Knorr Family Adventures

Between the months of April and October (more or less) we travel a lot and I don’t always have time to sit down and write about it despite the fact that I want to since I know we are going to forget things.   Traveling is both fun and tiring; but we know that one of the reasons we moved here is to see places that we would never be able to do otherwise.   Case in point – Chris had a business trip to Paris and I drove down with the boys on Friday night (after school) to spend the weekend.   I am thinking it’s not something we’d be able to do if we lived in the States.    Having said that - our Italian vacation was amazing, and I don’t think I would do it justice in one little paragraph.   However, here are the highlights.   We wanted to hit all the major attractions – Venice, Florence, Rome, Pompeii, and Milan.   We also knew that we have 3 active boys who can only do churches, museums, and statues for so long.   Our solution was rat...

Come October and we will be in Germany for 2 years and I can honestly say that time has flown by insanely quick!  We are very much adjusted to life here but since Chris has business trips every couple of months, he makes our Target trips for us and I have to live through him :) Here is a list that Chris went with this time: glue sticks, coloring pencils and pencil eraser caps - it's back to school sales in America; here it's back to school season without the sales.  Pack of coloring pencils runs upward 8 euros; same for glue sticks.  And I mentioned before, there are not crayons but coloring pencils are used a lot.   low sodium soy sauce - doesn't really exist here and it's hard to go back to regular once you've been using low sodium maple syrup - totally exists here, a little hard to find though and the containers are so small that we usually need to use an entire one for breakfast   chocolate chips - Chris prefers to use chips when making panca...

Picking up where I left off about a month ago, maybe more... Our transit from Tallinn to Helsinki was in style!   We took a 2.5 hour ferry but because Chris has been with me on the boats/ships before, he actually booked a room where we can lay down in case things went south for me.   Yeah, me and sea travel have been known to have some issues :( Anyway, it was really nice to have that because the seating on the ferry is first come, first serve and people end up sitting absolutely everywhere.   What was also weird was the amount of alcohol people were bringing from Estonia to Finland – cases and cases of beer! When we arrived in Helsinki and checked into our hotel, we knew to start looking for dinner right away (it was about 9PM).   After some wondering, we found a nice Finnish place and had Finnish taster platter with Finnish cheese, meatball and some other random things.   It was alright, but nothing like the Estonian food.   The wine...

Ilya started English school, Andrei starts next weekend; both older boys started their swim class again; Ilya and I went to pick flowers from the field; Chris took Andrei and Ilya to get their wall climbing certificates.  It was a busy but fun weekend.

It’s been almost 2 weeks since we came back from Italy and it’s been a week since Andrei and Ilya started school on Monday, Anton started new kindergarten on Thursday.   Life has exciting to say the least. Andrei seems to be adjusting decently enough. On the first 2 days he only had 4 classes but on Wednesday they started regular schedule which is somewhat similar to last year.  Three days a week he starts at 7:45, other 2 days at 8:35 and he finishes between 12:20 and 13:10.  This year again Andrei will go to extended day until 3PM at which point he will most likely walk home by himself.  Andrei has 2 religion classes a week which he will probably spend in the library since we opted out of them but have to confirm with the teacher.  He will also have 2 English classes a week and he is super excited to share English with his friends.  Funny story – Andrei got math homework on the first day of school and for some reason neither Chris nor I thought a...