This is one of the many useful Swiss things that springs to mind, but not what I'm referring to.  Now for some history and facts…  In 1891, Karl Elsener an owner of a company that made surgical equipment, discovered to his dismay that the Swiss army was in fact made in Solingen (Germany).  Elsener set out to manufacture the knives in Switzerland itself.  At the end of 1891 Elsener took over production of the knives, but Elsener was not satisfied with its first incarnation. In 1896, after five years of hard work, Elsener managed to put the blades on both sides of the handle using a special spring mechanism, allowing him to use the same spring to hold them in place, an innovation at the time.  This allowed Elsener to put twice as many features on the knife; he added a second cutting blade and a corkscrew.  The rest, as they say, is history!

Now to my bits.

All over you can find the guide to this and the guide to that.  We've read them before, during and after our move.  Do they prepare you? I don't really know.  Life is not lived by a manual, we often scrabble about in the dark finding solutions, well I do.  I don't want to say this is the way things work (often that is perception) but I thought I could just lay down some of my experiences and share them.

As a family the children are important, so Schools are one bit.  I've included a couple of links to the schools we ended up at with our children (and we only visited these 2!) from the links I hope you'll see why they worked for us.

Being away from you home country has a lonely side to it, what you see and hear helps.  Always, at least at first, having to discover new things is also exhausting.  Home comforts, English as a first language etc all a welcome release so I've included a bit here.

In general, just getting good stuff off the internet, information, news or any old thing is helpful - so here are just some links to random items that might help - they mey even develop into complete pages.