Mattenhof Abschlussfest

Wednesday evening was a celebration for the graduation of the Grundstufe 1 klasse at Hanna's school. The children have been in this school for 3 years (2 Kindergarten years and 1st grade) and now they are moving on the older grade school. We met at the Grundstufe building with our picnic supplies and then hiked up the hill to the Ziegelhütte, about a 30 minute walk. The Ziegelhütte is a picnic area in the woods by our apartment with a small shelter, play area, picnic tables, benches, a running water fountain and fire pits for roasting brats and cervelats. I'd love to see a statistic on the number of brats consumed per person in Switzerland. It has to be incredibly high.... it's the main meat (they are veal not pork) for grilling or cookouts and they do it regularly for school hikes too. They sell them on the streets with a hunk of bread and some mustard, at the train station, or at every outdoor festival or market.

After eating dinner, the children ran around in the woods, looking for frogs, snails and slugs. Then the parents and children presented the teachers with a special gift, a glass platter with tiles made by each child. One of the mothers had very thoughtfully translated her presentation into English for us so we could understand what was going on. It would be also interesting to know how many different languages are spoken at home by the families. One family that was sitting near us included a mother from Brazil and father from CH and they only spoke Portuguese at home. I also heard a couple of fathers talking and they sounded like they were speaking an Eastern European language. We met a little boy from Hanna's class at the park one day and his mother said they spoke mostly Italian at home and that the Swiss German she spoke was very different from the dialect here because she was from Bodensee (only 50 km to the north!). Elisabet has been picking up a little bit from her German class lately and when I overhear them playing she says things like "ok, let's pretend that they speak French, Italian and German". Even if they do not come home speaking German fluently, at least they have learned how there are so many ways to communicate around the world.