A new form of punishment

Child A was caught being evil to Child B last week.  We had lectured A about this particular variant of evil twice before, and so this latest act called for swift discipline.  

I cycled through the usual menu.  Loss of allowance?  Extra chores?  Grounding?  Indentured servitude?  None seemed right.  They all felt so…what's the word?  Meaningless.  They would satisfy my thirst for vengeance, and justice might even be "served", whatever that means—as if "Justice" were some vane deity who feeds off human retribution—but deep down, I knew that whatever consequence I chose, Child A would regret having been caught but not having done it.  

What would send the right message?  What is the message?  Don't be mean?  That's only the tip of it.  What I really want is for A to be kind to others because she desires to be kind, because she enjoys being kind.  And I could think of no punishment that would bring this about.

Therese found the solution.  It was so crazy and so obvious, it just might work.  And it did.  The speech went something like this.  "A, sometime before the weekend, your punishment is to think of something kind to do for B.  Something that will surprise her and make her smile!  Something that will show her that you love her, which I know that you do.  I'll leave it to you to decide what it will be.  The only rule is, you have to do it before the weekend.  On Sunday, I'm going to ask B what you did for her.  Agreed?"

I knew it was going to work before I'd even finished talking.  She was smiling, and I could see the wheels in her mind already turning.  She was already plotting what she would do—and she was excited by it!

Evil cannot cast out evil.  To learn to be kind, you have to practice being kind.  Miscreants, beware!  The punishment for wickedness is goodness!

What would you pay to keep a promise?

There's a prize in our family that we call a Daddy-Daughter-Day, and today the planets aligned to give Vanessa and me the chance to take one.  With big sister at camp, little sister at kindergarten and Mama at work, Vanessa and I gleefully drew up our itinerary at the kitchen table.  We'd buy ourselves new swim suits (we'd lost ours last month), go swimming (her favourite activity on earth), and finish with lunch at a fancy restaurant where Vanessa could order off the fancy adult menu.

Well, getting those swim suits was a bigger job than we'd thought.  Around and around town we went, in one mall and out the other, looking for a store, any store, that sold swim wear in February.  Our morning was slipping away.  "We could go skating instead," I tried.  "Or a movie?"  Her defeated expression spoke for her.  She really had her heart set on swimming.  "All right, we'll try one last place, but if they don't have any, we'll have to do something else, understand?" "Okay."  

One Last Place was the Adidas sports wear outlet in mall #2.  Studies have shown there are three grades of physiological responses consumers emit as they approach the upper end of a price spectrum.  There are prices that make you whistle.  There are prices that elicit involuntary noises like an "Ooof!" or a "Whoa!"  And then there are prices that make you say, "F--- YOU!!! ARE YOU F---ING KIDDING ME?"  Well, this was a f--- you store.  Sweat pants for €80.  Golf shirts for €120.  And...

"Daddy, look!  They have swim suits!  We can go swimming after all!  Can I get this black one?"

Moments like these define us.  When emotions are high, when the clock is running, when she's looking at you expectantly, when there's a cheaper store that might have what you want but would cost an hour-long detour, when the parenting books fall silent, you reach down and summon all the wisdom you've gleaned from a decade of fatherhood and you're wondering what would Jesus do and you're wondering even more what in Heaven's name you're gonna say to your wife when she gets home as you look in your daughter's hopeful face and say...and say..."Why don't you go try it on?" 

What would you pay for a million-dollar smile?  Vanessa was smiling.  Adidas share holders were smiling.  And as Vanessa dunked the daddy monster at the pool for the tenth time, the daddy monster was smiling, too.

Ice cream is the best conversation starter

I'd heard what I'd expected at parent-teacher interviews:  both girls excel in their school work but would benefit by being more outgoing with their peers.  Time for some fatherly feedback.  And what better way to grease the wheels of conversation than a pair of ice cream dates in the park, one daughter at a time?  At dinner there are no objections to this proposal.  The only debate is over which child gets to have her ice cream date second!  (We've done too good a job it seems in teaching the girls the value of delayed gratification.)  Cornelia "loses" and gets her outing first.

The early evening air is soft, almost glowing.  We walk hand-in-hand to the ice cream stand, order a scoop of Nutella flavour, and enjoy a happy-go-lucky stroll through the Mirabellgarten.  Converstation drifts breezily from one theme to another.  All the cities we've ever been to, being more outgoing at school, why do some people smoke, being more outgoing at school, how much we miss our friends in Canada.  And by the way, how are you getting along with your friends at school?

All too soon we must heed our internal pajama-time bells, and I give her a piggy-back ride home.  I deliberately relish this moment.  All too soon, she will be the one carting me around.

The worst tourist outing in European history. Because griping is just fun.

How can one capture in print the idiocy that is the Spanish Riding School in Vienna?  Prancing, leaping Lippizzaner horses, meticulously bred for centuries, groomed to a dazzling white in their polished saddles, led by Austrian gents in full riding regalia.  As a father of three horse-loving daughters, how can you go wrong with that?  By taking them there, that's how.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Knowing the Spanish Riding School to be one of the most popular tourist tra—er—attractions in Vienna, I buy our tickets the second the box office opens. What a smart father!  We're through the line in under a minute, and so with an hour to kill before the 10:00 show, I lead the girls on a leisurely walk through the old city.

That was Mistake #1.  For when we return at 9:48, a crowd of over 200 people is jammed into the entrance hall, which was designed for perhaps 10.  Over the heads of the crowd, I see that this bowl-shaped entrance hall is emptying into a corridor barely two butts wide, at a rate of about 1 person per 5 weeks, so these poor saps are going to be waiting for a long time.  But not us, right?  Surely there is a separate entrance for Smart Fathers who bought their tickets early, right?  Oh, no, the usher tells me.  That crush of people IS the entrance for advance-ticket holders!  Oh, and it's also the line for buying tickets.

"Daddy, why are we waiting here?  Don't we already h—"

I'm too mad to even explain it to them.  Twenty-five minutes later (the show has already started), we have fought our way through the "line", shown our tickets, and walked into the arena, ready to take our seats.  Except there are no seats.  The 80 or so chairs in this arena went to the lucky few who made it through at 9:18.  For the remaining 180 suckers who showed up at 9:48, it's standing room only along the railings!  Ah, but wait!  Here come the horses with their noble riders!  The show is on!  The day is saved!

