Mother’s Day is a global event and this year was about the most diverse one yet for me. We were in Annecy in France when Russell phoned his mother in Auckland to wish her a happy day and have a chat. We had moved on to Geneva, Switzerland by the time I started receiving lovely messages from my own children and was in Bern, Switzerland when our granddaughter (and daughter and son-in-law) FaceTimed us.
That was all on Saturday, local time for us.
On Sunday morning I was given a lovely present brought in France and then we went to a Mother’s day service at the Bern Cathedral, home of my paternal ancestors.
We walked down the road after church and headed to the Bear Pit to see the famous Bern bears. It was lunchtime so we went into the nearby Altes Tramdepot for lunch. We are finding the food service so far in Switzerland less than hospitable, and this cafe announced that if we wanted to eat we would have to share and marched us to a table where an unsuspecting young couple were having a romantic lunch. Without a word to the couple the waiter plopped down extra place settings and told us to sit.
Awkward- but the young woman, Sandy, broke the ice and started chatting with us about life in Taiwan and her current student exchange to France where she is studying English! Go figure. Her young man did not have quite such fluent command of English, but as we got to the stage of sharing email, addresses to come and stay etc etc he loaned me a very cool gadget he was carrying which I was able to use to hotspot my phone so we could connect via Facebook.
As we were about to leave a different waitress came up to us and offered our family a gorgeous red rose for their mother on mother’s day!
We all had a good laugh together, took a photo of us and our Taiwanese children, and we went our separate ways.
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