How to meet people in Switzerland: Advertise your apartment!

Let me start by explaining something about rental contracts here in Switzerland. It's not that easy to get out of. You get two chances per year to get out. That's it. That's the general contract. It varies, sometimes you might have three dates a year when you may give up your apartment and some contracts will only allow it once a year. Some are so lucky that they may give three months notice any time of the year.

We had the "twice a year" contract. That means we can either give 3 months notice end of December to move out end of March or end of June to move out end of September. We've heard about this. We read our contract as best we could (it's in German obviously). But did miss this point.

So when we decided towards the end of January that we want to leave our apartment we thought we could just give three months notice and that would be it. No. We had just missed the official date to give notice so we had to find someone to take over the apartment from us if we wanted to move out. Now as I've mentioned in a previous post, the owners of our apartment are really nice people. And they said that we need to just do our best to find someone but if we don't then we'll make a plan together. Luckily the plan wasn't necessary.

I put an ad on homegate.ch on Monday as well as ads on any other expat sites I could think of. About six others. Monday night we received the first call for a viewing. And we had people all week coming to see the flat and all of them interested and handing in their application forms to the owners. On Thursday the owners said that's enough now! It sounds like tonight they're seeing the final couple and then will make their decision. That only took a week! What a relief.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you about meeting people in Switzerland. We've had so many nice people coming to view the flat. Many expats from all over. If we were only moving to the next town instead of leaving the country we could have started some good friendships this way!

PS If you need to advertise your apartment here in Switzerland I would recommend homegate.ch instead of immoscout24.ch. On homegate you pay a basic fee plus CHF2.50 per day. When your apartment is taken then you remove your add and you won't pay any more. On immoscout you choose one, two or three months to post your ad for. I was going to choose two months because it works out cheaper than having to do it for one month and then another month. Luckily I then first checked out homegate. They worked out cheaper for a whole month than immoscout and now it will cost us even less because we only needed the ad for a week.

Cute video

I don't have my own (yet), but I enjoy kids and every now and then I check to see if this person has posted any new videos on vimeo. She posts the most adorable videos of her little daughter. Have a look at this one. Too cute! Also have a look at some of her other videos like "Fooling the tooth fairy" and "Too much sugar". Make sure you've got the sound on!


Disco Fever from Capucha on Vimeo.

My Tuesday and Wednesday classes

Yesterday I told you about my Thursday class. Today I'll tell you about my other two afternoon classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I'm looking for someone to take over these two classes from me, so if you're interested please let me know. It would of course help if you're a primary school teacher, but if not and you think you'd like to do this and like working with kids, let me know asap. I'll send you more details.

So on these two days I teach at Kidee, a learning centre for children. They offer all kinds of classes here and this is also where I did the Jungle book and Water theme summer camps. I teach English first language kids. So they speak mostly English at home, but attend a local school where they learn/ speak German. Their parents want them to still be able to read and write in their home language and so I teach them that.

I have two hours on a Tuesday, but at the moment I have only filled one hour. In this hour I have two 8 year old children. They are fairly fluent readers and able to write and spell quite well already. I give them reading exercises on topics they have chosen, comprehension tests, creative writing, spelling tests and we play word games. Lovely kids, hard working and eager to learn.

On a Wednesday I have a group of six children age 5-7. So they're between first year kindergarten and first year at school. We have now just finished learning all the sounds of the alphabet and next they'll start on double sounds like wh-, sh- etc. They have a book in which at first I gave them printed sentences with high frequency words to which they then drew pictures. Now they are able to write their own sentences and draw a picture with each sentence to remind them what it says. From not being able to read and spell 6 months ago they are now able to read and spell short words like cat, bed, and even longer ones like cave and love. These they know because we learnt that v cannot stand on it's own at the end of words. You see the letter v is Vicky Violet's vase and if it doesn't have an e after it at the end of words it will fall over and spill all the water and flowers. So always remember to put an e to make sure your vase won't fall over at the end of a word!

I love these kiddies, they are all really great children, well behaved, polite and so eager and excited to learn more. I will miss them when we have to leave.

My Thursday Class

I just got home from my "Thursday Class". And before I tell you about that I must just say that I noticed it was not completely dark yet when I left at 6pm. It did help that there weren't any clouds. It was a beautifully sunny day today. But I'm sure winter is slowly moving along south. Yippee! I can't wait for the longer days!

So I've been meaning for a long time to tell you what I do when I'm not at home writing blogs. And today I'll tell you about my Thursdays since thats what it is today. On Thursday afternoons I teach English to a small group of Swiss children. They're learning English as a second language and they've been in this class for two or three years now. They're six years old. And although most of them can't yet really have a conversation with me in English, they're doing really well and learning a lot of vocabulary. 