No it isn't.  This is the most boring and lifeless performance I have ever paid admission to see.  The riders seem unaware that their audience has waited an hour to see them, or even that there is an audience.  They cooly put their steeds through gentle paces, nothing too strenuous, old chap.  A cantor here, a little prance there.  No galloping, no jumping, and certainly none of the formation riding the School is famous for; we mustn't tire our horses before the evening show.  The canned parade music playing over the speakers is the last straw.  After 20 minutes of this drivel, we walk out in a huff.

Next up on the Vienna-day-tour:  the Vienna children's museum!   As a father of three museum-loving daughters, how can you go wrong with that?  The answer by now should be obvious:  by taking them there.  The long walk to the museum from the Spanish Riding Sham is made even longer by our crummy mood.

"One adult with three kids, please," I say.

The cashier, however, informs me that it doesn't work like that here.  You see, sir, this is not a "normal" museum.  You make reservations the day before.  Then you show up at your prescribed time, and they lead the kids through in pre-arranged groups.

Oh.

WHAT KIND OF CHILDREN'S MUSEUM REQUIRES RESERVATIONS?!  Viennese, that's what kind.

Well, the kids are about ready to vote me out of office.  There's only one "attraction" left on our list:  the famous Viennese ferris wheel.  After this morning, those first two adjectives alone should be enough to make me call it off and go back to the hotel.  But I can't lead them home on a note like this.

"All right, girls, we're going to try one last place.  If it also turns out to be a dud, then we'll declare this the Worst Day Ever, okay?"  This attempt at self-deprecating humour perks them up a little.

The map shows two subway stations nearby that lead to the ferris wheel.  Which one is closer?  On the theory that every decision I make today is bound to be wrong, I know that whichever station I pick will end up being farther away.  So I instruct the kids to do the opposite of whatever I tell them.  The kids like this idea, and it works!  From the map I calculate that Station A is closer, so we head towards Station B.  And reach it almost immediately!  We laugh ourselves silly for the first time today.

In a welcome boost to my approval ratings, the ferris wheel is A) easy to get to, B) has a short line, C) is actually fun.  Finally, a success.  I acknowledge that 33% is not an impressive ratio for a vacation day, but at least we ended well.

Vanessa falls asleep on my shoulder in the restaurant, and so when Cornelia volunteers to plan our subway route back to the hotel, I happily acquiesce.  She does a fantastic job.  Map in hand, she tells us exactly when and where to get off and on which platform to stand to catch each connecting train, while I lug our stuff and her sisters behind her.  I'm so proud of her.  At least I did good in the long term.

Visiting the Dachau concentration camp

We’ve seen the images all our lives, probably starting in a history class. The yellow stars.  The striped suits.    The ovens.  The piles of corpses stacked like pipes.  We know it and we are repulsed by it, but we seldom feel it deep in our bones.  It seems too distant.  It all happened way back then, over there, in black & white. 

Even as I approach the entrance of the Dachau concentration camp, holding the audio guide to my ear, it’s hard for me to sense viscerally that the Holocaust really happened, right here under my feet.  But suddenly I reach the gate, and I see the block letters wrought into the iron—ARBEIT MACHT FREI—and my blood turns cold.  The breath leaves my chest, and I feel nausea rising.  I can see the prisoners on the Appellplatz, standing in their pajamas in the snow, at attention, for hours at a time as the roll is called, slowly.  I press my fingertip into the barbed wire.  I see the hooks in the ceiling.  And peer down the chute where they dropped the pellets.  When I can’t take it any longer, I head back to the bus stop.

The Nazis built the camp at Dachau to imprison their opponents almost as soon as Hitler seized power.  They continued their abuses—torture, murder and starvation of prisoners—right until the very end, just a week before the surrender.  But Dachau was, incredibly, a mere shadow of what went on elsewhere.  The savagery is beyond comprehension.  An hour east of Salzburg, at the Mauthausen labor camp, SS guards would march inmates to the edge of a quarry cliff and give them a choice:  jump to their deaths or push one of their comrades.  Guards at the Janowska death camp in the Ukraine made Jewish orchestra players play tunes as the guards executed prisoners in front of them.  Because they liked killing people to music.

Who were these monsters?  Are they really the parents and grandparents of all these ordinary, iPod-wearing, Facebook-posting people I see walking past me on the streets of Salzburg, pushing their kids on merry-go-rounds at the park, weighing their bananas at the grocery store, inviting me for a beer after dance class with a chummy pat on the back?  The more I see of Austria and Germany—the normalcy of it, the everydayness of it—the more I’m convinced that the Holocaust could have happened anywhere.

All the ingredients of a holocaust—racism, resentment, delusions of exceptionalism and entitlement, the desire for order and uniformity over freedom and diversity—these are universal human phenomena.  There is nothing German or Peruvian or Mongolese about any of them.  They swell up in every country from time to time, but usually, thankfully, not all at once.  I can only conclude that post-Weimar Germany was simply one of those freak collisions of the universe, a singularity in space-time in which all of those hazardous ingredients converged in a single country in a single era, stirred and whipped into an explosion by a charismatic leader who just happened to live right there and then.

Would you and I have followed orders?  Or stood by idly as others followed theirs?  Or would we have dared to speak out and resist, knowing our families might be murdered for it?

Down the road from the Dachau memorial, there is a kindergarten.  As our bus rolled by it, I felt that in that building, behind the painted smiley faces hanging in the windows, there were women who were at that very moment teaching little children the Golden Rule—and for as long as they do, in this place and elsewhere, there will be no more Dachaus.

When it pays to stick to your guns

ME:  "Let's go do X today."

KIDS:  "Noooo, we don't want to do X, even though we have no idea what X is.  We'd rather stay home and do Y like always."

ME:  "But we can do Y any day.  X is only happening today.  Let's go do X."

KIDS:  <Whine.  Drag feet.  Mope.  Howl.  Grumble.  Bleat.>**

ME:  "Besides, X will be fun and educational.  Trying new things builds—"

KIDS:  "No, Dad, don't say that word!"

