Once Upon a Time...

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what is the fairest pantomime of them all?

The English Panto tradition is one of my absolute favorite things in the world. When we knew we would be in London at the right time of the year, one of the first things I did was book tickets. We were in luck that the Wimbledon Theatre, not far from where we were staying, was showcasing Snow White this season.

Charlotte has been to a few play in a live theater with her school and so has heard all the rules of sitting still, not talking during the show, and definitely no food or drinks in the theater.

Then we took her to panto and all those rules went out the window.

Charlotte was on the edge of her seat through the first part, then shushed me as I shouted at the show’s baddie, Snow White’s stepmother. When I explained that it was okay to interact in this show she really got into the action and was quickly yelling “oh no it isn’t!” in all the right places.

Though I think both girls thoroughly enjoyed the show, perhaps their favorite part was the intermission ice cream.

Harrods

Many of the things we did in London were nostalgic; places we loved, places we’d spent time in before, places that had a special memory. Harrods, though not somewhere we spent a lot of time in while we lived in the UK, we knew it would be somewhere the girls would enjoy. What I didn’t think about in advance was the fact that Charlotte has no concept of the term “window shopping”. The number of times I said, ‘no, we’re not buying that’ was pretty high.

One of the things Harrods is famous for is their Christmas windows. This year was gingerbread themed. They were also celebrating the 70th anniversary of Dior being sold in the department store, so all the windows were House of Dior themed as well. They did not disappoint!

The store occupies a 5-acre site and has 1.1 million sq ft of retail space. Needless to say we didn’t visit it all.

We started in the food hall, because why not! Though the girls (okay, and Adam & I) would have eaten everything there, we settled on a couple of scones for a snack.

Then we made our way through a couple of sections. Charlotte found something she really wanted, but even with the biggest “special eyes” I’ve ever seen projected at her Dad, there was no convincing him.

It turns out even Daddy's can say no 🙎

In the Mean Time

Time: The ongoing sequence of events taking place. But is it linear, circular, or, in the words of Doctor Who, wibbly wobbly? If you're a toddler trying to climb the hill on your way to the Royal Observatory Greenwich you could probably be excused for thinking all things, including time, are wibbly wobbly. If you're a 5 year old obsessed with running in circles chasing pigeons time is most definitely as circular as the field constantly refreshed with new pigeons. But if you're the parent of both of these said children attempting to heard them through a city such as London during the holiday season time can only be linear.

Greenwich for us while living in London was much like Stonehenge during our time in Bristol, a constant presence in our tour guide calendar as we tried to take as many visitors there as possible. Thankfully, it was much closer to our home in Croydon than Stonehenge was to Bristol and so we have many more unique memories that we were excited to revisit with the girls in the hopes of making our time a little more circular.

We arrived into Greenwich by Charlotte's new favorite mode of transportation, The Tube, and quickly made our way through the town towards the Cutty Sark. Charlotte has never shown much interest in boats so we only stopped for a couple pictures before moving on to the National Maritime Museum.

We had thought we might be able to escape the cold for a bit and walk around the museum some before ascending the hill to the Royal Observatory but there was a private event on-going so we stuck to the grounds and tried to find some interesting photos of the Old Royal Naval College.

My favorite was the Dreadnaught building! I want to take classes there!

Now it was time to climb the hill! When you look at the area on a map the distances between the Observatory, Museum and Cutty Sark appear to be very short. It's not till you're standing on the south side of the Maritime Museum and looking up at the observatory that you realize what you're in for. And quite frankly, photo below doesn't do the hike much justice either when you're pushing a stroller up the incline.

But the walk up is always worth it if the views from the top are amazing. And we already knew these were!

And you get the opportunity to stand astride the Prime Meridian!

Just around the corner from the Prime Meridian depicted in the photo above is the Royal Observatory and Museum which we had planned to go before lunch time, but with the Maritime Museum occupied the crowd of people waiting to get into the observatory was intense and I don't know about you but the face of the little one doesn't look like a patient face to me. It could have been the woppy-jawed way Dad buttoned her coat, it could have been the 35* temperatures, it could have the the previous late night combined with the lack of nap. No matter the reason, she really expressed her displeasure of the current activities.

