Swiss Family Willis

A traditional winter procession with loud noise and lanterns to find Samiclaus…

On the 6th of December Samiclaus (or St Nikolaus) comes to visit kids in Switzerland. At school we made lanterns and learnt a song for Samiclaus.

Bens with his lantern and bag of treats from Samiclaus

Then, last night we met at my school at 6pm. The whole village came, probably 200 people including lots of kids. There was a bonfire and they were cooking hot punsch over the fire. We heard a really loud noise and we went to see what it was. It was a lot of dudes dressed in white with big as cow bells and whips (to make that sonic boom sound with).

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The chateau is a castle on lake Geneva (or Lac Leman). It’s in a village called Montreux in the southern and French speaking part of Switzerland. They think the castle dates back to before 1000.

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On the first Wednesday of November each year there is a carrot festival in Aarau. Canton Aargau is the carrot capital.

Carrots are my favourite vegetable and so I was looking forward to going. We caught the train because there are lots and lots of people coming (35,000).

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Benjamin: Noah and I go to the Altwis school which is just down the road. The teachers are pretty easy going. They don’t mind if you talk at your desk. And there are headphones you can put on if you don’t want to be disturbed. My class has 23 children and two teachers. There are kindergarten (5 year olds), year 1, 2 and 3 in my class. It’s a really little school with 46 kids and two classrooms.

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Today we walked to a metro stop at 5am. When we arrived at our stop we hopped off and got some breakfast from a delicious cafe full of Greek yoghurt and baked goods.

We weren’t sure the ferry was going to leave because the last few days it didn’t leave because of stormy weather.

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Today we went on a bus to Saas Fee, a mountain region in Switzerland. Then we went up a gondola and walked down a path. There we spotted some marmots. We slowly crept up to them and gave them peanuts. We fed two marmots and they were really friendly. One of them was hiding in it’s hole and when it finished it’s peanut, I would feed it another peanut by holding my hand out and it would slowly come out the hole, grab the peanut and go back in. Both of my brothers gave the marmot a kiss.

Marmots live high up in the mountains in Switzerland and they look like giant guinea pigs but way fluffier.

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Today we went to the kinderzoo and it was really fun. First we went to the entrance which wasn’t like a ordinary entrance, it had a concrete wall with holes in the shape of people and you had to walk through them to get to place where you get tickets.

So after all that we met the giraffes and zebras but then I saw a moose which wasn’t actually a moose, it was a water buffalo which is my 7th favourite animal (now). After that we met the elephants but something was quite interesting was that one of the elephants had a black eye.

(Ben really wanted to go here as his big brothers visited this place 10 years ago before he was born…)

Today I went to my cousin’s baptism at church. He’s 8 months old. He’s probably the cutest baby I’ve ever seen ’cause of his laugh. So when we went to the baptism and sang some songs (in German) then we listened to the sermon (which was also in German), then we prayed for a long time…… then finally we baptised Arthur. When he was getting baptised he was staring at a dove (AKA the Holy Spirit) hanging from the roof. After that my mum got some special jobs (etc being Arthur’s god mother).

The church was amazing compared to a NZ church (at the end you can see a photo or a few of the church) even though it was really original for a German church. Then we went home, it was a fun day.

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