ME:  "—character.  Now get dressed, we're going."

KIDS:  <see **>

We go do X.  The kids have a fabulous time and even ask me if we could please stay a bit longer.  Of course, they have forgotten our conversation and neglect to thank their prudent father for overruling their prejudiced and groundless opposition to X earlier that morning.  I don't mind, though.  The smiles on their faces, the knowledge that I have given them a unique, enlightening experience, my relief that X was a success when it could very well have flopped (and there have been some flops), are gratifying enough.

By now this pattern is so familiar that I can encode it with variables.  X has been concerts, hikes, street carnivals and day camps.  Today, though, it was a recorder competition played by youth ensembles from around Salzburg.  One group performed a fabulous 5-recorder arrangement of The Bare Necessities.  One 4th grade boy as part of his act played two recorders at once, one in each hand.  He wore a Transformers t-shirt to match, perhaps to underscore his virtuosity in baroque music.  

Vanessa, our budding recorder enthusiast, stayed for the last few acts while I led a tiring Bettina out to the lobby to read her some books we'd brought along "just in case".  This unplanned solo act itself drew a crowd of eager pre-school-aged listeners who were in the lobby for the same reason we were.  I hadn't meant to start a reading circle, but I rode the tide and read to the whole group, drawing as many smiles from their parents as from them.  See, aren't I glad I did X?

What does 'ugly' mean, Daddy?

I was taken aback when Bettina asked me this at the bus stop one day. Seeing how often in children's literature we read of ugly witches and ugly step-sisters (but never ugly wizards or ugly step-brothers), I marvelled that my 5-year-old didn't know the meaning of this word. I was about to define it for her in the usual fairy tale sense, but thought better of it. In the cruel world of elementary school, the word "ugly" is almost always used to describe a person. And in the fairy tale logic we all grew up with, that means that the reviled person is also evil. Indeed, how many hideous mermaids or ravishing sea witches do we read about? Glenda the Good Witch of the North said it best: "Only bad witches are ugly." And Dorothy, with her liberal Kansas upbringing, just stood there and took that?

Maybe we can fix this fallacy, one kindergardener at a time. It's a dangerous thought, and one that would positively wreck our economy, but what if no one ever commented on, reacted to, or even thought about people's appearances? What if we reserved the words "beautiful" and "ugly" to judge people's thoughts, words and deeds? What if—

"Daddy!"

"Hmm?"

"Didn't you hear me?! I SAID, what does ugly mean?"

"Oh, sorry, sweetie, I got distracted. C'mere, I'll show you what ugly means. You see the cigarette butts and trash around this bus stop? They make the bus stop look ugly."

She bought it. And now we must reinforce it. From now on at at story time we will speak of Cinderella's poorly raised step-sisters; of intelligent princesses who marry thoughtful princes after a long, discerning courtship; of monsters and sea witches who are simply ill-mannered and who just might, with a bit of empathy and constructive feedback from the rest of us, learn to be pleasant, productive members of medieval or oceanic society.

The awkward physics of processional hymns

Singing hymns while marching is always a risky undertaking.  The physics of it produces some unwanted and embarrasing complications, and no congregation that I have yet observed, no matter how musical or devout, has surmounted them with any success.  But today a miracle happened.

The good Lutherans of St. Matthäus were invited one Sunday by their Catholic neighbours down the street to take part in a joint-service, with the first half taking place in the Lutheran chapel, and the second in the Catholic.  At half-time, as we processed down the sidewalk, someone in the middle of the train felt moved by the Spirit and began to sing a hymn.  One by one the rest of us joined in, until the whole procession was singing as one.  Well, for a while, anyway.  Strung out along the block as we were, hindered by imperfect human time-keeping and by the finite speed of sound on a windy day, different tempos began developing up and down the line.  The hymn began to wobble like a slinky.  The phase-shifts became so long that the vanguard of the parade would be wrapping up a verse right as those at the caboose-end were just gearing up to start it.  And we knew it.  That awful communal embarrassment that ensues when a group realizes that a spiritual moment has started to collapse, like a failed round of applause that one brave person tries to jump-start but then awkwardly withdraws when no one else joins in, leaving the unapplauded person feeling like a dope.

And now for that miracle I promised.  Too much of a bad thing became a good thing.  The temporal gap between front and back grew exactly long enough that in one magic instant the hymn became a canon!  We sensed it instantly and seized upon it.  We began singing in a round, first in two voices, then in three.  It was flash-mob harmony.  In a positive feedback loop, the resonance grew in strength.  Each mini-chorus could hold down its own part with confidence, and by the time the doors of the Catholic church came into view, the whole procession was bellowing praises to God, in perfect discipline, a choir of hundreds conducted by the unseen Spirit.

Christmas in Salzburg

Christmas traditions here are almost identical to those back home, but we are enjoying some of the Austrian nuances of the holiday. We've traded off stockings on Christmas morning for stuffed boots on December 6th.  German Christmas hymns are more vivid and fun for kids than traditional English ones, I find. (Hark the Herald? Who's Herald?)  But if you really want a German-style Christmas, you decorate your tree with lit candles instead of electric lights! We're trying it this year, keeping that 10-litre bucket of holy water close at hand.

Salzburg does Christmas markets better than anywhere I've seen. The warm glow of the booths selling hand-crafted ornaments, the jaw-dropping, jaw-killing array of sweets, the ever-present brass quartet, the gentle snow that seems to know to begin falling as soon as you enter the market, and the smell of the chestnuts and the Glühwein (a hot spiced wine that soothes a sore throat like nothing else)—it puts us all in a warm, nostalgic haze. And so the euros slip from our pockets, booth after booth, like angels ascending to heaven.


The children are all old enough to want to gift one another for Christmas, and so everyone is hiding gifts from everyone else. Cracks are appearing in the disguise, though, like when a giver is caught reading the book he/she had meant as a present—often by the recipient. Or like poor Cornelia, who knit adorable caps and vests for Bettina's stuffed mice. Cornelia had meant them as a present and hidden them accordingly, but a nosey Bettina discovered them in the drawer—twice. After the second discovery, Cornelia gave up and just handed them to her.

