Finally Settled

Well, it's been an interesting journey but we seem to have finally gotten settled. After 6 weeks of crazed packing, selling cars, renting our house etc. we left Arizona on November 24th. When we arrived we were told that our large shipping container (with Cameron's Christmas presents) would probably not arrive until after Christmas. We still hadn't figured out how to transfer money from the U.S. to Switzerland so we were behind in the rent on our Swiss apartment. We had no working phones and we had just flown in to the first big snow storm of the season. Needless to say we were panicked!!

It's been a month now. Our stuff showed up a few days before Christmas (thank you Dave for yelling until people listened). We got me a working cell phone (Thank you Tim, Dave's coworker, for helping us out). We finally managed to get a Swiss bank account and get money into it (thank you Wincasa, our apartment company, for being patient). Of course none of this would have been possible if Dave's mom hadn't flown out to help, so a big thanks to Susan. Now we are settled into our new place and living the quiet life.

Dave's enjoying work, and looking at several projects to work on. Cameron has done what is termed an (introductory period) at his school and will begin going for 4 hours a day starting January 5th (I'm counting the days). I am figuring out how to...... line dry clothing, speak German, cook, shop for groceries when all the labels are in German, and keep my child from driving me crazy and blogging about what I've learned (SwissFamilyHixson).

Our town, Dietikon, is a little suburb northwest of Zurich. It is 10 to 20 minutes away by train (depending on which train you take). The upside of this town is that it is very near the largest shopping center in Switzerland and the largest IKEA in Switzerland. This little bit of American consumerism has kept me sane. Our town also has a beautiful recreation center with an indoor and outdoor pool complex. For pictures go here http://www.fondli.info/index-Dateien/Hallenbad.htm . Cameron really loves this place and I love it because it wears him out. I'm not sure if it's obvious in the pictures but there is a seperate pool for little kids to play in. Cameron can stand in most of it so it's a great place to splash about. There are also 2 indoor playgrounds in our town, but we haven't gotten the chance to visit them.

Everything shuts down here on Sunday's and holidays so we decided that we would spend these days sightseeing. Turns out, Cameron is not a great tourist, so now we are visiting museums (because these are allowed to be open). We've visited a very interesting dinosaur museum in Aathal, the Swiss transportation museum in Luzern, and today we went to the Technorama (Swiss Science museum) in Winterthur. If you want to see pictures of our travels you should visit Dave's blog WeekendinSwiterland. While Cameron doesn't like just walking around a town he LOVES riding on the trains. In fact, we've sometimes thought about just spending the day riding around on trains. I honestly think he would be happy if we did this. The upside is, the numbering system they use on the trams and trains is helping him learn to read his numbers from 10 to 20 and because time is so important to train travel he's trying to learn to read a clock.

As the new year begins I'm sure we have lots of wonderful things ahead of us. Here are a few pictures of Cameron's adventures so far.
Learning about magnets
at the
Techno-
rama.











Learning about the controls
of a tram at the
Transportation
museum.












Trying to figure our
a giant wooden pinball
machine at the
Techno-
rama.







Enjoying his pirate ship bed
at home in Dietikon.