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I booked our flights to Switzerland yesterday, so it's fairly sure now that we'll all be taking the plane.
We'll be flying with Air Berlin. €270 for all three of us, plus €60 for (optional) seat reservations, since Stella wanted to make sure that we could all sit together. (I imagine it might have been possible even without reserved seats, but if it'll make her feel better. Also, this way we're sure to be near the front of the aircraft, which I'm told is better if you have small children. We originally picked row 4, but then settled on row 7 since Stella had heard that the front and back of the aircraft were the most shakey. Row 7 looked as if it was just before the wing began, which is good since I find over-wing seats boring: you can't look out and see much but wing.
We'll be leaving on a Tuesday, since the flight is cheaper then, but returning on a Monday as planned, since the prices were the same for Monday and Tuesday return flights when I looked yesterday (a couple of weeks ago, though, the Tuesday was cheaper).
Teenager außer Kontrolle started up again, this time not on the Roundy Camp in Utah but in Oregon; still with Annegret Noble and her assistant Chris, though. (It's a nature therapy thing for youths who are all but intractable; for some, it's their last chance before they face jail or something.)
This time, there are a few more staff members who speak German: not just Annegret and Chris but also Marlies and Kami (and possibly Dan, though I've only heard him say a couple of words).
Annegret sounds as if she went to the US from Germany as an adult; Chris sounds like an American who learned German (I wonder whether he's a returned LDS missionary and learned German that way). Marlies and Kami, on the other hand, sound a bit like heritage speakers: they speak German fairly fluently and with a decent accent, but they don't sound as if they feel quite "at home" in that language. I wonder whether they were born in the States to parents of German descent, or moved over very young.
They also make the occasional odd word or grammar choice that indicates that English is their stronger language.
One thing that amuses me is when Marlies asked the teenagers whether they were "parat"—a word I understand but that's hardly used where I come from, so it sounds rather quaint. (For "ready", I'd use "bereit" or, colloquially, "fertig", which means literally "finished" but can be used to mean "ready" as in "finished with whatever you had to do to get ready".)
She also called the straps of the backpacks they all wear "Strapse", which sounds a bit racy to me: I've only heard it refer to what the British, apparently, call "suspenders": a garter strap that holds up a stocking. So to me it has a connotation of lingerie; specifically, lingerie worn to arouse, rather than just "generic" underweat that you wear during the day. FWIW, the word I'd use for backpack straps is "Riemen".
Amy used to say things such as "I bin die lion" for "I am the lion"; she's now switched her copula to an English word, but not the right one :) She now says "I are die lion". Which makes a bit of sense, I suppose, given that first and second person singular are identical in all English verbs but for a couple. At least, I presume she's generalising from being addressed as "you are the lion" into "I are the lion".
