Joshua had his seventh birthday party today<\/a>.\u00a0 About ten kids came to our place and Anne organized some art projects that she learned about in Aspen.\u00a0 It was a challenge to deal with that many six-year-olds (they are all younger than Joshua with one exception because the cut off here follows\u00a0calendar year, unlike the US, so kids are younger in their grades).\u00a0 In any case, they seemed to have\u00a0a good time and Joshua was super excited to have a birthday party.\u00a0 He made a beach scene out of molding clay, including a non-smoking and smoking sections!\u00a0<\/p>\nOne of the mothers was very nice, but a very stressed German, whose kid was threatening to either throw himself or someone else down the nine floors from our balcony to the street.\u00a0 She, predictably, didn’t want the kid on the balcony and I assented.\u00a0 She was a bit stressed, though, and I felt like I was dealing with another kid i.e. a situation.\u00a0 She invited us to join her in her Chalet in Gstaad, which is tempting if she would promise not to be there at that time.\u00a0\u00a0 Gstaad is a very chic destination and in fact, in the movie trading places, Dan Akroid tries to palm his Pateck Phillip watch, which tells time simultaneously in Paris, New York and “staad.”\u00a0 I didn’t tell her about the joke.<\/p>\n
Our poor dog is such a mess with scabs on his neck and the side of his face, which he has scratched and made bloody.\u00a0 We bought him a lamp shade and now he’s all depressed.<\/p>\n
December 2, 2007<\/u>.\u00a0 Anne took the dog on a long walk today to try to cheer him up.\u00a0 I hung out with the kids who are perfectly happy not leaving the house.\u00a0 I guess that’s the way it is.\u00a0 When Anne got back I went on a long 1:45 run and ran a race course where they had a race today — that I considered doing but since I didn’t run all week as a result of my cold and it isn’t quit over, I gave it a miss.\u00a0 It was a course on dirt and looked pretty good.\u00a0 Then I planned our trip to France for next week (rented a car, mapped the route, tried to find some stuff to interest the kids…).<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking about the pricing here.\u00a0 Why are things so ridiculously expensive, sometimes twice what they cost in the US.\u00a0\u00a0One glaring example of commodities\u00a0gone wild are\u00a0running shoes.\u00a0 The same shoes that I get in the US cost twice what they cost stateside, sometimes more.\u00a0\u00a0Books are another thing that is much more expensive than in the US for the same book.\u00a0 I don’t\u00a0think this\u00a0is\u00a0explained by duties; it’s a problem in the system\u00a0since if it’s easy to open a business, then someone would have and underpriced the few stores that have the high prices.\u00a0 I’ll work on finding\u00a0the answer but according to some quick research, books are free of duty and athletic shoes are subject to an 8 percent duty.\u00a0 Stay\u00a0tuned.\u00a0<\/p>\n
December 3, 2007<\/u>.\u00a0 Did you know that it’s polluted around here — really polluted?\u00a0 I didn’t but this morning’s newspaper made that clear.\u00a0 Listen, it’s nice here in a lot of ways — there is a way about this place that makes it a friendly city and certainly one that is beautiful and worth spending time in — but quality of life is another question.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unless you are willing to really throw serious money at the issue, like who knows\u00a0how much\u00a0but let’s call it Russian mafia money, it’s not even close to what we have in Aspen.\u00a0 We have a lot of the European experience to experience, for both ourselves and the boys, but here’s what we know so far: learn Spanish, small check, get a European experience, check (it’s very much like and reminds me of Europe), bath like a European (small check since we can’t take long showers), frustrated with the ability (inability) to wash clothes (check), far too much traffic, check, critical mass of people check, other physical activities (check — running for long times).<\/p>\n
The dog turned out not only to have fleas (nice) but also allergies to food and whatever else.\u00a0 I feel for the little critter; he’s miserable but has been diagnosed and will be better soon enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another thing, our blog stats look terrible.\u00a0 We just seem to be uninteresting, unknown, or both.\u00a0 Here are the stats from the last months but they are going the wrong way.\u00a0 92 visits two weeks ago, 52 visits last week, and zero this week.\u00a0 I’m not hurt, well that much, I mean, even Anne doesn’t read it!<\/p>\n
December 4, 2007<\/u>.\u00a0 I have a theory about the sexes here — by sexes I mean Men and Women.\u00a0 The women here are hard and the men are soft, almost like the traditional role of the sexes is reversed.\u00a0 I think that this may be the prevelant situation throughout Europe.\u00a0 I’ve developed my theory over the last few months but it seems clear that the women over 20 or 25 are very hard, and generally don’t seem that attrative.\u00a0 Anne told me they aren’t supposed to be attrative to me, but I’m not sure that she’s correct.\u00a0 I’m not saying I’m going to fool around, obviously I wouldn’t since I have Anne to fool around with; I’m just saying that you would expect women to want to be attractive; men too.\u00a0 I guess the men are attractive in a soft, unthreatening,\u00a0mamma’s boy, cuddly\u00a0way — I’m not being gay here.\u00a0 The women, however, seem to take some pride in having hard hairstyles, hard sunglasses, hard “perscription” glasses, hard boots, hard clothes and a hard, unattractive, almost agressive\u00a0look and attitude.\u00a0\u00a0I guess they just boss their men around and it’s good with everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We had considered staying for two<\/a> years over the last few months and even went to the trouble of getting German passports into process.\u00a0 The idea would have been to go to Aspen over summer and return here for the next school year but we’ve nixed that idea.\u00a0 We don’t want to be away from home for that much time and don’t think that the additional year is worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"November 28, 2007.\u00a0 I studied Spanish this morning before going to my lesson.\u00a0 It’s a long process.\u00a0 When I got back, Anne and I went to lunch and then by the local cheese and ham store.\u00a0 We were looking around and the store is very high end (we ate there last week).\u00a0 It’s a special […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}