Can we make our own 'from our own correspondent'

[teafortwo]

I love love love this radio show...

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/default.stm

Can we please please please have a thread that has a vibe a bit like this?

We can have a bunch of parents who live all over the World in all kinds of countries (including Blighty), with all kinds of neighbours and themselves living in all kinds of situations (rural, city, suburbs and anything inbetween) explaining what is happening where they live. Day to day things (what is on sale at your local market, what you ate for lunch), portraits of figures in your community (e.g a lovely old village character), big news stories (e.g student riots), little news stories (a much loved dog has died that used to wander around the town centre), arguements in the cafe (sport, politics, religion), music and dance (e.g I notice all Parisian teenagers like to do this weird wiggling dance and they even have lessons for how to do it on national telly), observations on things that are different from where you come from (I don't know...e.g a New Yorker's take on living in the Lake District), interesting discussions on languages spoken... etc etc... I think it could be fun!!!

So tell me...

Am I making sense?

and..

What do you think? Shall we give it a go?

TheMadHouse - sadly some do end up on the Sunday Roast table - hardened farmers , some are given away, some are on loan from local farmers and are returned after Ag Day and softies like us end up keeping them all and now have 2 goats, a few sheep and half a dozen chooks (great for fresh eggs) . Fortunately we live on 11 acres but I overheard a parent the other day who was telling tales of hiding chooks in the airing cupboard when her landlord with a no pets policy made a visit to her house!

Fortunately the school sets up an Ag Day animal creche so I take the goats to school with ds1 every morning in the boot of my rather small car - think small golf, he feeds them their bottle at lunchtime so I'm not tied to the house all day and they get to play with other goats and lambs all day .

the goats go to school too? that's fantastic!

Sibble that sounds fab!!

Here in QLd the high schools ( secondary) have agricultural studies as a subject they can choose from their second year at secondary school. They have a variety of lifestock and crops.

teafortwo - I had an experience kinda like that where your innocence/ignorance of ways shows.

Dh took me to Chelsea for a football game ( he is a lifelong football fan - not a hooligan but he loves his chelsea and has done since he was very young) His father is a rabid west ham fan - so no idea where dh got his love from - but I digress.

Anyway - he decided to drive up to Stamford Bridge as I was pregnant - early stages with dd1 and he was a bit concerned about travelling up from our neck of the woods with west ham fans - also going to the Bridge.

As we left and drove past Fulham Broadway tube station - the police dogs and cars where there. I remarked quite concerned to dh about the possibility of a watch house or prison nearyby. He asked why - I said well they have the dogs out - they must be looking for someone - you know an escapee or fugitive!!

Dh pissed himself laughing and told me they would have been brought in to keep the football fans apart and to break up any fights.

it had never occurred to me that anyone would brawl over football!! let along needs dogs to control them!!

Whilst we are passionate about our rugby league ( football) here in Aus - we are not that passionate to rise to brawls!!

Sibble I love that the animals go to school too! And have a little animal creche. That's fantastic! I hope your DC win a prize this year.

Teafortwo, I've had a similar experience to you in Madrid, although I did recognise the ladies for what they were. . There's a park called the Casa del Campo which you can arrive at by cable car and has a theme park in it. We decided to go and have a wander around with friends and perhaps go on some of the rides. As we were going over the park in the cable car, we could see men coming out of the bushes and women standing alone along the side of the road. As we got closer, we could see that some of the women were wearing g-strings and bras only. Needless to say, we made a beeline for the themepark and forgot the wander around!

OMG - someone posted a link for an article about Down Syndrome and there is a pic of dd1 - at 1yo. I got such a surprise.

They did some pics of her and included our story about her in their Annual report. They did a feature of a baby, a school child and an adult. Dd1 was chosen to be the baby and we had some gorgeous pics done of her. That is actually one of my favourites.

here she is

Awww eidsvold, she is beautiful! What a surprise for you to see her there!

THOSE EYES!!! THAT HAIR!!! AW!!!! AW!!!!! AW!!!! Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle; kiss, kiss, kiss!!!

