Posts

Showing posts from 2014

Holiday Update

Image
McFarlands Month by Month: 2014 edition January: Rob gets a nose job, surgery # 1 of 6 for the year (Roto-rooter on the nose plumbing). Barely out of his nose patch, he then meets with other film professors for a working weekend in a swanky cabin. He and MA attend the Sundance Film Festival. Mary Ann makes a graceful exit from the film industry after a year of playing Mom to a film crew. Joss gets a cookie-as-big-as-your-head for learning all of his phonemes. February: Will and Sebi rip up the slopes at Sundance ski resort, and later participate in a wicked “Hunger Games” contest up Rock Canyon.   The odds are not in their favor.   Maddie fares better at a ballroom competition.   She and the waltz were made for each other.   Joss is at BYU and Wasatch Kindergartens; most days he has lunch with his buddy Zinnia in Dad’s office. March:   Mary Ann takes over in the presidency of our congregational women’s society, looking after the temporal and spiritual welfare of a gro

Last Day: Swabia Squared

Image
We went to the Ritter Sport museum (because we are never going to be able to see the artwork while the kids want to make custom chocolate bars). For being a small museum, they had a great collection of contemporary works. This one may have been called "Big in Japan" after the song. I knew Will would like it for that reason. This piece was all from carefully stacked tissue paper. We stopped in at Bebenhausen on the way back. I don't think I'd ever been through the tour before, but it was impressive. inside the cloister clock tower in the courtyard neat-o fishscale tiles on the roof

Monday: Tourist Training in a Hatchback

Image
 After the students got checked in, we met up with them in Tübingen and set off to do some area sight seeing that we didn't think they'd get otherwise. Unfortunately, we couldn't get a car big enough to hold them all. We took the ladies and sent the men on the train, which worked great getting from Tübingen to the Bad Urach waterfall.  We stopped in the town of Bad Urach and looked around. We saw the church, the water wheel, the town square where we had come in 2011 with the boys . Having come here before is what helped us know what to the options were with the students. We had tried out the hike with little boys, we knew what we could fit in a day, and we had other options (Sigmaringen or Ludwigsburg or Waldenbuch) for them to choose from. This is the huge advantage of having a scouting trip like Switzerland, where you can get the lay of the land without 30 students at your back waiting for you to figure it out.  The ladies bought some lunch and were heartened th

Settling in Tübingen

Image
We came to Tübingen to get BYU students settled in this program for the month of August. We drove up to the airport in Stuttgart, to the program's office, to the apartments and back to the office twice, and then did it again at the train station. But we were happy to be able to do this for the students--arriving in Europe tired and disoriented is always the best time to have someone you know show up and soften the landing.  Once they had dropped off their stuff and showered, we took them shopping at Rob's favorite grocery store, drove them to church, took them out to dinner for some regional specialties (we went to the Neckarmüller this time and it was good food and of course has a magnificent view of the river). This is part of the castle in Tübingen. I found out this time that in the kitchen here in the middle of the 19th century, acid was successfully extracted from the nucleus of a cell and called nuklein. They went on to discover that it contained all of the genetic

Swiss National Day

Image
After chasing alpine views on Thursday, we decided to race around a third of the country trying to celebrate Swiss National Day on August 1st (essentially their July 4th). We'd already made our itinerary and booked our hotels by the time we found out we'd be in Switzerland for their national holiday, so we had to make do. Except that after doing some internet research, we discovered that where we were on Thursday, they were celebrating on Friday, and where we were going on Friday, they would be celebrating on Thursday! What's a tourist to do? We charged out of Fluhli and drove straight to Zurich.  This is what we found. A lovely swiss choir, all wearing their traditional costumes,   the Zurich city band,   even spectators in their traditional finery,   an excellent flag waver,   this darling woman whose mother was from Bern. She said even though they were in Zurich, her mother would never wear the Zurich colors (blue and white, like BYU) and she always w

An Interlude on an Interlaken Lake

Image
 Coming down out of the Lauterbrunnen valley, we were cruising along the highway, mostly in a long, dark tunnel. Switzerland seems to shunt lots of its traffic through the country this way. It's very efficient, but when the GPS is showing you a famous lake to the left, Rob and I get antsy to see it. So we took a detour. Helga (the GPS lady) got very concerned, but we're able to ignore her voice quite well by now. We parked in Brienz. Here is what we knew about it: it's the other lake by Interlaken; quieter thank Lake Thun; it looks like everyone oversaturates their pictures of Lake Brienz on Pinterest--crazy turquoise water. First, we had to stick our feet in the water. This stems from our theory-in-progress about how to interact with places you visit. Rob's initial theory was that you had to eat somewhere or take a nap there to feel like you've been to a spot. Through the years we've seen students and tourists try all sorts of things to feel like they