Anna

In late March (yes, I'm just a bit late on posting this -- I don't make a very good blogger) Anna came to visit us for a few days. Anna was at OSU last year studying American literature and teaching German to undergrads and now is back at University of Bonn in Germany finishing up her Masters thesis. She tutored the boys in German for a few months before we left last year and did so in such a fun way the boys often forgot that they were being tutored. It was very fun for the us to see her again. The boys were able to carry on full conversations in German with her (well, Elliot not as much since he knows Swiss German, not "high" German, and they are quite different). One of the big topics of conversation was Harry Potter. It turns out that Anna is a big HP fan, as are we, and so we had many discussions of HP and made lists of "top ten favorite characters" and "top ten least favorite characters." Being the literary person that she is, Anna pointed out the difference between ranking characters just based on own personal preference vs. their literary role. So while we all agreed that we dislike Draco Malfoy, we also agreed that his character should be highly ranked -- the story wouldn't be the same without him, as Isaac said.

We also had one of our most ambitious hikes with Anna, rather by accident. I sometimes get a bit too ambitious with planning our hikes -- this was definitely one of those times. We set off for the "Voralpen" to the west of Zurich. We have a great little book that outlines 50 great hikes in the Zurich region and I picked one of the "moderately hard" ones that started from about 500 meters, climbed to 1300 meters and was about 14 km. This in and of itself would already be pretty ambitious for us; with the unanticipated snow that we discovered along the way, it became a real expedition. In late March, although there was no snow on the ground in Zurich, there was of course still snow at higher elevations -- something we had naiively not anticipated. So as we hiked up, we found ourselves starting to encounter snow, which then turned into these snow drifts that became quite deep! The sun had completely melted away large patches of snow, but then other patches were 2-3 feet deep. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Elliot did the best -- as the lightest, he danced along the top of the snow ahead of everyone else as we slogged step by step through the deep snow. It took a lot of determination and perserverance, but we finally made it to the restuarant at the top. We were all soaked, especially the boys. After warming up and drying off a bit, we still had to walk all the way back. We opted for the longer, but easier hike along the road to avoid the snow drifts and ended up catching the train at Wald. We were completely exhausted by the time we got back!