Days since last round up: 8
Estimated fluency: 68% (we’re sticking here for a bit)
Miles from Munich: 145
Major achievements: learning how to paddleboard
Unfortunate mishaps: lost sunglasses (now somewhere at the bottom of the Bodensee)
Reading: Desintegriert Euch! by Max Czollek
Weather: glorious sunshine with a lovely breeze
The start of the week seems a long way away, and Munich even further. Last Friday we drove across to the Bodensee (Lake Constance), where the dad’s parents have a small holiday home in a little village called Dinkelsdorf. The nearest big town is Konstanz, about 30 minutes on the bus, but otherwise the house has everything we need: it’s a relatively cosy two-storeys, each with a kitchen and bedrooms, so that two households can live relatively independently, and there’s a huge garden directly on the lake. The grandparents are also here until Wednesday so they’re downstairs and we’re upstairs for now, but most of the time is spent outside anyway.
The main focus of the week was preparing for going away, but I managed to do a little more exploring, despite the rain on Monday and Tuesday - turns out Munich is just as pretty in the rain (if you’ve got an umbrella), but the Viktualienmarkt is a lot less busy. There was also plenty of time to work through Haymatland by Dunja Hayali, which was especially enjoyable sitting in a shady spot in the Bavaria Park. This week was also my first experience of having a beauty treatment in German, although the linguistic challenge was different to the one I had expected, with an absolutely lovely Italian manicurist who had described her own German as ‘eine Katastrophe’.
Mornings ran especially smoothly; the older girl is allowed to go to bed a bit later because it’s school holidays, so there were a few tired mood swings, but the younger one is really getting used to the routine and things have become very easy - she’s even enthusiastic about getting ready now! With the girls variously falling asleep after a long day, playing at friends’, and the family being invited to a neighbour’s for a barbeque, evenings this week were very relaxed, leaving time to chat with the parents about arrangements for the holiday. There were also a few childcare highlights: getting the younger one ready for bed while she was sleeping, after her nap when she got home from Kindergarten lasted all the way until the evening, and her asking to be carried home from picking her sister up from school.
Things got a little more chaotic as Thursday approached, as the apartment filled up with bags, and it was my job to distract the kids while mum and dad packed. Easier said than done in a small apartment. Having to move in and out of Oxford each term, I’ve dealt with a fair bit of packing stress, and I always thought I was an over-packer. But once the car was loaded up with thirty-eight individual bags (admittedly a lot only handbag size, but yes, thirty-eight), and only 3 belonged to me, I felt strangely reassured, and just a tad squashed.
We set off late on Friday and arrived just before midnight, unloaded the car, said hello to the grandparents and were quickly in bed, the girls having fallen asleep on the way, so Saturday was when the holiday really started. After a bit of a lie-in following being woken up at 6.50am by an excited three-year-old, I spent the day outside, in and out of the water, mostly playing with the older girl while the grandparents took care of the younger one. Family breakfast on the terrace and a hearty homemade dinner by the Grandma eaten al fresco book-ended a day of alternatively chilling in the sun and trying out the paddleboard. The older girl couldn’t get enough, and we’d roughly mastered standing up, with each go lasting a bit longer before we inevitably fell in.
Sunday was a little more relaxed, still in and out of the water most of the day, and a particularly special evening spent sitting just by the lake with a campfire. The grandpa especially is really lovely and I’m now surrounded by more adult conversation in German, which gives me a nice chance to practice. Very different vibes to the Munich lifestyle, but I think I’m going to enjoy these two weeks in au pair paradise.
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