Paris from on high, day 1

During the kids' February school vacation, we used the very good excuse of Thomas having a work colleague in Paris to justify four days in the beautiful city...  

Tuesday 2/12, we took an early TGV directly from Munich to Paris (at times, in France, hitting 320 km/h!) and arrived in plenty of time to settle into our little rental apartment near St. Michel then hit the Catacombs (see earlier post).
For our first full day, Wednesday, the kids and I did a tour of  Paris "high points" (literally and figuratively).  First stop, naturally, la tour Eiffel.

View on the way up, in the elevator

Palais de Chaillot, et Jardins du Trocadéro,
seen from the top of the Eiffel tower. 

View to the east.  The big golden dome is on Les Invalides.
Too bad it was misty.

We took the stairs part way down.

On the way back to the apartment, we stopped at the nearby Paul boulangerie for a mid-morning coffee plus.  Man, the French know how to do pastries.

These macarons were to die for.

We walked around "our" neighborhood in the Latin quarter for a little, taking in the atmosphere of cafés, restaurants, and, well, touristy souvenir shops.  The streets are narrow but lovely.



After lunch (simply baguette from a nearby boulangerie, and St. Albray cheese from the grocery... yum) we headed to L'Arc de Triomphe.

Luckily it wasn't too crowded on top

284 steps up to the top in a tight spiral.

View from atop L'Arc de Triomphe,
down the Champs Élysées

Instead of taking the Métro, we decided to walk from L'Arc de Triomphe down the famous Champs Élysées. There are some pretty fancy stores along there, but I loved simply looking at the architecture of the buildings.

It didn't take us long to walk the couple kilometers to the Place de la Concord.  

As we kept walking towards our flat at St. Michel, we strolled through the beautiful (even in winter) Jardin des Tuileries to the Louvre.  What an absolutely gorgeous walk.  

Looking through the Tuileries garden, towards the Louvre.

L'Arc de Triomphe du Carroussel, in front of the Palais du Louvre

I love the Louvre, simply for the building itself...

Our visit inside the Louvre was planned for the next day, since rain was forecast, so we headed over the Pont des Arts pedestrian bridge.  Its simple mesh side fences are chock-full of love locks -- which actually looks very cool.

 We met Thomas, and went for a dinner of fabulous Breton galettes (savory buckwheat flour crêpes) and then wheat flour dessert crêpes (with house-made caramel au beurre salé...)

A pretty satisfying first full day, en tout cas.  

(The one frustrating thing, however, was the fact that my language ability seemed totally blocked:  my French used to be quite fluent, but this first day, when I tried to speak, my words came out half-French half-German, and I ended up totally tongue tied.  Arg!  It got a little better by the end of our time there -- and then of course I ended up trying to speak French the first day back in Germany...)

Below the streets of Paris, day 0

The biggest hit of our four days in Paris was, perhaps surprisingly, twenty meters underground.  For our first afternoon in Paris, we chose to visit the Catacombs, an ossuary in the former limestone quarries under Paris.  It's quite something down there.

To enter the Catacombs museum, you descend 130 narrow spiral stone stairs, then walk in a dimly lit underground passage for 1.5 km until you enter the door which warns "Stop!  Here is the empire of death."

Opened around the time of the French revolution (late 18th century), the ossuary houses the remains of over six million Parisians.  Apparently when it first opened, the Catacombs was merely a bone "repository" and it wasn't until the early 19th century that the unorganized heaps of bones were piled neatly into impressively arranged walls of femurs and skulls (with the rest of the bones hidden behind these artful structures).

Flash photography was not allowed in the ossuary area itself, so we tried to best utilize the dim lighting which "illuminates" the bones. We were also not allowed to touch the bones, but we got quite close.

(For some of the grey-hued pictures below, I cheated a bit before posting them here and increased the contrast and exposure with iPhoto, otherwise they just look black.)

The skulls are of course the most impressive feature of these walls.  They seemed to be used artistically as borders or "trim"in the incredibly regular arrangement of femurs.

Most of the skeletons in here date from the revolution, or before, and there are a few tombstones and cemetery monuments included down here from that time.

Now, by the dim wall light, you can see the yellow cast of these centuries-old bones.

Our bags were checked as we left, sensibly enough.  I'm sure many people are tempted to try to take a souvenir.  I mostly just wanted to touch, but kept myself in check.  It's fascinatingly creepy.

