This week was all about preparing for the Johnsons.  Tomorrow Melissa’s whole family (Keith, Janell, and Kyle Johnson), as well as a former exchange student they hosted from Austria (Sandra Zwanzinger), are flying into Geneva to spend Christmas with us in Switzerland.  We’ve been busy cleaning up our apartment, Christmas shopping, and planning our sight seeing.

Our guests are staying from the 21st to 29th, and in addition to the Johnsons and Sandy we plan to meet up with Britt Sieber for one day in Freiburg, Germany, and host Bjorn Lindholm from the 26th to 29th.   Britt was an exchange student with Janell’s sister’s family, and lives in Germany.  Bjorn was another former exchange student hosted by the Johnsons who lives in Sweden.

Our sightseeing days will be spent riding trains all throughout Switzerland then riding home to sleep at our apartment.  Everyone has train passes to cover 6 days of travel, but for the first day we decided to rent a van to pick everyone up.  The cost to rent is slightly cheaper than having everyone buy train tickets, and it gave us our first opportunity to drive in Switzerland.  After bringing the van back to the apartment, we only noticed one major difference between driving here and in the U.S. The van has a strange feature to turn itself off every time it comes to a stop.  It seems really weird, but we looked it up and it’s actually a law here that either your car has this feature or you turn off your engine at stop lights so as to reduce pollution.

On Wednesday I took a break from thinking about travel in Switzerland to think about travel in a galaxy far far away.  Star Wars came to Switzerland one day earlier than the U.S., so I had to take advantage of it, even though it meant seeing the film in French.  My review is: I loved it! And could even follow most of the plot! (Because most of the plot is big action scenes).  I was a little confused on some of the finer details, but I felt better when I went home and checked the internet spoilers to find out most of the stuff I was confused about wasn’t even explained in the movie anyway.

Tomorrow will be the start of Christmas for us, and this year we are super excited to celebrate for 9 days with family and friends!  Happy holidays to all! Joyeux Fêtes! Frohe Weihnachten! God Jul! and Merry Christmas!