Long Days

School started for the boys on September 10th, but the first week was mostly chaotic, trying to figure out schedules and taking care of administrative and organizational tasks. For their final (unless something goes horribly wrong) two years, they will be preparing to take the International Baccalaureate (IB) at the end of next year. That means they have very different kinds of classes starting now, especially in the subjects they have chosen as “higher level”. After the first meeting with the teachers, Paddy was ecstatic about higher level math, so much so that I found myself devoutly hoping this math teacher has a good sense of humor and is not likely to tell him “not quite that high” too soon. Christopher is taking standard level math (Paddy coined the term “the stanleys” for the standard level math group), but higher level history, so he is equally thrilled about devoting his attention to a more in-depth study of Stalin and Lenin. The only glitch with their classes is that the school is apparently still trying to determine what their “first” language is and figure out which consequences that choice might have. I find this fairly frustrating. This is an international school, and the majority of the pupils at this school speak more than one language at home: How is it not possible to accommodate this fact in the curriculum? Paddy and Christopher are bilingual, in other words they speak two languages (not counting the languages they have learned at school and from friends), so why do they have to choose just one as their “first” language?

Since the boys were in France last week with their respective classes and only returned last Sunday, on Monday morning they jumped in at the deep end, so to speak. This has been a very, very long week.

With the IB classes all in very small groups and along with all the “core subjects” they are required to take for the Austrian graduation certificate, the boys have a staggering schedule. They leave home every day at about seven in the morning and don’t get back until about seven in the evening. During the day they have some longer breaks, when they can study on their own and with friends and classmates, but there is an incredible amount of information to be processed in any case.

With the boys gone every day all day, we figured out fairly quickly that we can’t really afford for all four of us to go out for lunch every day of the week, so we are trying to change some of our routines. This includes trying to remember to keep supplies of food that could work as a kind of mid-day snack to take along to school, the workshop and the office. Then we try to have a reasonable dinner together in the evening. Eating our main meal of the day in the evening feels odd, and I’m not sure it feels entirely healthy, but it is certainly enjoyable to take the time to sit down together in the evening and talk. The boys both have so much to say for themselves, and it is a great pleasure to be able to listen to them.

With such long days of work, though, we are already looking forward to the next holidays.

And they're off again

I have just come home from the train station, where I said good-bye to Christopher, who left with his class to spend a week at a language school in France. When I got home, I found Paddy packing to leave early in the morning with his class to spend a week at another language school in a different part of France.

I'm already feeling lonely.

Since school started this week, they have both been very excited about some of the classes they have this year, and it has been so much fun with them. Paddy is delighted to be taking "higher level" math now, and Christopher is looking forward to starting an extended essay on Lenin and Stalin for his "higher level" history class, as they start preparations for the International Baccalaureate this year. They both have so much to say, and each one has a very different but equally delightful sense of humor that makes it a pleasure to listen to them.

It doesn't seem quite fair that they are to be gone again for a whole week so soon, but I'm afraid this is just a taste of things to come.

Paddy's illustrated map

Since I kept pestering Paddy about putting his pictures online so that everyone can see them, he started to put them on Flickr the other day, but there were too many and they are too big for that. I suggested he could just make some kind of an album and put it on the Derieg web site, but naturally that was too simple for him.

Instead he made a map and linked the pictures to it:
Paddy's map

Return of the young rain gods

Last Wednesday, at about nine in the evening, our young travelers returned to Linz by way of Prague. As the train pulled into the station where we were waiting for them, Peter pointed out that it was coming from the direction opposite to the one they had left in, so they really had come full circle. As they got off the train and announced that they were starving, they brought with them the rain that seems to have followed them all the way around this circle.

The day they arrived tired but without further complications in London at Francis’ house was the same day that Skype went out all over the world. I found that quite frustrating, since I had been looking forward to a long talk with the boys without feeling pressured by the cost. Nevertheless, they obviously enjoyed being with Francis again. Paddy caught up on sleep, and Christopher took an extra little side trip to East Anglia to pick up with small rucksack with some extra clothes that friends had kindly taken with them when flying from Linz to London a few days earlier.

After their refreshing visit with Francis they went on to Kemble, where they enjoyed a visit with their cousins. Sara took a picture of all the cousins together, which she put online on Facebook, and it was lovely to see how happy they all looked together.

Since the boys had made plans to rejoin the rest of the group in Amsterdam a few days later, I booked a flight from London to Holland for them, but it left from London-Stansted at about six in the morning. Unfortunately, since Francis had already gone to Northumberland and the boys had somehow not managed to communicate other than telepathically (and quite ineffectively) with Nizam, they found themselves then without a place to spend the last night in London. The problem was quickly solved when I sent out a request for help to about five or six different people. Three people kindly offered to take them in, and they ended up staying with my friend Paula. They even managed to get themselves to the airport at dawn without waking her up and made it to Amsterdam without further mishap.

In Amsterdam they caught up with Sascha and George, but Alex had unfortunately had to go home from Paris after he injured his foot and it got infected. George returned to Austria shortly after that to go on holiday with his family, Christopher set off from Amsterdam to the Czech Republic by himself to go to the hip hop camp there, and Paddy and Sascha went to Switzerland. The three of them met up again in Prague last weekend, where Alex was able to rejoin them, and apparently had a wonderful time making music together in Sascha’s uncle’s flat in Prague. Their longest journey was the train ride home from Prague in the end, when they ended up on a little train that stopped at about every other little house between Budweis and Linz.

In the meantime, at home in Linz Peter was not coping very well with the information about things going wrong and the impossibility of taking over and sorting things out. We finally reached a point where I began to seriously doubt that he would be able to live to see the boys return: Either he would wind himself up worrying until he gave himself a heart attack, or I would murder him if he asked me one more time whether I had heard from the boys, about where they were, what they were doing, what he thought they should be doing ... So I made reservations for us to spend the weekend, Friday through Sunday, at a spa hotel in the country.

It was a very restful and quiet weekend at this hotel, where we enjoyed going in and out of the sauna and the hot tubs and lying comfortably naked in the sauna garden reading crime mystery novels. That definitely helped – except for a slightly hair-raising moment, when Peter asked me whether he had understood correctly that the last time I had heard from Christopher, he was walking all my himself down a long country road in the Czech Republic with no money on his way to the hip hop camp. An anxious text message to Christopher, however, soon brought assurance that he had arrived at the camp, met up with a large group from Linz, and everything was fine.

From the lovely messages I have received from various people, it seems that the boys left a trail of good impressions along their way around Europe. It is nice to hear that from other people, but I am very glad to have them home again.

They won’t be home for long, unfortunately. They have this week left of summer holidays, then they have one week at school, and then they will be leaving for a week of language school in France with their respective classes. When I expressed my dismay at the realization that they will both be gone the same week, Christopher in the north of France, Paddy in the south, Paddy sternly reminded me that they had left us alone for three weeks already, and he would have expected us to have matured a bit in that time. I doubt it. I think we are just going to miss them terribly again.

Paddy is just working on a map of their travels that he wants to link to his wonderful photos, so that should be online soon too.