Month: March 2006

The photograph is one we generated using the Google earth program of Leon.

We have been back now for almost a week. It was a busy period starting Sunday night when we arrived in Leon. We stayed at Vera’s house, the Irish lady who lives in Spain and organised the whole week on top of looking after us. Tony and the girls were able to use Vera’s third car while Anne was pre-occuppied with meetings and teaching.

The occasion was a project meeting for www.teaching-culture.de where two courses are being piloted for teachers from all over Europe. This was the residential week after they have been working online since last October. After Leon they will be trying out lesson ideas for the next three months. So we were a large group of partners, students and family.

Meanwhile Tony and the girls went to a stuffed animal museum which is much better than it sounds. They also visited some caves in the mountains. Mia was a little reticent beforehand but agreed to go in the end and had a great time. Gwen and Mia also went to a Spanish school for a couple of hours. It is a school where they teach through the medium of English 40% of the time so Mia was doing science while Gwen was following one of the teachers and being questioned by the Spanish children about Denmark and so on.

The Spanish tempo was difficult to adjust to with lunch at about 3pm, dinner at 8.30 (too early for the Spanish so the restaurants were empty at this time) and late nights and early starts.

Life carries on apace. Tony was at a BTO meeting in Thetford today and Mia is staying overnight at a friends. Tomorrow Mia is taking part in a gymnastics display to mark the end of her gym classes which she has been doing on Wednesday evenings. Gwen is going to 2 birthday parties in the next week and Anne is going to a 2-day conference in northern Denmark on Monday and then giving a talk at conference in Mallorca at the end of the week. We should be all together again by Saturday evening April 1st.

Tony has just finished overseeing a conference based close to Kalø. Although it is less than an hour’s drive from here, conferences are such time-consuming events that he overnighted there for 4 nights. One of the delegates was a Finn who seems to have been drunk from the moment he set foot on Danish soil until the minute he boarded the plane to fly back to Finland. He was escorted out of the local supermarket by police and gave his talk with everybody wondering whether he would fall over before the end. Apparantly it was a good talk. No-one knows where he spent the first night because he didn’t claim his room key until the next morning. And he was using the airport bar as he prepared to board the early morning flight back to Finland.

Otherwise we had three Russians to lunch and dinner as well as an old friend from WWT days who has lived in Spain for about the same amount of time we have lived in Denmark. We went to stay at his flat in 1995 when Gwen was barely one year old and he came to visit us in our summer house when we went to Southern Spain in about 2000. So we now have some cyrillic script in our guest book.

Boringly, the snow continues. We have had snow in the landscape non-stop since the end of December. I know you all think it is like this every year in Denmark but it isn’t!

Now we must get ready for sunny Spain or at least Spain which is 20 degrees warmer than here. It has been minus 10 at night and the car brakes and gearboxes have been freezing up even though we keep them in the garage.

It is likely that Gwen and Mia will be able to spend a day or part of a day in a Spanish school so it is not all fun for them!