There is a larger disappointment, though. In a country as Catholic as this and with a history so interwoven with that of the Church, I'd been expecting a feistier resistance to the commercial monolith. But here as in North America, the dominance of secular Christmas is thorough and unquestioned. Jesus has been relegated to Sunday mornings, when the pastor reminds us yet again that He is the reason for the season.

Church math

The family-Sunday service at St. Matthew's is a smash. Happy hymns with guitars (very non-German!), kids doing the readings, kids dancing in the aisle. The gospel and sermon are on Jesus's instruction to forgive 70 times 7. How can a pastor in a service full of elementary school children resist asking the obvious question? Three guesses who raised her hand and answered. "Vier hundert neunzig!"

Tea time with tantes

It's 3:15, we have aunts coming for tea at 4:00, and somewhere in the apartment there is a sock lying on someone's bedroom floor. That's enough to put Therese and me in drill-sergeant mode, and we scrub the entire apartment left, right and sideways. I do dishes. Therese vacuums. The three children whine about the unfairness of being made to do their 5%. Getting them to do it is more work than doing it myself (and they know that—it's part of their strategy), but at 3:58 the place is spotless, the dining room arrayed for a tea party Jane Austen could write about.

Our Austrian aunts are very aunt-like: cheerful, doting on the children, and of course bearing a two-ton chocolate cake, wrapped in a box with a ribbon. After cake and tea I politely excuse myself to go entertain the kids, whose interest in the conversation waned once their cake plate was scraped clean.

We play my patented "What Do You Want?" game, which has to be one of the dumbest games ever invented in the history of fatherhood, but the kids make me play it again and again. (It's basically an excuse to throw giggling children into a pile of pillows on the bed.) Even Cornelia, who's immersed in her paint-by-number, gets sucked in. "Hey guys, stop making me laugh, I'm trying to concentrate." To which I retort, "Stop making us concentrate, we're trying to laugh."

Home-grown Parcheesi

Remember the board game Parcheesi?  I loved it as a kid, and Bettina's just the right age for it.  I could order the game from Amazon...Nah!  We've got cardboard and markers! With some memory-jogging from Google Images, we draw up a board in an afternoon and get in two games before dinner. If we'd ordered it, we'd still be waiting.

	And when you get tired of that, there's always playdough.

Thanksgiving international style

Our English-speaking church in Salzburg hosted an international Thanksgiving.

As Canadian delegates, we felt it our patriotic duty to make Nanaimo bars.  The kids and I had made them the day before.  (They're supposed to "age").  They came out a bit rough around the edges, clearly a home-job and nothing you'd sell in a bakery, but good enough for a pot-luck where no one knows what they are anyway.

But what a hit!  The moment I set them out, I was descended upon by a flock of admirers who took a great sudden interest in all things Canadian and wanted to know exactly what was in them, especially that yellow stuff in the middle, and whether they might please sample one for quality assurance.  I shooed them away, seeing as we hadn't said grace yet, let alone started the main course.

Well, grace couldn't come soon enough.  The first two turkeys were gutted within ten minutes, and Therese volunteered me to carve the next one.  I found a knife and a pan to set the slices in, but the latter was wholly unnecessary; a flash-queue formed at my elbow as soon as I started slicing, and I spent as much time serving the turkey as carving it.  Not part of the original job description, but it was fun nonetheless.

Cornelia loaded her plate with enough desserts to feed three people, but she was inspired and finished the whole set.  Therese stayed for clean-up crew (anything to avoid bedtime child-duty), while the girls bussed me home, seeing that their tired father needed to be put to bed.

Serious silliness

"It's the mayonaise bus!" says Bettina as the white 28-bus approaches our stop.  She loves how the Salzburg buses come in multiple colours.  Some mornings we ride the ketchup bus.  Other days we ride the lime bus, and if we're lucky we get a blackberry bus.  And when we're tired of riding mayonaise buses, we'll call the white bus a marshmallow bus instead.

We get the sillies at the park, too.  The girls like it when we run races and I accidentally on purpose mess up the count.  "On your mark…GO!" is perhaps their favourite.  But they were not amused when we were about to race to the tree and back, and I said, "We'll start on the count of seven.  Ready?  One…SEVEN!  GO!"  I'd neglected to mention I would be counting by sixes.  They made me start over.

What passes for poetry around here

The older girls have gotten into making up tricked-you-into-thinking-it-would-rhyme verses.  They'll write things like

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

And so are...marshmallows.

or

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the king's horses and all the kings men

Couldn't put...out the fire.

Or this one, to the tune of It's Raining.

It's drizzling, it's sizzling

The old man is fizzling

He fell into a pot

And he got too hot

So he had to be rescued by...Ralph.

We have beggars here, too

The mornings are growing colder.  The beggar on the sidewalk is holding his coin cup with his hands pulled inside the cuffs of his sleeves.  Bettina and I see beggars often along this stretch, but this particular sight tears at my heart.  I have no small bills to offer him, and we pass awkwardly by.  Bettina asks me why beggars beg.  She already knows that money comes from people working, and I explain as best I can.  Something about the double cruelty of not being able to work and having no family or friends to turn to.  "Can we give him some food, Daddy?"  That's an excellent idea.  There's a grocery store right here.  Bettina will be late for kindergarten, but this is education, too.  We go in, and she helps me pick out some things—bananas and a bag of rolls—and we walk the half-kilometre back to where the man is crouched.  I speak to him and Bettina holds out the items to him.  He takes her hand and kisses it.  His smile is half toothless, but Bettina does not recoil.  She's too young to be afraid, too wise not to smile back.  Jesus was right; sometimes kids are wiser than the rest of us, we who have perhaps just seen too much, who have forgotten just how insulated, tepid and comfortable we really are, how afraid we are to go near anything less comfortable than ourselves.

The jeans that escaped the gallows

Last week Cornelia's favourite pair of jeans sprung a hole at the knee that was too big to pass inspection at the door.  I handed down the death sentence.  She appealed it.  She got out the sewing kit, cut a denim oval from another pair of jeans awaiting a donation run (my own pair, it turned out), stitched her name onto it for emphasis, and patched her jeans with it.  The donor tissue was a match, and the graft held.  It's as if she were descended from an Oma who lived through the post-war or something.

