our French is getting better, it's amazing what little nuances -- and sometimes big meanings! -- you miss when you're reading something that's not in your first language). And in Colmar, unlike most of the other trilingual signage we have seen, the English and German sections were equally as long as the French, signifying that we were getting the full story and not just a brief summary.

At the beginning of our visit, Mark chuckled when he got off the train because he'd overheard a German couple talk about Colmar's wonderful water tower. At the end of the visit, and on our way back to catch the train home, we made a slight detour and found out that the water tower is indeed impressive. The Germans probably knew about it because the tower was built in 1870 during a time that Germany had annexed Alsace. Although old, it was in use as late as 1984. Now I think it just sits there and looks impressive, but not to the kids who, after three hours of wandering around, were tired and just wanted to get back home.

On the way back home we snagged our own compartment in the train, which made for a very relaxing trip back. I had to shake myself out of picture-taking mode, so I tried not to look out the window at all of the colourful houses flashing by.

Even though the trip to Colmar provided some good examples of Alsatian design, I don't think I'll stop taking pictures of the buildings here. After almost six months of living in Strasbourg, I still marvel at the architecture and decoration of the old buildings, which causes me to pause and snap pictures on almost every walk. My family gets tired of waiting for me, but they always appreciate the "slide show" when we get back home.

More pictures at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christina-t/

Read the kids' blog: http://www.viewegkids.blogspot.com/

Contact us: christinateskey @ yahoo.ca or mvieweg @ gmail.com

La jour de la Saint-Valentin

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

Mark made a detour this morning after getting our traditional breakfast baguette, and he arrived home with roses. The French love flowers at any time, but he said that the flower shop was doing a booming business even at 9 a.m. He thoughtfully arranged them in one of the apartment's Alsatian pottery jugs, which made for a pretty picture.

Although I haven't seen much evidence of stores gearing up for St. Valentine's Day, it may be because I haven't been doing a lot of shopping lately. I did snap a picture of a wonderful shop window in Colmar, however, when we visited there last week (please ignore the nasty glare on the picture!). Colmar has some beautiful buildings about which I will post later.

I hope you have a great day with your loved ones!

Lessons from Homeschooling

We've struggled this year with exactly how to "run" our home school. When we left Canada, I had a vision of all these wonderful projects that we could do together. The kids would be engaged and interested, pushing the learning agenda themselves, sometimes working so late that I would have to demand they put their school work away and go to bed. As usual, though, reality is different from the vision.

Even regular school can be boring at times -- heck, regular school is probably boring a lot of the time for many kids. But at least there you can hang out with your friends and maybe even get into a little trouble once in a while. The lack of interesting things to do is more than made up for by the lack of interesting people to be with. In many cases, the actual work is secondary. Contrast that with home schooling; there's you, the work, and your mother, also known as "the teacher". If you're lucky, "the teacher" has figured out a way to combine the courses so you can work with your brother or sister, who you are currently mad at because he/she has just ___________ your _____________ . (fill in the blanks with your own pet peeve)

We've run the gamut from almost no structure -- when Mark and I would leave the hotel room in search of an apartment and say to the kids on the way out, "Work on your math!" -- to a fairly strict schedule that has the kids finished by 2 p.m. each school day (theoretically).

Amidst all the traveling that we did between September and November, we managed to sneak in a bit of school work. We made it a point to not take any school books with us when we traveled. By the middle of November, however, we began to realize that we needed a bit more regular structure. We started by trying to let the kids schedule their own time. I would lay out 20 one-hour assignments that the kids needed to do each week, and they would organize their schedules to get them done. As time went on, however, we had to lay out more and more "rules", mostly around the use of our two laptop computers:

1. School work and the adults' work gets priority for the computers.
2. The computers can only be used for school work between the hours of 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.
3. Adults get computer time during the even-numbered hours; kids get the odd-numbered hours.
4. If work isn't completed by Saturday night, school starts Sunday morning at 9 a.m. and continues without breaks (except for a 10-minute break in every hour) until the work is done.
5. And so on...

Far from allowing the kids more freedom, it actually ended up imposing more restrictions on all of us. Looking back, I see that I was decidedly optimistic but crazy to think that it would work.

Eventually we got down to the nitty-gritty: how much work needs to be completed by the end of the year, and how much time we have left to do it. The kids scheduled their 20 one-hour blocks of work (between the hours of 9 .m. and 2 p.m.) in a way that suited them.

Some (ok, most!) days we don't get started by 9 a.m. Then we work after 2 p.m. The goal is to get finished early enough in the afternoon that we have time to go out and explore the city, or do other fun things.

What is interesting to me is the process that we have been through. That order and structure was imposed on them was actually the kids' choice. However, it suits me, too. It has been much better to have a set schedule so that the kids know they will be finished at a certain time each day.

We have had our good days -- like the bridge building project that both the kids took on -- when the home schooling approaches my vision, but it has been a lot of hard work for all of us. We are trying to ensure that the kids achieve the learning outcomes for their grades and have the necessary skills to do well in their next school year. It is an experience that we'll never forget. Through home schooling the kids have produced a blog, painted beautiful watercolours, learned goal-setting and developed some amazing computer skills, among many other things.

As wonderful an opportunity as a year of home schooling can be, I think we'll all breathe a sigh of relief when things are back to normal next year and the kids head off to a "real" school.

How's the winter going for you? write us: christinateskey @ yahoo.ca or mvieweg @ gmail.com

See our pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christina-t/

See the kids' beautiful watercolours and read some of their writing: http://www.viewegkids.blogspot.com/