Week Three

Vigo had a fairly uneventful week at school. The real work is starting and he's not having quite as much fun anymore, but he still doesn't want to leave the place in the afternoons. Vigo has a friend at school called Eduard, but he was feeling a little homesick this week. He'd like to do some video chatting with some of his old friends. Eduard is the 3rd grader who is partnered with Vigo to mentor him as an older, more experienced member of the school in the way Vigo was partnered with India last week. The kids really take this mentoring stuff seriously. Vigo was also a little sick last weekend and had to skip the pool on Monday. He has a lingering little sniffle still.

One big thing this week was getting Vigo a fountain pen. He wasn't required to have one, but most of the other kids use them and he wants to do things the right way! Vigo and Erik went to the paper store together and chose a really well-designed Pelican brand pen. It has a smiley face on top to indicate that you're holding the pen right-side-up and it's indented for small fingers, to promote proper holding. Vigo told me Saturday that he almost doesn't make any mistakes at all with his new fountain pen. He used his pen to write his first fiction reading report. He has to write a report every week about a book that he gets from the school library. He picked a thick fantasy book but he didn't end up reading that because he was tearing through the remaining Secrets of Droon books we bought him before leaving the US. He read 400 (illustrated) pages of this stuff last week and now he doesn't have any more Droon left. He wants to get the rest of the series, read them, and then re-read all of the books again, in order this time. This week he brought back a book about volcanoes and earthquakes. It's not fiction, but we're going to run with it. He's been enjoying it a lot.

We got Vigo's bike fixed by Job at Culture Road and he's been riding to and from school every day. He really loves that bike!

Dan spent the week with us and said that Vigo seems really happy. Dan might be able to teach Vigo to play the trumpet, though Vigo also seems to be warming up to trying out a woodwind instrument. Iris spent a night with us over the weekend. We are so glad to have those guys around to hang out with!

Friday after school we went to some kind of family festival at the park. Erik looked at all the listings and organized a really great Friday night outing for us. They had a lot of games at the little family festival, like tug of war, a sack race, and a giant balloon that the crowd kept aloft for about 12 minutes! Erik and Vigo had a great time, but I ended up leaving with Sam because of her terrible fear of balloon animals. The sound of squeaking balloons just makes her quake.




After that, we went on our first big family bike ride to attend a couple art openings. Even Sam came trotting along with us!




Vigo really loved the work of Miao Xiaochun at the second gallery we went to. He asked a lot of questions about the pictures and videos and looked at the catalogs of the artists' other work. The next day I showed him some Bosch, Bruegel, Muybridge and Duchamp on the internet because all of those artists were heavily referenced in the stuff we'd seen.

Vigo is starting to experiment with an English accent. Most of the kids at his school speak English with some form or another of UK accent, so it's not surprising that he's picking it up a little bit. Of course the accent he's going to probably end up with after a year here will be some kind of Irish/English/Welsh/Norwegian/Icelandic/German English accent. I asked him yesterday if he was going to start talking with an English accent and he replied, "No . . .Well, to tell the truth, sometimes. Because my nose is a little bit stuffy."

Today (Sunday) Vigo and I went just the two of us to the park. The Volkspark Friedrichshain is huge and there's still a lot of it that we haven't explored. I took Vigo to try out the climbing wall. After that, we went to the cafe inside the park and got something to drink on the terrace. Vigo finished reading his Encyclopedia Brown book and I did my German class homework. It's getting a little chilly here, but if you find a spot in the sun--when there is sun--it's still pretty nice outside.





Tomorrow we all have to get up extremely early to go to the place where we can get our residency papers sorted out. We have to be there at 6:30 in the morning. It turns out the people who handle paperwork for foreigners are on strike, so we can't get an appointment for two months. We can't really wait two months for our paperwork. They told us if we come first thing in the morning one day, they can process us.