Auf deutsch!

The kids have learned as much German at the public library as they have at school.  Back in Waterloo, you couldn't beat Cornelia or Vanessa into picking up a German book.  Now they devour them.  They got over the hump by reading German editions of books they already knew in English:  Calvin & Hobbes, Ramona Quimby, Garfield, Chester, The Smurfs, and now recently Harry Potter.  Cornelia has now re-read the first six Harry Potter books in German.

My own German, I fear, is about as fluent as it's going to get, which is to say, not very.  At least in this area, I'll settle for living through the accomplishments of my children.

Parenthood in the big city

Living in a dense city centre has been a windfall for Therese and me as parents.  North American suburbs are designed to make every destination in the city — school, shopping, church, parks, doctors offices, music lessons — far away and dangerous to get to outside the fortress of a steel automobile.  Thus, kids in suburbs can't go many places unescorted, making it harder to teach them independence.

The densely knit neighbourhoods of old European cities are a welcome foil to this model.  Because the buses are so frequent and so kid-friendly (a computer-voice announces each stop), Cornelia now braves the city bus to the library and home again on her own.  The first time we let her do it (and I admit I was anxious as hell), she came home beaming, almost trembling, with self-satisfaction.

We often send Vanessa with 10 euros and a shopping list to the corner grocery store, which she can walk to in under three minutes.  And she loves it!  She begs to be sent.  "Mom, we're out of sliced almonds.  Do you want me to go to the store?"  

Their school is just as close, so the girls can walk themselves there and back each day.  At 11:47 sharp every morning, whether I've gotten any work done or not, that (damned) door bell rings, and I push the buzzer to let the girls in.  From inside the apartment, I hear the street door click open, then the echo of their foot falls as they climb the stairs.  I make them lunch, send them to do their homework, then boot Cornelia back out the door for her second half of school.  (But not Vanessa, since she only goes half-days.  And it's killing me.)  With two heavy doors and two flights of stairs between her and the street, I feel safe leaving Vanessa at home while I go pick up Bettina from kindergarten.  Bettina hates being picked up, which of course is a great sign.  But we miss an awful lot of buses on account of it.

The Music!

Salzburg is perhaps best known for its classical music.  (Sorry, folks, but The Sound of Music is for tourists.)  I knew that before we came, of course, but only after attending several concerts did I see why:  the people here value it.  Every concert in the city sells out, every night.  In four concerts by different groups in different venues, I have yet to see an empty seat.  One example:  I took Cornelia to a Sunday matinée concert of Mozart and Brahms, expecting the usual 200-300 people in plaid and denim that you'd see at a similar Sunday event in Waterloo.  Not so.  The hall of 2,500 was filled to the last seat, everyone in formal attire, champage served at intermission.  Cornelia and I found our seats and wondered why no one had taken our tickets yet.  Did we skirt the gate without knowing it?  Oh no, it's honor system, explained the couple seated next to us.  Just like the bus system.  I love this country.

After the performance I chatted with one of the performers, whom we know from church.  I asked her what other gigs she does during the week.  "Oh, this is it,"  she said.  This orchestra is full-time?!  That a city of barely 140,000 can (and will) support a 100-piece orchestra at full-time salary is hard for a Canadian mind to fathom.  And there's about ten such groups in the city, with innumerable small groups in between.  There is, however, no hockey team.

The performance itself was wonderful.  I was worried Cornelia might be bored with the long, ponderous program, but she had a great time.  She was amused by the peculiar tradition of holding applause until the end of the final movement of a piece.  Perhaps it's a symptom of the age demographic in the room and its corresponding health issues, but we both laughed at the pent-up communal coughing fit that ensues at the close of each movement. In her words, "Oh, so you cough after movements 1, 2 and 3, and clap after movement 4?"   You got it, kid.

The middle piece of the program was by Fazil Say, a "modern" composer.  And we all know what that means.  ("Get the cat off the piano!")  I made myself stay open minded, and the effort was worth it.  The eclectic mix of percussion and a host of instruments I'd never heard before — ever heard a theremin? It's apparently the only instrument that you play without actually touching it — made the piece fun for me, though still challenging for a 9-year-old.  The latter observed, "It sounded like five different composers wrote five different pieces and played them all at the same time." Thankfully the final symphony by Brahms was beautiful (as only Brahms can be) and refreshingly normal.

The joy of watching European ballroom champions!

A day I've been waiting for all month!  The 2012 European 10-Dance Championships are in Salzburg this year.  I scooped up a ticket as soon as the first posters went up.

Before today, I had always thought that ballroom dancers at this level were so polished, so impossibly perfect, as to be indistinguishable to all but the judges; that judges alone could spot the split-second differences in foot work, floor craft, angles and timing that separate 1st place from 6th.  But watching from the bleachers, I am delighted to see that this is not so.  As the semi-finalists, and then the finalists, are announced, I find that my own preferences matched the judges' 90% of the time!  Meaning, they could just have well have given me a judge's clipboard and gotten similar results — and for a lot cheaper, too.

Like the Olympics, each country in Europe sends its top couple to represent them.  But what makes this event especially fun for me is that I personally know the Austrian couple.  (They run the monthly dance socials I've been attending.)  They are the home-crowd favourites, and each section of the bleachers screams for them and calls out their number "ZWANZIG!" whenever they dance past.  And these two are wallowing in the celebrity attention.  They play to the audience at every turn, sparkling with smiles a mile wide.   The judges mark them in 5th place out of a pool of 18.

I feel sorry for the spectators who paid 1400 euros for a floor-side VIP table and the six-course meal; from their ground-level view, they have, ironically, the worst view in the house because of the foot-high placard ads that surround the dance floor.  My cheapskate 85-euro seat in the bleachers gives me a far better view.

Even so, the best  view of the dancers is off stage where the dancers warm up before their heat.  I sneak under the bleachers to watch them.  They are literally within arms' reach of me.   Their precision, their incredible speed and the intricacy of their choreography hits me full in the face.  If they weren't right before my eyes, I'd have sworn it was enhanced by CGI effects!

Saint Therese, meanwhile, in a noble act of magnanimous adult sacrifice, has taken the children to the kiddy-rides carnival — for the whole day —  so that I may enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime experience.  Marry well, people. It is my number-one advice to young adults today.  Marry well.

