Philip Newton's journal

This morning, we went to church.

Usually, the Primary organises an Easter walk on Easter Monday morning, but since Easter was so early this year, they decided to have a breakfast inside instead, followed by games.

This turned out to be a good idea, because it started snowing around noon, fairly heavily.

So we all had breakfast at around 10:15, with all sorts of goodies, including warm bread rolls and scrambled eggs.

When everyone had eaten, the tables were cleared. The children were then all called back in and got a little bag of candy each.

Then the games portion started. Everyone had been asked to bring some games with them, and we ended up with quite a stack of them at the side of the cultural hall. (This may be a German thing; at any rate, there seems to be an entire genre called "German-style board games.")

At first, only a few people played, but eventually, quite a few groups formed.

I joined a game of Zug um Zug (one of the few games by a non-German author to win the coveted award Spiel des Jahres; the original name is Ticket to Ride), together with Andreas, Brigitte, Bianca, and Luca and Lukas (the last two played together initially, though Luca wandered off after a while and it was only Lukas then).

That was pretty fun, though it went on for longer than expected, and Amy ended up wanting to go home when we were about half-way through. Fortunately (for me), Stella managed to keep her occupied until I was finished, which ended up being about an hour later rather than the twenty minutes or so Andreas had guessed.

I saw Bianca nursing her son twice, which I found nifty, since I'm rather in favour of breastfeeding, and a few others in her family had nursed their children for a fairly short time (a month or so). Yannick is already eight weeks old, and when I asked her how long she planned to nurse him she said, "oh, six months or so perhaps?".

Speaking of which, I had also had a conversation with Bettina about (among other things) female periods and methods of contraception.

( Feel free to skip if you don't like that topic )

Usually, when Amy uses a construction from the wrong language, it's German intruding into her English, but I just heard what sounds like an opposite case: she handed me a box and asked me, "Kannst du das offen?".

I'm assuming that this was a slip caused by the fact that both the adjective "open" and the verb "open" are homophonous in English; what she said was "Can you open this" but with the adjective-open rather than the verb-open. The fact that it had the -en ending characteristic of infinitives may have helped.