What a lovely surprise for you and what a delight for the rest of us to get to see such a gorgous gorgous baby!!!!

oh tea for two - she was ( still is) scrumptious - obviously I don't get to do as much kissing and cuddling anymore.

eidsvold - she is goooooooorgeous!!! How old is she now?

I'm LOL at people's stories of the 'ladies of the night' so following the theme I'll tell you about the only time I have seen a prostitute here. It was at a motorway junction on the way to Sarajevo and to start with she made us gape from a distance because she was wearing a short skirt, something which is rarely seen out here in the very conservative sticks. But as we got closer we saw just how short the skirt was...... not quite a skirt in fact...... actually we could see all of her knickerless 'wares' on display!!! There was absolutely no doubt what she was selling! And behind her was a conveniently sized white van, with driver.

People here are quite prim and proper, or at least like to give the public impression that they are and "that sort of thing" is not tolerated. There's a story that I've been told about a brothel full of prostitutes from some other eastern European country (not our own girls, oh no!! ) being raided and closed down, and the girls run out of town. I don't know if it is true or exaggerated though.

Love the image of the goats piled in the back of the car and taken to creche!! Fab! We took some of our baby chicks to the nursery school earlier in the year for the kids to see and so that the teacher could do a 'where do eggs come from' lesson. That was fun, although the kids were more fascinated by the smelly little chick poos, of course! Kids are the same worldwide

wellies she is 6 - pic on profile of her birthday early august this year.

LOL at the goats going to school

Love animal creche - we get random chickens wandering into classrooms etc, but nothing so formal.

So, fooc-ing from northern thailand:

I'm at work at the moment, bit jealous of dp and dd who've spent the day at a rocket festival. A handmade rocket festival. I have an American friend who describes Americans as 'extremely risk-averse'. Locals here are the opposite - complete loons 'extremely risk-friendly', I suppose.

It works like this: you take a piece of bamboo and hollow out the kind of section markers on the inside. Then you sit in your house (incidentally, often made of bamboo as well) and grind gunpowder in a mortar and pestle until it's fine enough to pack into the bamboo. Ah! Many are the nervewracking pleasant afternoons I've spent watching the rockets being prepared, while babies crawl around the room picking up lighters (and yes that's true, although not since I became a mother I have to say).

Anyway, assuming everyone survived the preparation, the rockets are taken to the appointed place (usually carried over a shoulder, but the biggest ones go in the back of pick up trucks). There everyone looks at everyone else's rocket (oh, this is sooooo male, isn't it?), jokes are made, bets are placed, and the 'launch pad' is prepared. At the last rocket festival I went to, that was a convenient crook in the branch of a tree.

One by one, the rockets are passed up to the biggest loon of all expert, who gets them into place, lights the wick (about 6 inches long) and then jumps out of the tree, if he has time. Otherwise he gets covered in black soot.

The actual rockets don't really do very much. They make a loud noise and go up. Then they fall back down and everyone runs out of the way. Occasionally they explode without going anywhere. The rockets are judged, on the criteria of how far up they went and "how beautiful it was". I think that going straight up is more beautiful than veering off to the side. The entertainment is mostly in laughing at the mishaps, and of course the excuse to sit around all day drinking and admiring the view (which round here, is always spectacular).

mangalossi - sounds dangerous like lots of fun.

Mangalossi - I like the sound of your rocket festival! Definitely one for the risk friendly.

The rocket festival sounds great, if scary.
How often do you have a rocket festival?

LOL at the goats going to school and the animal creche. I am going to savour that all day, and I hope Sibble will perhaps take a photo for all the nosy bints enquiring minds of MN.

I was at a farewell party last night, with lots of friends from all over Germany.

One of my friends brought a traditional present of bread and salt, for our new house. Bread symbolises the hope that the family will never go hungry, salt that hope that the family will be prosperous. It was very nice and made me cry

Hi everyone

I have just ciome back from holiday. I decided to go locally - under two hours drive from where we live and found a couple of houses to rent - one for a fortnight in the deepest charante and the second on the ile d'oleron.