So we skipped the Observatory and meandered our way back down the hill for an early lunch at what maybe my favorite pub in all of London, The Greenwich Tavern. It was just the same as I recalled from our last visit 9 years ago and everyone was much happier with warm atmosphere while waiting on lunch!

But alas our time in Greenwich was coming to an end and while new experiences shared with our daughters didn't create the type of circularity in time I had hoped for, I wouldn't trade our family time together for anything.

A First Time for Everything

Amanda and I have done a lot of travelling over the years. Most of that has been driving and flying for distance travelling but we are starting to get more comfortable with train travel since the Swiss are world renowned for their on time performance and relative cost savings. So for our Christmas trip we decided that instead of driving to the airport and paying for long term parking we would get up early and take the train into Zurich before catching our 11:15 flight to London. To do this we had to account for 2 hrs to get through the ticket counter, security and customs so the latest arrival to Zurich airport of 9:15. For the train we ended up taking a 2 hr 12 min journey that contained a single transfer which arrived at the airport at 8:36. This means we needed to be at the train station in Buchs by 6:15 and subsequently a 5:45 departure from our apartment. So by the time we are scheduled to take off for London we have already been travelling for 5 hrs and 30 minutes.

A forced smile at 6:30am

So with all that in mind we end up getting to the airport around 8:40 (only 4 minutes after our projected arrival) and as we walk up to the ticket counter (we had several pieces of checked luggage and a stroller that we needed to get tickets for) discover that the line of passengers at the ticket counter already extends all the way through the nearly 10 layers of serpentine que and the ticket counter is unmanned. We quickly learned that EasyJet, the airline we were flying, doesn’t open their ticket counters until 2 hrs prior to a flight so despite all the efforts we made to arrive at the airport with plenty of time to get through the normal backlogs at security and customs we end up spending an hour and forty minutes queued in line to check luggage. This leaves us only 55 minutes to get to the gate before the departure time and 40 minutes to get their before boarding closes.

Thus, the sprint of crazy Americans with their 2 young children, stroller, carry-on luggage begins. Thankfully, Zurich is a relatively small airport, so we got to security quickly and after a brief dispute about whether or not the car seat that we strap into the airline seat would fit through the scanner (it doesn’t and apparently spatial awareness isn't a required skill for employment in security) which included a demonstration that it doesn’t come apart to fit through the scanner they manually inspect us and two of our bags for good measure and then send us on our way.

We now have 30 minutes to get through customs and take a short 5 min tram ride to the international gates. Here we have no issues getting through customs and get to the tram with 15 minutes until boarding closes. So a 5 minute tram ride has us at the terminal at 10:50 so we continue hustling to the gate and arrive at 10:54 expecting to be able to squeeze aboard with the last group of people boarding since it doesn’t close for another 6 minutes. However, there is no one to be seen at the gate except for one other family that arrived a couple minutes before we did who were looking around bewildered as to how they had missed the flight. At this point I proceeded to go over to the window in front of the plane and waive at the pilots in hope that they could send someone back to the desk to admit us since we technically still had time to board. And low and behold, a few minutes later an airline representative did show up and started to attempt to call the gate agents back, but after 10 minutes told us that it would be another 15 minutes for the agents to get back. Unfortunately he also informed us that they couldn’t re-open the plane to board the remaining passengers, of which there were now 4 families standing together, because they had already performed the safety briefing and it’s against regulations to board passengers after that has occurred. And yet the plane continued to sit there for a full 40 minutes after the scheduled departure time with empty seats. The collective of four families that all went through this same ordeal continued to debate the absurdity of the situation with the now multiple airline representatives who showed up but to no avail. In fact, there was nary an attempt to assist any of us in making sure we got to our destinations at all, much less an offer of compensation for operating a wholly inadequate check-in procedure alongside having gate agents leave their job site prior to boarding being completed.

Eventually, we made our way back into the core of the airport to regroup and wait for our luggage to be returned to us and find a new flight to London. To say there were a few people missing their luggage at baggage claim was an understatement. The entire baggage hall was filled with unclaimed bags that we had to sort through to find ours.