Why you don't take the kids out to eat in Europe

I'ts a gorgeous almost-fall day.  So after school, we pack up the swim suits, perhaps for the last time this year, and bus to Lake Salzachsee.  In full sunshine and a mountain breeze, I dive into the lake and casually observe that the temperature of the water on this fine September day feels just a touch — WHOA, THAT'S COLD!  ("He's all right, folks.  Cancel the ambulance.  He's still moving.")  Inspired by dad's brave example, the kids swim and run and squeal until the sun sets.

Watching the kids burn so many calories has made me ravenously hungry.  I dumbly suggest we eat out tonight.  In my malnourished state, I have forgotten that we are not in Canada anymore; we are in Europe, where restaurants cater, as a rule, to adult couples and tourists.  Having changed at home, we're seated at a charming Austrian homestyle restaurant.  And yet all of us are grouchy.  I am wondering why no one is having any fun.  Then it hits me:  not only are there no kids' menus, but the kids can't even make sense of the adult menu, seeing as it's printed in this medieval Hear Ye! type face.  The waiter had simply rattled off two things the chef could make for the kids — in a rapid dialect which the kids couldn't understand — and we'd chosen for them.  Right off the bat, half the fun of eating out for a kid is gone.  To fill the time in between, there is nothing for them.  Crayons and drawable placemats?  Shirley temples with crazy straws?  Nope.  North American inventions, not known here.  

And they are taking their sweet time in the kitchen.  Honeymooners will happily gaze over the table at each other for 45 minutes, but kids famished from swimming all day won't.  Bettina is falling apart with hunger and boredom.  Therese is starting to grumble, too.  I hand out pretzel sticks from our bag just to prevent a mutiny.  

Praise heavens, the food is truly delicious when it finally comes, and everyone's moods improve.  In this sense, I suppose the 20 extra gourmet-minutes the chef spent primping the meal were worth it, but this dad has learned his lesson.   

Nature Still Makes The Best Toys

In the past three months, Vanessa has developed into the family athlete. From which generation in the family tree she inherits this gene, fully dorment in her two hapless parents, we cannot tell. But whatever the source, Vanessa knows no greater joy than when she is climbing. Trees. Boulders. Ropes. And her favourite is rock-climbing walls. It's the first thing she heads for at any playground. So as a weekend treat, I take the kids to a rock-climbing gym I found in Salzburg.   Three jaws drop when we enter the gym.  Some of these walls are five storeys high.  Most are meant for pros, to be attempted only with ropes, harness, and a spotter on the ground.  But enough of them are kid-friendly to be worth the hefty admission.  The girls climb hesitatingly at first but grow bolder when they learn to trust the foam-padded floor beneath them.

Time for a picnic lunch. As luck would have it, a beautiful brook empties into the Salzach river just outside the rock-climbing gym, with miniature stone beaches on either side of the delta. Instant playground! We'd paid 26 euros for two hours of indoor rock climbing, which required shoe rental. We paid 0 euros for an equal amount of outdoor rock climbing and river play, all in bare feet. Which was the better deal? Watching them play in the river with timeless abandon reminds me yet again that the best things in life are free, that unstructured play is the best play, and that even in the G6 wireless age, nature still makes the best toys.

School Here Is Neat

The children just love their schools! They're speaking German to their peers and teachers without hesitation. This is the moment we've been working towards since last December. For me, it's the crowning achievement of the sabbatical so far.

In utter defiance of their parents' genetic heritage, both older girls even like gym class! I am relieved. If ever there was a setting where language barrier could cause an embarrassing mistake with the consequent shame and tears, gym class, with its quickly barked instructions from gruff whistle-blowing coaches, rushed locker-room changes before and after, and unfamiliar games with unfamiliar rules (which the native kids all know of course), would be it. But the girls are taking it all in.

One routine new to all of us is that the 4th graders walk home for lunch, then walk back to school in the afternoon. Cornelia likes it, actually. Luckily I am sufficiently unemployed to be able to greet them at home each day and make lunch for them. What full-time or single parents do is a mystery.

REGISTRAR WARS

EPISODES I-III:  THE PHANTOM MENACE

It's the Wednesday before school starts. Time to get the girls registered. We'd have gladly done this in August if anyone in Salzburg had been behind a desk during the summer vacation season.

But this morning we finally get in touch with the school principal. "Oh, your kids aren't Austrian?" the principal says. "We can't register you here, then. Immigrants are registered by the clerk at the municipal building."

Fuming, Therese calls the municipal building. "So sorry," says the receptionist. "The registrar only holds hours on Monday afternoons from 1:00-4:00pm. Come see us in five days."

"BUT SCHOOL STARTS ON MONDAY MORNING!!!"

"Well," he says, "the kids will only miss the first day. The first day isn't all that important."

The sheer ignorance of this statement defies description. Cornelia and Vanessa are frightened enough as it is, starting a new school in a foreign country. On top of this, they are now to miss all the 1st-day introductions, the rules-and-expectations talk, the where-is-the-bathroom talk, the seating assignments, everything.

Well, next up is Bettina. Kindergarten is optional in Austria, but spots are fiercely coveted. We've been looking all summer without success, and by today it's come down to the brute-force action of calling every kindergarten in the Yellow Pages, starting with A. Therese locks herself in the back room with the phone book for an hour, with no luck.

EPISODE IV:  A NEW HOPE

Two days of painful waiting. On Friday we meet the principal, who in a welcome change of heart, offers to let Vanessa and Cornelia attend the 1st day of school "under the radar" even though they won't actually be registered by then. Little Vanessa lights up like a Christmas tree when she sees her 2nd grade classroom. Her nervousness is gone, replaced by true excitement! It is a joy to watch her glow.

With renewed energy, we buy school supplies and pack for one last getaway to Lake Weißenbach. The sunshine matches our ebullience. After a hearty swim in the lake, we get the best news of the month: one of the dozens of kindergartens Therese called on Wednesday calls back, offering Bettina a spot! If we drank, we'd have popped the cork. As it is, we unscrewed the sparkling apple juice and clinked cups all around.