Well, the houses were great. The destinations were both total surprises. The first one 'la france profonde' turned out to be totally infiltrated by Brits. Totally. My kids loved it - to them it was like going to the UK on holiday; we were unofficially 'abroad'! We bought exotic groceries like marmite and ambrosia custard in the local intermarché supermarket, where you could pick up the daily mail, times or telegraph but the local papers were not to be had, I smooched in second hand english bookshops and eavesdropped conversations about problems renovating barns in the dordogne, and dd3 made friends with an expat English child and actually started speaking English voluntarily. It was bizarre and fun and such a surprise, althgough my very french dh is sure I had an inkling. Not at all!

We spent a fortnight in WokingdanslaCharante and then went to the ile d'oleron, which I thought would be a sleepy island, and definitely is - in mid November. In August the population swells from 3500 to 35000, and the place is heaving with traffic jams and rip off moules frites. However, the beaches are great, the seafood to die for(best have ever had) and we had great mornings looking for oysters and crabs and bigorneaux in the rock pools at low tide. Came home two days before the rentree (error) and thought I would hanker for the countryside and the beaches but not at all. Bordeaux is great!

What a brilliant thread by the way. But could I make a suggestion - that we write at the top where we are talking about; I forget and need to go tracking back to other posts to find out where people are writing from.

Oooh - I haven't been on MN in ages, then I came back today, saw this thread in active conversations and haven't been elsewhere in MN since! I think I've read about three quarters now and as far as I can make out you don't have a correspondent from the Swedish archipelago?

DD (7.5 mos) and I live about 50km east of Stockholm in the archipelago between Finland and Sweden. When you buy houses out here the estate agents list the address and the longitude and latitude. We're as far out as you can get by road, and bus thankfully! If you want to go any further you have to walk to the end of our road and hop aboard one of the glistening white passenger ferries that chart their way through the myriad of islands.

In the summer these boats are often heinously busy - but summer is a strictly defined period here. Despite bitterly cold conditions the Swedes are reasonably hopeless at tolerating cold so anything below 23 or 24 degrees is not considered warm. Thus summer is confined to a few weeks in July and August. A unfortunate consequence of this, combined with their absolute need to be outside at all plausible times, is that the entire country shuts for those weeks and no-one can get anything done.

The silver lining however is that for the other 48 weeks of the year DD and I share the boats with just the few folk who live all year round on the islands. In the winter the boat decks are equipped with reindeer hides as blankets and the boats themselves with icebreakers. Provided it's not cold enough to freeze your pee (below about -10) you can sit on the deck with a hot chocolate and sail silently through the frozen bays and marvel at snow settled on ocean.

Once you are out on the islands you are free to wander amongst the forests and the beaches as you please. Some of the islands have evolved in to bigger destinations, like Sandhamn, which have shops, bakeries, yacht clubs etc. Most of the islands have nothing at all except a few houses. Some of the most fascinating islands, for me anyway, have forts from old wars (with the Russians if memory serves) and isolation hospitals.

The staff of Waxholm Bolaget, the boat company, are astoundingly knowledgeable, and very accommodating as regards my diabolical Swedish. They will gladly spend the duration of trip, once tickets have been issued, delivering their knowledge of the islands and the history.

At only £6 one way, and no fare for children, it can be a rather common yet breathtaking way to spend a day.

Wow, what a lot of fascinating posts! Love TFT's story about the art gallery - DS and I went to the Museum in Docklands today but it was more charging about after DS: 'Boat! More boat! Train!' then thundering off into the next room . DC2 is predicted to be another boy, so any hopes of quiet art-appreciation trips will have to be postponed to the moody teenage years.

The make-your-own-rocket festival sounds fantastic and I'm fascinated by the insight into Thai politics, as we hear so little apart from the indictments in the news here.