Ultimately we ended up booking a 7:30 PM flight that was scheduled to arrive into Gatwick at 9:15 PM. This time we were first in line at the ticket counter and again there was no representative available until 2 hrs prior to departure. The line of customers waiting when the counter finally opened was again well beyond the end of the serpentine queue.

Our trip through security was the same as the morning venture in which we once again had to explain that the car seat doesn’t fit through the scanners and watched again as they attempted to force it through before asking if we could take it apart. We also had a few more questions to answer at customs since we had already been booked through earlier in the day but ultimately we made it to the gate well before boarding and got on the plane without further incident. Only to be delayed on the tarmac for another hour due to weather conditions in London. So our 9:15 arrival eventually turned into a 10:30 arrival in which the landing was also one of the roughest, most rocky, up and down arrivals I have ever experienced.

 

Thankfully Amanda didn't take a photo of me at this point. I felt about the same.

We had expected to arrive at our B&B early afternoon and get in some light sightseeing on the first day but after the late landing, waiting on checked luggage, catching a train from Gatwick to London Bridge and a taxi from London Bridge to the B&B in Fulham we didn’t arrive until just before midnight and were utterly exhausted and completely strung out emotionally.

Neither Amanda nor I have ever missed a flight and based on our arrival time to Zurich there was absolutely no reason we should have missed our morning flight! Especially considering we were in line at the ticket counter before the counter was attended and we arrived at the gate before gate closing should have occurred. And while the flight back to Switzerland on EasyJet was uneventful we will never again book travel with them and hope that our first time to miss a flight will also be our last!

Frohe Weihnachten!

We didn’t have any visitors for Christmas so we’d talked about taking a trip for it. I’m so glad we did it at home though. We did a little trip just before Christmas to the Christmas markets in Germany & France and we were planning a big trip to visit the UK but decided to hold off and go the day after Christmas so we could still open all our gifts on Christmas Day without having to haul them anywhere.

We’ve talked alot about the various Christmas traditions we’ve gotten to experience from St. Martin’s Day to St. Nicholas’ Day to all the Christmas Markets. I wanted to share just a few more things we’ve found a bit different to the American traditions.

Live Christmas Trees are popular in Liechtenstein / Switzerland but do not arrive in stores until mid-December and are often not bought by the locals until Christmas Eve. And then, if there are young children in the house, the trees are usually secretly decorated by the mother of the family. Traditionally, they use real candles on the tree, which are lit twice, once on Christmas Eve and again on New Year's Eve (for good luck). Most people have now wised up to the world of fire safety and use electrical lights like in the US.

You may have noticed above that I said they light the tree on Christmas Eve & not Christmas Day - that’s because you open all your presents on Christmas Eve after attending Mass and the main Christmas meal is eaten after opening gifts on Christmas Eve.

So for those mamas following along, on this one day you go buy your tree, secretly decorate it away from your children while preparing dinner, have everyone dressed for Christmas Mass, come back home and surprise a beautifully decorated tree with all the gifts!, open the gifts and eat a full dinner. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Popular food for Christmas Dinner is ham and scalloped potatoes with melted cheese and milk baked into it. Dessert is often a walnut cake and Christmas cookies. It’s a simpler meal than alot of American Christmas Dinners, but then again, think of all the other things going on that day!

I couldn’t quite bring myself to go fully Swiss on this one, so we decided to keep everything on the 25th in our American standard.

When we returned from France we had just enough time to make Santa his cookies…

… and write him a note …

… ate the not-so-traditional Christmas Eve Pizza …

… and watched our family favorite Christmas Movie - The Muppet Christmas Carol.

The girls went to bed & I tracked Santa on Norad - he made it to Vaduz!

When we woke up the next morning, Santa had come!

Charlotte decided we should “dress fancy” for Christmas so after opening stockings, Dad made us French Toast while the girls got dressed.

Then we opened up packages from under the tree.

And we had to take a break when we opened a game we wanted to play with first.

Until we got bored and started to wonder if there was anything better under the tree…

And then someone found clothing, and decided to wear all of it at the same time.

The other one is going to have plenty of reading for a little while

When we’d partied all we could,

we ended the evening with a germknödel, one of my new found favorite desserts!

Merry Christmas / Frohe Weihnachten from the Powells!