Movie Park and Summer Fair

This week has been so busy!  I feel like I start every blog post with exactly the same sentence recently!

There was lots of sickness in Lower School this week, so I was covering in Nursery, Little Dragons, and Year 6.  Lots of the Little Dragon staff had been off because the same bug was going around, which I of course caught while covering.  So I was off sick on Wednesday.  Back to being busy on Thursday, and then Friday was Movie Park day!  Whooooooo!

The whole of Lower School (years 3-6) go to a movie themed, theme park to celebrate the end of the school year.  The park is brilliant, and I had a great, small group of 5 year 5 students.  I teamed up with a friend who had 2 year 3 girls and 4 year 4 boys, so all together we had a really nice group.  Our group were in the 'wants to go on everything, and is tall enough to go on everything' group, so we ended up on roller coasters (AMAZING!), wet rides (with me being the only one to get drenched some how), twisty spinny ones (which I managed to avoid going on luckily), and the very high free fall drop that you can see in the two photos below.  It takes you up really slowly, then angles you out before free falling.  Wow, what an adrenaline rush. I was properly shaking from head to toe when I got off of that one.  I screamed the whole way down, and made a 9 year old girl hold my hand!  What a wimp!  Yet, roller coasters I have absolutely no problem with!

The children had a fantastic time, despite there being half an hour where we had a few green faces from too many spinny rides, and despite one trip to the medical tent for a seatbelt burn, oh yes and a few forgotten bags that we had to run all over the park finding... other than that, it was a great day.  We didn't get back to school until 6pm, so it was a long long day too.  and the next day was the Summer Fair!

We have to work two saturdays every year, and today was one of those days.  I was doing the morning shift, which means two hours of set up and two hours of manning a stall.  I was also a team leader, so I was in charge of getting 10 people organised, and setting up their stalls.  My stall was making bubbles.  We had lots of bubble mix, with food colouring in it, and the kids could fill up a test tube with bubble mix, put a cork in the top, add a pretty stamp or jem to the cork, then make a bubble wand out of a pipe cleaner, and voila! Bubbles!  The stall was really popular, so the time went super quick.

In the afternoon I stayed around after my shift for a couple of beers, and to watch Matt play in the teachers vs parents football match. The teachers won 4-1! Woop Woop!  It was fun to watch, and Matt played really well.  There was someone taking photos with a really big zoom on their camera, so I will put some more photos up of the match next week once I have those piccies.

Tomorrow is Sunday, and our only day off this week!  Next week is sure to be another busy one, what with sports day having been rescheduled for Monday, and prize givings taking place.  I can't believe there are only 2 more weeks of this school year!  And 3 weeks until we move house.  Yay!  There was another argument with our awful landlady this week, so I really can't wait to get out of here!  Tomorrow is definitely going to be a day of rest!

Tennis

I have no photos at all to show for this week.  A boringly quiet week is exactly what I wanted in order to recover from three weekends in a row of guests, but I didn't actually get it.  Matt was off sick on Monday and Tuesday.  He had a nasty cough and possible chest infection.  He went to the doctors who told him that his resting pulse was very low.  So his week was full of doctors and cardiologist appointments.  Turns out his heart is very healthy, and he has a low pulse because his cardio exercise is amazing!  An incredibly stressful week for absolutely no reason at all.  I'm just so happy that everything is fine.

My week health-wise was OK.  I'm now on week 6 of the couch to 5K jogging challenge.  I am meant to do 3 runs per week with a days rest in between.  I have only managed to do 2 this week, so now my running days are all messed up.  It was very annoying on Friday when I was walking home and started getting hassled by a couple of men.   I had to tell them to get away from me, and they did, but unfortunately they went and sat in the park that I run in.  No way was I going running after that!

So a bit of a weird week really.  I had a slob around the house day yesterday, while Matt was off watching the tennis in Halle. It was the semi final and he got to see Federer play, so he had fun.  Today we're not doing much of anything, just getting ready for what will be a very busy week starting tomorrow - sports day, movie park trip with the whole of lower school, summer fair at school on Saturday and year 13 prom on Saturday evening!

Wuppertal Zoo, Cocktails and Rubber Ducks

This week has been very busy!  I'm not sure that I have quite recovered from my hectic weekend last week with the girls.  It's been very hot here in Germany this week, and Friday especially was sweltering.  We had a storm on Saturday, but it doesn't seem to have cooled off a huge amount.

On Wednesday and Friday mornings I was in with the Nursary children.  I really dislike being in with the Little Dragons, who are a year younger, so I was dreading it, but I actually really enjoyed myself.  It was a nice break from the age groups that I normally work with.  They do lots of fun activities, and I just picked a table to sit down at and joined in, chatting with the kids and doing some Disney colouring.  On Friday, they spent the entire morning playing outside, it was lovely.  We made Gruffalo cupcakes too which was fun, and so messy!  I couldn't do it every day, but once in a while, it makes a nice change.