EPISODE V:  THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Up at 6:30. Breakfast, backpacks, hair, teeth, jackets, and out the door for the kids' first day of Austrian school! Vanessa enters the bustling 2nd-grade classroom, searching nervously for a desk with her name on it. Frau Doppler (as in Effect) spots us right away, greets us kindly and finds Vanessa a desk. Vanessa is practically levitating.  Should I stay with you awhile or go? "Go," she says.  So I leave her in able hands, cast a wistful glance back and head home.

Three hours later (the 1st day is short), I pick up the most elated kids you ever saw. They buzz all the way home over how neat it was.

But our joy is short lived. We are met at home by a livid Therese, who had been at the municipal building to register the kids. She'd been in the queue for an hour before being told, "Why didn't you bring the children? I have to see them in person in order to register them." (As if parents registering fake children for school were a regular menace.) So back home she'd come to meet us.  She drags the kids back to the registrar, waits ANOTHER hour in the queue and is told, to her incredulity, that Vanessa, because she is born in December not September, is to be placed in Grade 1! "BUT SHE'S ALREADY FINISHED GRADE 1!"  Doesn't matter, the lady says.  This chart clearly states that any child born in THIS month goes into THIS grade. And this woman will not be reasoned with. She is a cog, entrusted with no professional judgment, unable to move 1 inch from what is printed in her binder. Sign here, please, she says.

Therese and I are apoplectic. At the lady.  At Salzburg.  At the Iron-Curtain-like mindset of the bureaucracy here. At ourselves for taking on this sabbatical that has cost us so much anxiety, along with untold hours of preparation and legwork.

Our only hope is the kind principal at Vanessa's school. With the one signature she denied us at the very beginning, she could resolve this mess. I volunteer to speak with her in the morning.  Of course it would be easier if Therese, being the native speaker, took this on, but she has taken on enough.  It's my turn to bear the brunt.  I begin formulating in German what I will say.  I better get this right.  If we hit another dead end, we're aborting this mission and flying home.

EPISODE VI:  RETURN OF THE JEDI

At 8:30 a.m. I knock on the principal's door.  I'm not nervous.  I've rehearsed my explanation, and it comes out smoothly.  To my delight, the principal is on my side from the get-go!  She promises to call that silly registrar's office at once and straighten things out.  She signs the papers herself, after all! Vanessa is back in Grade 2.

The relief is indescribable. The road is clear at last.

For our victory lap, we get to take Bettina for her first kindergarten visit. We would have signed her up regardless, for this is the only opening we've found, but we have a better reason than that. This kindergarten is a dream.  Smiling, happy teachers, a huge green garden for outdoor play, lunches supplied by an organic caterer, and a newly renovated play area remove all doubt.  Bettina knows the first-day drill.  Without a trace of hesitation, she seats herself at the Playdoh station next to two other little girls and begins making green pizza.  The last death star is destroyed! Let the sabbatical begin.

 

I'm Too Old For Exams!

Today I'm off to Berlitz to take my B1-level German language test, requirement number 12,906 for my residence visa. Bettina sits quietly with her coloring books while I am examined for 45 minutes by a language teacher. (You know, the kind that wear half-moon reading glasses around their necks by a string of beads?) Only in the heat of the moment do I realize that I have not taken a timed test in 14 years! And I am out of practice. I haven't done this since graduate school, but the stress is instantly familiar: the furious erasing; the frantic glances at the clock that grow in frequency in inverse proportion to the time remaining; the hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach; the fatalistic choice between A and D. I'm too old for this! I feel like the over-the-hill Rocky as he's getting whupped by Mr. T. The worst feeling is that I know my German is better than this, but this examiner will not know it. "They're asking all the wrong questions!" my inner 15-year-old protests. "If only they'd ask me about the things I know!"

How many times have I counselled a student with tears in her eyes and a D+ on her test, "Anne, you'll have more success on the next test if you'll invest [I love that word] 20 minutes a day on your homework, ask me lots of questions during lessons, and come to me more often for extra help," dismissing her piteous claim that she just "blanked out that day" as so much drama. Today in the examination room I remembered that it's not always just drama. I have been on the other side of the teacher's desk for too long.

Bettina and I eat lunch by the river, my B1 certificate fresh in my bag. Time to go pick up her sisters from horseback riding. I find them at the drop-off spot with empty ice-cream cups in their hand. "They bought us all ice cream!" they say with chocolate-smeared grins. A clever maneuver on the part of the day-camp staff to plump up the reviews the kids bring home to the parents who will decide whether to fork over the dough for the next outing. Or maybe they're just nice people. Regardless of the truth, I force myself to think the latter. "Stay Canadian!" I remind myself.

She's Got Her Mother's Good Looks

Therese is off to Bratislava to deliver a talk and come down with a cold. Big kids are on a day-camp outing, leaving Bettina and me alone for a D³, our code for Daddy-Daughter Day. I take her to the Thursday farmers' market for a 4-year-old education on bargain hunting and shopping-list management. Bettina proudly crosses off each produce item on the list, like Toad does in Bettina's favourite Frog And Toad story. With her maternally inherited good looks, Bettina charms one fauning vendor after another. One hands her a free strawberry. The next one gives her a free pear. At the next booth she gets a free croissant. (They certainly didn't hand me anything.) By 8:30a.m. she's practically had lunch. I should take her with me to the bank.

No More Relatives! Finally A Day To Ourselves!

A week of visiting in Berlin. The kids are tired of being sent off to Find Something To Do while mom and dad engage in adult chinwag with one set of old friends after another. A full week in Berlin, and the five of us have yet to do anything together as a family. Today we aim to remedy this with a morning of sight seeing in the Berlin city centre.

All of us are in high spirits—there are no guests to entertain, no opinions to solicit from friends over what to look at next, no advice from well-meaning mothers-in-law to parry. It's just us.
Therese takes us to lunch at Mövenpick, which I'd always thought was just another American ice cream brand marketed with a contrived European name. But no! Mövenpick is a full-service restaurant complete with sauces, table cloths and wine lists.

Sadly Therese must leave us after lunch for her conference talk, but the fun has just begun. Mövenpick has a fantastic play area for kids, where Bettina discovers a bin full of My Little Ponies with the requiste combs. She is in little-girl heaven.

