Arrival of KLAS Students

Hello all! This Saturday the KLAS students are scheduled to arrive, and begin their stay in your homes and at our school.

Here are the flight details:

AC 831       01 SEPTEMBER       GENEVA-TORONTO              1210 1715

AC 269       01 SEPTEMBER       TORONTO-WINNIPEG             1900 2034

Ms. Samson has my cell phone and will call if their flights get delayed, or rearranged.

I will also be checking the Air Canada website, to follow their flights. 
If there are any changes I will post details here immediately.

Hope to see many/all of you at the airport on Saturday night.

Back in the country!

We're here. All is well, in Montreal. We are patiently (sort of) waiting for our final flight to Wpg.

We are on schedule to arrive just before midnight.

See you then!

Travelling Home

As of 3pm Swiss time, the status of all our flights (from aircanada.com) is 'On-Time'.

So we are leaving Geneva at 12:10 (just after noon) on Saturday on Flight 831.

We get into Montreal at 2:15pm on Saturday.

We leave Montreal at 9:55pm on Flight 1105 on Saturday. (Lucky us!!! 7 hours layover!!)

We arrive in Wpg at 11:49pm (just before midnight) on Saturday night.

That's 2349pm on Saturday August 18th.

I hope to get some i-net in Montreal and update you here on our travels but...
I dunno what Montreal has to offer.

Hopefully you will see an update here later in the day on Saturday to reconfirm our arrival time from Montreal to Wpg.

The 2nd to last evening

All of our students took advantage of a free evening to walk down to the Fromagerie and enjoy some classic Swiss food: Fondue!!

We've been frequent guests of the Fromagerie during our stay, so we can say with some authority that the students made a good choice. The food is fantastic. Live music outside in the pedestrian alley. Great ambience.

I would highly recommend the raclette, which is nearly as (perhaps more...) fantastic as the fondue. The ladies seemed to enjoy their time, and hopefully also enjoyed the long walk up back to KLAS.

Final Excursion: Bern

Since most of KLAS had one more day of exams, while the the summer-only students did not, we got one more excursion: A day trip to Bern.

Beautiful central, tourist-business-shopping area. The river Aare is sooo blue. Nice and warm (read hot!!!) day. A last chance to shop, buy gifts and enjoy a European city.

Drama Finals

All of our students were in a drama class this summer term. They all had their final sketches to perform as their final assessment. Many were entertaining, some were quite funny (some unintentionally so...) and it was an enjoyable morning. English with a Japanese accent (and pronunciation) makes for some crazy skits.

Adventure Park

Sunday afternoon we took the school van down to Aigle, to Adventure Park. We were hooked into harnesses, shown how to clip in and out of the safety cables, and were then free to roam about the woods, scrambling along the suspended courses through the trees. The big finish is the 200m long zip line, plus the elevator ride down from the tower.

I managed to complete 3 courses, and the long zip line, but was scared witless. The students seemed to really enjoy the challenge of the courses, and gained confidence and speed as they progressed.

Japanese Festival

Our 2nd last Friday here in Leysin! Time sure flies.

KLAS puts on their Japanese Festival at the end of every summer, to give us a taste of Japanese culture, music, dance, etc. They dress out students in traditional dress (yukata??) Their choir sings popular songs, the band plays popular music (often from their best-selling boy/girl bands.)
They do demonstrations of tea ceremony, karate, double-dutch skipping, and dancing.
Then we move to the cafeteria for a Japanese supper (BBQ chicken and rice... not too far from our norms...) and some activities stations.
You can have messages (your name?) written in Japanese script, play some other games typical of their culture, and generally hang out and enjoy each other's company.
We enjoyed ourselves this year again.

Trekking with Terri Round 4: La Riondaz

After a week away from trekking, because she was under the weather, Terri has returned. For our last trek, on Thursday she led us down from the tele-cabine, and then up to the top of La Riondaz, pictured behind her here:

Was a great trek, great weather (again!) and a good workout. Char and I did not make the peak (with Aidan as payload) but everyone else did. There was lots of chatter and silliness on the way back down, so seemingly the trek didn't cause too much wear and tear.

Sunday: Canadian Breakfast

Chef was kind enough to plan a 'Canadian' breakfast for Sunday brunch. He was prepared for several of our students to help in the food prep and serving in the cafeteria kitchen. He spent some time showing each how to do their assigned task, and stepped in an helped as needs warranted.

The students did great work keeping up with the steady demand of students showing up for brunch. Typical Sunday: 120 meals served. This Sunday: 185 meals served. 50% more than normal! They did very well.

The savoury menu was poutine(fries, gravy, cheese curds), bacon and egg. Then Chef had prepared

waffles, with white sauce, fruit sauce, ice cream and whipped cream. Unbelievably good. We ate sooooo much. It was a fantastic meal.

The students also created packets of Canadian prizes and raffled them off during the meal.

We had fun helping Chef Pierre and his staff in preparing and serving, and it seemed the students enjoyed the meal as well. We cannot thank Chef enough for doing this for/with us.