Life is full of surprises...

Well the first day back to school for the boys this week. Mike has moved to the big boys’ school, a year ahead of the rest of his friends to start in a bilingual preschool, housed just a room away from Max’s class. Nicole and I were both surprised when we left Mike with his new teacher, and there was barely any reaction. He had been the king of his kindergarten, and was one of the bigger kids there and here he starts right back at the bottom without knowing a soul in his class.

Summer is well and truly over and it feels as if the weather gods have decided we won’t bother with an autumn this year, and let’s just skip straight to winter. I unfortunately do not own any winter clothes and am forced to endure the cold chill in the air. This summer has been one of the hottest recorded in years, and it also strangely happens to be one of the shortest. But the sun could come back, you just never really know.

Nice and early on Tuesday I was sent to pick up a family friend from the Airport, the last person I expected to see through the arrival gates was my very own Mother all the way from New Zealand. She had been planning a trip to Eastern Europe months before I had even mentioned my intentions of moving to Germany. So she had contacted Nicole, and arranged to come and stay for just under a week, before joining her tour group for the rest of the religious pilgrimage throughout Croatia, Bosnia and Italy. She hadn’t even told my grandmother she was coming, until the day before she left NZ. I was a little taken back to say the least, and I my first reaction was of course to swear. I didn’t take any notice at the time, but apparently a few people around us were quite startled with my reaction. Mum even pulled out the digi to start snapping away at my reaction.

When I had composed myself and recovered from the shock, I took her shopping in Wiesbaden – to get some of the winter clothes I desperately needed and to show her the sights. On Wednesday we did the tour through Mainz, and I took her to several churches (dutiful daughter that I am). On Thursday we went to the Kaiser-Friedrich Irish Roman Thermal baths, which are famous in the area, and of which I didn’t realise fully until I had gotten there, were ‘textile free’. So I had to cast aside twenty-one years of inhibitions and get back to nature, my only saving grace was that I couldn’t wear my glasses, and so I had no way of being able to see peoples reactions and expressions. So we spent the morning going around the different pools and saunas, the Finnish sauna had an air temperature of 85 to 90 degrees celsius. We even went so far as to have a Rasul treatment, where we had to cover ourselves in different mud, then sit for half an hour in a scented steam room before rubbing oil all over ourselves. The Germans are crazy about ‘spas’ and there is a whole health-craze phenomenon surrounding them, they are even covered by their health insurance. I am glad I stuck it out, and it certainly opened my eyes to a different way of life. Germans (and most other Western European countries) are surprisingly liberal when it comes to nudity and censorship. Throughout summer, it was not uncommon to see women sunbathing topless in the cities parks during their lunch breaks, and boobs are flashed all over the TV and in normal magazines, not at all like our reserved attitudes back home in New Zealand, a hang up I guess from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers.

Finally I took her on a tour of some of the villages along the Rhine. I even managed to find a historic Cistercian Monastery, a religious order my mother is connected with back in NZ. Thankfully, the monastery has been un-inhabited since the early 19th Century so it was more of a museum, than a religious institution. I took her to the touristy town of Rüdesheim, where we ate schnitzel and strudel then we walked amongst the tour groups of old ladies in twin-sets and loud touritsts along the famous ‘Drossel Straße’. The highlight of Mums day was seeing a small dog, with what appeared to be underwear covering its backside.

So even though it was an unexpected visit I got to show Mum some of the sights and sounds of my life as an Au Pair in Germany. She was impressed with how well the boys behaved, the standard of my driving, the life style the family lives and the ingenuity of the way the Germans do things or the way things are made.