On Thursday I went on the Year 5 trip to Wuppertal Zoo and on the Schwebebahn.  This is the oldest Monorail in Europe.  It's a bit like a roller coaster when it goes around corners!

The zoo was really nice, apart from the fact that it is (like the whole of Wuppertal) on a very very very steep hill.  I got a serious amount of exercise on Thursday!  We had a tour when we arrived on coastal animals, which was a bit pointless really.  Apparently the other group's tour guide was really good, but ours was just like 'this is a polar bear, here are some penguins, this has nothing to do with the coast but lets look at a sloth'.  The children got a bit restless, as all they wanted to do was run around and see as much as possible.  We had a nice picnic at lunch time, and then we split into groups to explore.  I had 6 boys in my group, including the 2 who are very hard work, but who I really like.  They are hilarious!  One of them gets bored very easily and was likely to run off, so I hatched a cunning plan... I gave him my camera.  With a little bit of responsibility the boy behaved brilliantly.  Consequentially, I had 700 photos when I got back - a selfie of every child in my group, lots of pictures of the floor and blurry animals in the distance (he didn't work out that there was a zoom).  The pictures are so funny and it's a shame I can't share them with you because they have children in them, but here are some of the best animal ones...

The Polar Bear was gorgeous.  She was playing in the water, pushing the ball up through this floating platform, and jumping from the rocks into the water.  She was the happiest Polar Bear I have ever seen at a zoo, which was lovely. Normally they are just pacing back and forth, and seem a bit miserable.

On Saturday, my lovely friend Al had a cocktail party at her flat, which was so much fun!

Here is a nice photo of the 'Hague gang'.  

 Sunday was the annual Duisburg Inner Harbour duck race and dragon boat racing, which of course was a must for me.  I went with Sean, and it was fun to see the ducks and the dragon boats racing!  We went for ice cream too, and then Matt and Luke met us there for dinner (huge pizzas again!).  Matt and Luke had been in Cologne for the day, climbing the Cathedral tower and visiting the Nazi Museum.

The ducks are all entered by local businesses.  I particularly liked the below one, which is based on the famous statue in Duisburg town centre.

Gossip, Gladiators and Gothic Cathedrals

Last week was a lovely 3 day week! I just love it when you get up on Wednesday morning, and it't the last time before the weekend.  This weekend I had extra cause to be excited; my lovely best buddies came to stay.  They arrived on Thursday evening (after Matt and I had a very lazy day). We decided to head straight out to the Inland Harbour for gigantic pizza at L'Osteria.  The pizzas are so tasty there!  We could only eat about half each, so asked if we could take the rest home.  The waitress dropped our halves on the floor, so Becky and I got a fresh half each cooked for us!

On Friday, us girls headed off to Cologne for the day, while Matt spent the day playing Football Manager and running errands (including meeting with the tenants advice bureau regarding our landlady trying to keep our whole security deposit).  Friday reached temperatures of 33 degrees!  Ridiculously hot!  We had to take shelter in the Cathedral when we arrived, just to get out of the sun.

We then headed off to the Lindt Chocolate Museum.  There was lots of information about fair trade and the cocoa bean, but the most interesting bit was seeing the machines actually go from start to finished wrapped chocolates.  It was fascinating watching the process, and physically stopping myself from thrusting my head into this big vat of liquid chocolate!

The above are chocolate molds.  They are enormous!

Mini chocolate cathedrals, and lindt bunnies...

 We, of course, had ice cream sitting on the Rhine...

When we left, we got on a train that had broken air con.  It was like walking into a sauna.  We actually got off the train and waited for the next one, because sitting on it for 45 minutes just wasn't an option!  In the evening, we met some of my work friends for cocktails in the town that we will be living in from mid-July.  It was nice to introduce old friends to new ones.

On Saturday, the girls went into Xanten. I went last week, but it was so good, and I knew the girls would love it, so I just had to go again.

Above, are some of the original gargoyles from the Cathedral before it was almost totally destroyed during the war.

The archaeological park had some sort of event going on, which was nice as there were lots for kids to do, like chariot racing.  There were some gladiator fights too which was really cool!

There were lots of tents set up with Roman trades like medicine and chain male working.

We had a great day in Xanten, despite there being a fun fair in the middle of the little Medieval town, which somewhat took away from it's charm, but still a lovely day.  We topped it off by going to the local brewery in Duisburg, for traditional German schnitzel. Yum!  Matt spent the evening out watching football in the local pub.

On Sunday we had nearly the whole day before Nic and Becky left for their 9pm flight.  We decided to have a restful day at the 6 lakes beach.  It's 4 Euro to get in, and there are toilets and cafes.  It was pretty much empty at midday when we arrived, and steadily filled up throughout the afternoon.  I dipped my toes in the lake, but it was freezing!  Matt and Becky went for a proper swim. They are much braver than I am!  I was content just to lay in the sun and read my book and listen to the dragon boat practices on the lake.  Bliss.