In the same bin, Vanessa finds a toy gorilla. (What else would you expect in a box full of ponies?) She holds the gorilla to my face and says in her deepest gorilla voice, "Clean your room!" in allusion to her favourite Calvin and Hobbes comic, for one of the best laughs of the day.

But the best entertainment lies outside, in front of the aquarium, and for once it's not a playground—at least not in the usual sense.

There's a heap of flag stones assembled haphazardly into a fountain. The kids beg me to let them climb on it. Seeing no VERBOTEN signs, I give them a hesitant "o…kay", expecting at any moment to be barked at by some grumpy city authority figure. But not only are we not run off, other kids draw inspiration from the sight of us up there and join in! In five minutes, a whole school yard of kids is climbing and drawing on the rocks with chalk-like stones. It's now 5pm, and I have to drag them back to Oma's house.

The kids, fueled by two hours of intense, physical imaginative play, literally sprint the three blocks to the subway station, leap frogging one another and prodding one another on to ever faster speeds.

On the first leg of the subway home, I show Cornelia how to get around a big city with a subway map, and once in the station, how to find your platform. We're hungry and beat---a perfect segue to one last lesson! I invite Cornelia and Vanessa to go buy us some salami buns from a snack stand on the subway platform. They're scared, but they work up the nerve to approach the cashier and order. "Zweimal Semmelbrötchen mit Salami, bitte." Hot dog, she did it! I'm so proud of them, and so are they. The tasty buns, the successful navigation through the scary Berlin subway system, and a surprise, chance meeting with Therese on the last platform ("Hermione! Where'd you come from?!") make a perfect ending to a perfect day.

How Did We Canadians Get So Puritanical?

Oma drives us to a lake for a swim. Vanessa and Bettina are pleasantly amazed to learn that children are allowed to swim naked, and they gladly take the opportunity. Prepubescent girls swim with just trunks, and some of the women even walk around topless. (We're still talking about lakes here).  And no one seems to care. There is no ogling and no finger pointing. Why can't North Americans learn to be so easygoing, especially in regard to things that matter so little?

Europeans view nakedness from Adam's and Eve's perspective (before the apple): there is nothing shameful or dirty about it. You'll often see parents taking young kids for a tree-pee at the playground. Uncircumcised boys, letting it fly as nature intended. Our own kids take full advantage, and no one looks twice. It is as refreshing as it is relieving.

Alcohol and tobacco are viewed in the same spirit. Beer on the bus?  No problem!  Mixed drinks at the public swimming pool? No problem! And if you forgot to bring your own, there's a cash bar, right between the change rooms and the ice cream stand, where you can order yours. In Europe, beverages are beverages. There's nothing special about alcohol -- it's just another ingredient you put in, like Yellow 5.

The lackadaisical attitude toward smoking is just incredible,

especially for a culture that is otherwise so progressive, well educated, and politically invested in science. In terms of tobacco, Europe is about where America was in the 1970's. Cigarettes are still advertised on billboards and on TV, and they're available in vending machines where any kid can spend his allowance. I think it's their fast-food.
You'll see the occasional McDonald's here, but the #1 retail outlet in Austria is by far Tabak Trafik, a convenience-store chain famous for its wall-to-wall selection of cigarette brands.

Berlin and the 2-Storey Grocery Store

We've been home for three whole days. Well, that's just too long! Time for another road trip. How about Berlin? It's only a day's train away. We've packed 7 hours' worth of kids' entertainment for the train (books, cards, Connect-4, math journal papers), which sounds like a lot unless your trip is 8 hours, or in our case 9, making the last hour of the trip a veritable whine fest. The kids were getting whiney, as well.

We perk up when we reach the Berlin Hauptbahnhof and see Oma waiting for us on the platform. The kids fall upon her like they hadn't seen her in 100 years, though it's only been about 100 hours.

Then it's midnight-grocery-shopping before the stores in Berlin, by law, must close for Sunday.

Ever seen a two-storey grocery store? This one has a stairless magnetic escalator that you and your shopping cart can ride between floors. These Germans have thought of everything.

When the Honeymoon Ends, the Real Sabbatical Begins

Therese is feeling dispirited and overwhelmed today by the administrative tree trunks that keep falling in our path. This time it's the utility company getting our address wrong, requiring yet another call, letter, or e-mail which will be ignored along with all the others Therese has written to banks, real estate agents, internet "providers", contractors (the last tenant left us a water-logged floor), and civil authorities since our arrival. Yesterday it was the Austrian police having no clue where in Salzburg I could get fingerprints taken, which the Canadian police need in order to run a criminal-record check on me, which the Austrian authorities need in order to complete my visa application. Round and round we go.

I'm in a funk today, too. Therese is at the university, and I can't think of anything to do with the kids. The play room -- spotless as of last night -- is a junk heap after just two waking hours. Cornelia has a cold. The dishes are piled high. The kids are still not dressed and generally look like orphans. Living abroad is not just a year-long romantic get-away. It is hard work at times, some days full of thrills, some days are like watching the lawn grow, just like at any other stage of life.

After a tedious morning of moping (and mopping), I finally get out of the house with Bettina and Vanessa on our way to Mt. Gaisberg. I have Bettina to thank for the idea; she saw my screen background and said, "That's Gaisberg! Daddy, can we go there today?" Why, yes we can! Two points for the four-year-old!

The blue sky and jolly moods of my two mini-companions infuse me with new energy. The view from the mountain peak never gets old; it's spectacular every time. The girls take in a gasp when a hang glider suddenly swooshes over us, not 30 feet over our heads.

Looking over the valley, Vanessa realizes out loud that the horizon is not a fixed place; it looks different to each person at each height. I just love these synaptic moments in my children. They make the vagaries of fatherhood all worth it, hair knots and all. And there are more moments to come on this trip! Waiting for our return-bus to push off, the kids are gagging on the smoke of the bus driver who's having one before taking the wheel. Why do people smoke, Daddy? Insert loving, fatherly explanation of nicotine, pleasure synapses and addiction, and the tragic cautionary tale of their grandfather who smoked at 17 already and whose life was cut short as a result. Is that why everyone was crying at the funeral, Daddy? How I love them both.