We move, and the village and neighbours are lovely, welcoming, friendly. We appear to have fallen on our feet, and life is easier than I anticipated, despite the sum total of my German vocabulary being "rot wein bitte".
The boys start at their international school, and they are taught German 4 days a week. In this subject they are streamed within each year group into Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced.
In the meantime we start to get to know the neighbours a bit, and I am bowled over with one family in particular (Swiss/Italian), whose adult children all speak 5 languages (Swiss German, High German, Italian, French and English). Where did these extraordinarily brilliant but very modest people learn all that ? Swiss German and Italian at home, but the rest of it at the local Gemeinde schools. And one of them didn’t go to the Gymnasium…… Hmmmmmmm.
I join the Swiss Schooling Yahoo group, and watch the conversations there with interest. There definitely seems to be something in the idea of immersing the children sooner rather than later so they learn the language more quickly. However, there are a lot of scary threads about bullying of auslanders, which gives me great concern, particularly as J is extremely small for his age. And in the Swiss system the children come home for lunch so opportunity for me to find a job would be somewhat limited.
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