I thought I'd bring pace down a bit with a town planning story - I did warn you that life in North London is on the humdrum side. So far this year we have had three big planning protests: first against the strip club adult entertainment venue planned for the High Street, handily situated between the church and the mosque. Cue families protesting with banners and the plans predictably being ditched. Then there was the Great Nandos War, where the middle-class urbanites of Stoke Newington got themselves all het up over the prospect of lower class fried chicken eaters colonising chain restaurants opening in bohemian Church Street. The latest is an amusing reversal, as the denizens of the local Swan public house object to the building being bought by the Bobov Jewish community for a synagogue and community centre. Obviously a seedy boozer is of far greater worth to the local community. The pubs round here are rough, you have to venture as far as the fried-chicken haters of Stoke Newington to be able to drink your pint in peace.

I'd post a link to the article and picture in the local rag, only they had to pull the photo as the protesters were draped in a giant St George's flag.

ggglimpopo I agree[grin, though you should have set the example

So for us poor folk who don't live anywhere exotic, could you all start your posts

FOOC countrywhereyoulive*

PLEASE

bugger, something wrong with the link:

community.thejc.com/articles/make-mine-a-service-?-pub-become-shul

we are planning to name DS2 after this chap

DH thinks: saint and big hero

I think: amateur space shuttle builder (cool)

FOOC in Ibadan, Nigeria

Hi, I was directed to this thread by some other mumsnetters posting on an ex pat thread. Are the mumsnetters from the same continent as me out there?
I have just been catching up with all the posts - there are some very exotic locations represented here and some fascinating posts. What a great thread! One of the things I missed most when moving here from the UK was Radio 4 (that, and cheddar cheese!) and this version of FOOC is fantastic and much more dynamic. There are many things that I could say about day to day life in Nigeria but it is late (for me anyway at 7 months pg, working full time and knackered with swollen ankles) Suffice to say that there is an electricity outage at the moment (not uncommon) and all I can hear are generators rumbling away and the squeaking of bats right outside the window. The local church will begin their (very loud)service at around 2am (why?!) How is anyone supposed to sleep around here?!

FOOC Paris

Hello squigglywig -what a great first foocs post and heres to many more - I have a feeling you are going to be a superb foocs poster - especially as you live in such a fab place!!!

Hi diddybobster - Welcome too. There are a few people living in deepest darkest Africa!

As regards a few things you mentioned in your post I have good news and bad....

Good news...

YOU CAN LISTEN TO RADIO 4 ONLINE!!!!!!

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/index.shtml?logo

And what is brilliant is if you have a power cut during your favourite programme you can use the listen again facility when it comes back on.

Bad news....

I have no idea if you can get Cheddar cheese online but I have a feeling the answer is no!

I am looking forward to hearing more from Nigeria! Thanks for joining the foocs!

fooc brisbane australia

califrau - I showed the dds the page and all dd1 said was dd3 - to which I said no baby dd1. THen she gave me a big smile and said 'cute!' Don't think she grasped the fact that she is somewhat famous. Dh said she was also on the front page of the health section.

Here in Aus it is Father's Day tomorrow. Dh is the lucky recipient of presents purchased at our school's father's day stall. The parent committee usually makes lots of presents that children can then purchase. This year we just did not have time so made a few things and bought a lot of things. It was amazing to see the money children had to spend. We had presents from $1 to $7.

It was a good little fundraiser for school - making over a thousand dollars. That money is then used to purchase things or do things around the school - like replace sporting equipment or school equipment, landscaping etc. Despite having government funds - it is never enough for all that needs and could be done. So the school tends to do the urgent health and safety and equipment things and the Parent Committee then helps with the rest.

So dh has a pen, notebook, bottleopener key ring, mug and chocs and a hanky and chocs. These were all chosen by the dds. I bought him a couple of books.

As a child I remember our equivalent of guy fawkes night or cracker night as we used to call it but before long fireworks were banned in order to eliminate injuries from fireworks. However at a school not far from here a licenced firework guy managed to have a rocket go awry and killed an 11 year old girl and injured seven others - some quite critically. My cousins were there when it happened - the youngest was very young and has a terrible fear of fireworks because of it.