international day

Saturday was the final day of German saturday school for me and the twins. All the girls and I did the fall semester of the program, which ended in January, but Erin couldn't enroll in the spring semester because school conflicted with her weekly softball games. Erin has continued learning German with a tutor at home while the rest of us continued in the school. On our final day, each of the classes performed a song or read poetry and a couple of the teenage classes performed original skits. Everything was in German, of course.

My classmates and I in the adult class couldn't escape performing either, so we sang/acted out a childrens' song and one of my classmates brought her guitar and played along. Very unfortunately, since I was singing I couldn't take any pictures or video of our performance and thus I have no footage to share here, and I'm ever so upset about that.

Luckily, we adults performed first and with that indignity out of the way all the parents and grandparents who gathered to see their kids could enjoy the rest of the show. Here is some of the twins' class together with the first grade class, which Erin was a part of in the fall. Unless you are a German-speaking grandparent, this video probably won't be too interesting for you.


In the afternoon I knew there would be a puppet show in German at a German school in the city and anyone was welcome to attend. I hadn't visited this other school before and I was wondering if we would be making this long trek only to be in an audience of 5 people in some dirty basement in order to watch a show that would only last 15 minutes. But, I decided to take a chance and after lunch the girls and I headed out.

The puppeteer didn't have the most elaborate stage in the world, but he had many, many puppets. He changed scenery several times and he had tons of props and sound effects going on from behind the set. He was a really entertaining guy even before he went behind the backdrop, and his show, Rumpelstiltskin, was really well done, and funny.



There were probably 40 kids there, plus parents. Before the show and afterwards he talked with the kids, and afterwards he invited the kids to see behind his stage and touch many of the puppets and props. The show lasted about an hour.

We all enjoyed it, it was well worth the trip.

I noticed when we entered the school building that it was literally steps away from the entrance to Chinatown, so after the show the girls and I took a walk around. The girls liked all the animal statues sitting outside various stores. See if you can pick out the three monkeys in the second photo:

I know, trick question! The photo has 6 monkeys.


We walked around for a while and I bought the girls a couple of truly junky (even by Made in China standards) trinket/toys, and we headed back to the car. On the way there, after leaving Chinatown, Erin announced, "I hear Scottish music! There it is, let's go in!" as we neared a Scottish imports store with an open door and bagpipe music playing from within.

We wandered in there and were greeted by a salesman in a kilt. We looked at samples of John's family plaid and I distracted the girls away from the whiskey bottles by inviting them to play with some Lock Ness Monster toys. Then Kate found a shirt she liked and suddenly all the girls wanted one.


We got back home just at dinner time, and with that our German-Chinese-Scottish day was complete.