Bitte zurück bleiben...

So it's about time I get back to writing more about the city of Munich (the title of this blog after all!) and about the things here that are notably different from places I've lived in North America.
I'll start with the things that I'll miss the most when I get back home.  Number one, I think, is public transportation!

The network of trains, trams, buses, and subways here is really a prime example of something we should learn from the Europeans, and the Munich system is awesome.  We mainly use the U-Bahn (for Untergrundbahn, or subway) and S-Bahn (for Stadtschnellbahn, often translated as "suburban trains" or "surface trains") but the Trams (electric streetcars) are quiet and smooth and great for seeing the city, and from our current apartment Benjamin takes the public bus to school every day.

An older-model U- Bahn at Marienplatz, the city center.

"Bitte zurück bleiben":
My post title refers to the recurring U-Bahn announcement, just before the doors close at every stop, which translates as "please stay back".  In the new U-bahn trains, the voice is automated, but on all the older trains the driver has to say it each time.  (I'm sure they say it in their sleep... they literally repeat it every minute in the downtown area.)  At the S-Bahn stations, you hear the same phrase announced from the platforms.

The tunnel into the U-Bahn platform at Marienplatz

The U-Bahn lines at Marienplatz are deep:
 below two different levels of S-Bahns.

The timing in the U-Bahn system is great -- I travel with it nearly every day and rarely have to wait more than 3 minutes for an U-Bahn to arrive.

A new U-Bahn in "Münchner Freiheit" station

The new U-Bahn trains are very cool, I find, but so far only about a quarter of the fleet has been replaced with these.  (I find them especially impressive when they are in the ultra-modern looking U-Bahn station just a couple stops north of us; see pictures.)

All the U-bahns here are amazingly fast, apparently the fastest in Germany, at speeds up to 80 km/h.  Mostly the drivers make very smooth stops and starts, but you can definitely feel the accelerations and have to learn to plant your feet right and hold on to something if you don't get a seat (which is often).

Sometimes the trains and platforms get very crowded, especially during rush hour and before and after the incredibly popular soccer games. People often jam themselves into the trains like sardines.  Ugh.  The soccer games are especially bad since public drinking is allowed here, and the fans often have lots beer on them (and in them).  At our subway station, unfortunately on the same line as the soccer arena, you can tell well in advance when there's home game: policemen and security staff line the platforms -- supposedly to keep drunks from falling into the tracks, but apparently also to push them on board...





Whew, that was a lot about U-Bahns, but I guess they're my favorite, at least in terms of speed of getting around.

The Trams are also fabulous.  They're quiet and more relaxed, and it's lovely to look out the windows at the city going by.

The Ostbahnhof (which we used to live beside) is the eastern point at
which all the S-Bahns go underground into the city.

The S-Bahns are very useful for getting a bit outside the city, even to some of the nearby lakes.  They are not run by the city of Munich, but by a subsidiary of the national German railway.  Their schedules mesh very well with all the U-Bahns etc. and they are the main commuter vehicle.

The Ostbahnhof, which is also a regional train station,
has 5 tracks used by S-Bahns.

All the S-Bahn lines run through the center of town on the same tracks, which are underground within the city (and so feel like a somewhat slower subway).   Munich is talking about building a second set of tracks, since during rush hour there is something like one train per minute on those tracks, and if one has problems (which is rare, but happens) then the whole system gets bogged down.

The kids are very comfortable with all the methods of transportation here, and both have their own monthly pass.  Speaking of passes, the system here really seems to run on the honor system.  There are no turnstiles or gates anywhere -- you just walk on an off all trains, trams and buses very easily.  Every so often "controllers" come on board and ask to see your pass or ticket, but incredibly rarely.
How wonderful.

Julia has this whole "fast-train-net-map" memorized...
She can really tell you which U- or S-Bahn to take anywhere in the city.

School report: mid-year

I had intended to report on the kids school experience more regularly, but it has become such an integrated and normal part of our life here that I haven't thought about blogging much.  However, both kids have just finished their mid-year exams (Schulaufgaben) which had brought on a little extra stress, so I thought it high time I recorded a bit of this major part of our life here.