The picture above was taken in June. We did a lesson on kitchen vocab- table, knife, fork, etc so I brought sweets and we had a little picnic. A few of the kids have moved away after the summer when they started their first year in school. I now only have four kids in the class but tonight two was absent. It was so much calmer! They are real little busy bodies. And chatterboxes. My most difficult customer in the group was such an angel tonight and I guess that is why I now felt like writing about this class. It feels so good when a really difficult child is being so good for a change and participating. Hopefully it will be like that next week too when I have my last lesson with them.

Now another story about teaching here: We rent a classroom at an old age home. They like seeing the kiddies around. Tonight when I walked in, the door to the classroom was closed and a "Besetz" (occupied) sign was on the door. I knew what this meant. I've seen that sign a couple of weeks before. So I open the door, knock, say hello, say hello again, and again as I'm walking closer and right up to the old lady sitting at a table. She sees me, gets up, shakes my hand, asks me how I am etc all in Swiss German so I can't tell you exactly what she said. I ask her if she has a course on here tonight? There are two mattresses rolled out on the ground and some towels on the table. She says, what? I can't hear you. I repeat myself and she still can't hear me. I see her hearing aid lying on the table and it takes her another moment to realise that too. Because, I continue then, I have kids for an English lesson here from 5-6. No no she says, impossible, she has been here for years at this time for her class. Right, I think, you weren't here last week. And I know from a previous experience that you have got the days muddled up. (I don't say this to her.) I say instead: On a Thursday?  Yes, yes, for years, she says. On a Thursday from 5-6? Every Thursday, I ask. Hang on, she says and checks her diary lying open on the table. I look over her shoulder and see stuff written in at Fridays date. Nothing for Thursday. Oh dear, she says, it's Thursday today? I had the days mixed up. And she packs her things and leaves.

Now if I didn't have a class there on a Thursday, it would have been the second time she would have sat there waiting for her people. She teaches a breathing class she told me the previous time.

Good thing I showed up to tell her it's not quite Friday yet. But she made me speak an awful lot of poor German to make her understand that.

We're leaving Switzerland

Yes that's right, we're moving to the UK at the end of March. We'll be sad to leave some things behind in Switzerland, like new friends we've made and the snow, but we're excited to see many of our old friends who now live in the UK and to be able to speak English to everybody!! That is so exciting! I will be able to understand  people in the grocery store and the post office. Yay!

Andre will finish work next Friday. He still has some leave due which they're not paying out so he has to take the leave. I will be working until the end of March. I am still looking for someone to take over my two afternoon English lessons, so if any of the Swiss readers here know of a teacher who might be interested let me know!

It sounds as thought our apartment is also sorted out for renting. That went really well and really quickly. Much better than I thought. Apparently the couple is coming to sign the contract this evening and once it's signed we can tick that off the list. They're also interested in buying our furniture so then we might end up taking only what we came here with. Then I get to go shopping all over again :-) And Andre will get to build furniture all over again!

We'll be staying with some very kind friends when we get there, then hopefully we'll find a place of our own soon. (Thank you kind friends!) That makes it a lot easier than trying to find an apartment from way over here. I have NO idea which are nice areas over there. I'm actually looking forward to house hunting and starting all over again.

The only thing I'm not looking forward to is going for interviews again... I'll miss my work here. I had some great kids in my English classes and I'll miss the little ones at the play school too.

So let me go and check my list to see what else needs to be done!

A snowy two days

This was the view from our bedroom window this morning. Everything is covered in white after all the snow we had on Sunday. After this bedroom window weather check I walked to the grocery store to go buy the groceries for the week. Andre discovered the car keys in his pocket when he got to work so I couldn't drive. It was nice to get out and get some (very) fresh air.

A few hours later it started snowing. 

It's dark now but it looks like it's still snowing.

I think this is the most snow we've had since we've been here. It looks like it might last a few days this time.

This is the view from our kitchen window. I love looking out the kitchen window. 

I walk across that little bridge every day to go to work. I saw Andre coming home across that bridge this evening. I was staring out the window again.

I have snow boots for days like these. I'll be wearing them tomorrow. That way I don't have to worry about messing up my nice boots. These ones aren't so pretty. They're not girly really. They're just waterproof and warm and don't mind the snow.

Meet our new neighbours

Ok, I know I shouldn't be posting this, but it's just so funny.

We've got new neighbours busy moving in across from us right now. They don't have curtains yet. And we just never got curtains. And I'm sitting here in front of my laptop which happens to be in front of our curtainless window overlooking their flat. And this dude has been building wardrobes, moving stuff and unpacking all night in his underpants!

We don't have TV you see.