For the last couple of weeks Jas has been focused on fruit and vegetables at school, they've had a project all about healthy food that started with shopping en masse in the local market for healthy stuff (apparently the whole class (less teacher) finished up in the local toy shop) and ended (hopefully we're done with this now & my veggie knife and peeler can go back in their kitchen drawer rather than rolling around in the bottom of Jas's bag) on Saturday with a 'Gemüsefest' which the world and his dog was invited along to and which we, as parents, were supposed to offer to help with...oops, I knew there was something I was supposed to do!
The 'fest' started at 11 and ran till 3. Jas was there for the majority of it - you'd think she'd be glad to spend some time away from school but no, given the opportunity to hang out with her classmates and race about the school grounds free from the usual parental/teacher constraints, she was desperate to be there. Si and I, on the other hand weren't so keen, but felt we should show our support/our faces and made it for the last hour.
There was an unusual collection of activities going on, bearing in mind the theme was 'Rolle vorwärts ins Gemüsebeet' (which translates as 'roll in the vegetable patch' - a bizarre title, made even more amusing if you know that the next project lined up for the 10 year olds is sex education) The first activites we came across were baseball and a Viking game called Kubb - Jasmine's class were in charge of this and despite playing it I'm still at a loss to understand the rules...there must be some I'm sure, I just made an attempt to throw my lump of wood in the same direction as the rest of my team and to try to keep out of the way of those being lobbed towards me from the opposing team. Not a vegetable in sight.
Up onto the top playground there was some kind of football skills course laid out but still no vegetables.
Through onto the smaller playground there was a huge soup wagon serving vegetable soup (at last, vegetables) but on a May day with the sun beating down, ensuring a toastie 24 degrees, ice cream would have been better (although clearly not vegetabley enough) the würst grill (sausage barbie) was of course doing a roaring trade, the only thing that'll keep the Germans from their ice cream is a hot würst, but that's not very vegetabley...then there were herb crepes, waffles (hmmm) a stall with loads of different bread (?) jacket potatoes with quark and quark with fresh fruit, all 'healthy' I guess, but not all vegetabley.
Down onto the bottom playground and there was more football, a pedalo course* and a photographic display of fruit and veg picture plates the children had done (have we given up on the 'don't play with your food' line now? Is that old hat?)
The children all appeared to be having a great time and the parents seemed pretty chilled out too, as they sat about eating their bbq sausage in a bun, an odd collection of activities with a very loose theme but at least there was no pressure to make money for the school as happens at the school fairs in the UK where you can sometimes feel bullied into spending money for something you don't want but you feel you have to donate because you know the school needs the money, here if they need the money they tell you and they tell you how much they want from you and they give you the bank account details to transfer the money to - gotta admire German directness!
* to the non German world I'm quite sure the word 'pedalo' conjures up water and plastic boats for 2,4 or 6 people, some with slides on them, that you're meant to pedal around the sea/lake/river, but here it means something quite different & the word 'trettboot' is used to describe a pedalo. If you want to know what the Germans understand by the word 'pedalo' take a look here.
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