Julia has six major academic subjects (Hauptfäche):

German

English 

Math

Physics

Social studies

French

Mixed into these during the week are also: art, music, sport, and academic subjects which involve smaller tests but no major exams -- history, geography, biology, ethics, chemistry lab, physics lab, and "SOG" which seems to be a mixture of health and community awareness.

Julia's classroom:  just today they had a substitute who came late, so
they took out their iPod's (which is not allowed, usually) and Julia took
a picture of two of her good friends:  Caro and Paula.
[Apparently every classroom has a mural: theirs was painted by
 5th graders a few years perviously...]

Julia has become more and more independent at doing her homework.  Thomas still helps her regularly with understanding some of her class notes and homework, especially history (due to the very difficult language in her text) and physics (not so much due to language...  I think they're learning in 8th grade what our system teaches later).  I help her with French, since this is the 3rd year of French language for her class and she only had one year at home -- language instruction here is much more intensive than we have!

She had exams in all her major subjects these past couple weeks, and these are taken very seriously here.  Even though Julia is registered as a "guest student" all her teachers treat her exactly like the rest of the girls and grade her the same way (which is very severe, by North American standards).  The grading scale here goes from 1 (best) to 6 (fail) but it is not unusual for the average to be in the 3's or 4's.  No grade inflation here!

      Julia has received the whole gamut of possible grades:  a 1 in Math to a 6 in German (there is no slack for her as a non-native speaker, nor any extra language help... imagine sticking a new immigrant into Gr. 8 English class at home!)  The 5 on her last German test showed a good trend from the 6 on her first exam.  Impressive, actually.  She got a 4 on the Social studies exam, which is much better than I would have done -- I couldn't even understand the questions when I saw the exam.  English class is "boring" (even though I think she's learning some English grammar rules) but "amusing to watch Frau Wittmer speak English".  I was hoping they'd take her out and give her extra German help, but no such thing at her school.  Overall, she's doing great though, and has some good friends.  

A class photo during Oktoberfest, so the back row are wearing Dirndl's, the Bavarian traditional dress.
Julia is third from right in the back row.

Benjamin is also doing great in school.  He's in a Gymnasium where the first "foreign language" is Latin.  (English starts in the 2nd year.)  We had thought that might be a nightmare, learning Latin in German but it's his favorite subject!

Learning Latin vocabulary, with the very organized index card system.
(After writing a card -- Latin one side, German and English on the other --
it gets studied at least 5 times by being moved into the card-box's next
section, depending on whether it has been "learned" or not...)

In this 5th class year, there are only four major academic subjects:

German

Latin

Math

Music (in the case of this school, where music is a specialty)

He also has art, sport, violin lessons (during school, no extra $!) and the academic subjects that are tested at this stage with smaller quizzes:  geography, biology, ethics.   His exams this past week or so didn't seem to stress him as much as his sister.  He's been getting 1's in Math, which he finds easy - partly because we put him in 5th grade again here (he'll start back with 7th at home) and partly because it seems that the math is a bit easier here at this stage than at home, somewhat to my surprise.  We're not worried about how he does on the German Language/Lit. exams, just happy that he seems to be understanding and participating in the class.  He is a bit more concerned about how he did in the Latin exam (which hasn't come back yet) because he likes the Latin teacher so much and hopes to maintain what I think is a very good standing in her eyes.  

Benjamin is in the musical class of his school, which is great, but it's maybe not surprising that of the 31 kids in his class only a few are boys (and he's still ignoring girls for the most part).   He does have one good friend, Jona, and a few others with whom he runs around in the playground.  This is a so-called "all-day" school, from 8 am to 4:15pm, which means they get a half-hour lunch break (with required hot lunch, which we pay for monthly), and then an hour and a half break in the afternoon where they sometimes organize soccer, or play in the game room across the street.  After that is a study hall time for doing homework, so he rarely brings home work to do, other than learning Latin vocabulary.

One last quick note here re school:  the kids are also real pro's at getting around on their own on the (wonderful) public transportation system.  Julia was independent from day two in getting to and from school (mostly, due to the embarrassment of having your parents turn up with you) but I rode the S-Bahn or bus with Benjamin for the first couple moths.  Now, he is completely fine with coming and going by himself on S-Bahn, U-Bahn, or bus. There are lots of parents who are perfectly happy to let their 10-year olds take public transport by themselves here, so why not? 

So, there is lots more I could say about the German school system, but for us here and now, it is working out just great.