This afternoon the Frankfurt International School at the northern end of Oberursel celebrated their “Worldfest”.

At Worldfest, the parents of the pupils attending the school sell food and drink as well as arts and crafts from their home countries.  With 19 countries represented, there was certainly a wide choice of things to try, from more well-known dishes such as pizza (Italy), sushi (Japan), and Bratwurst (Germany), to more exotic items like Blini and Pirozhki (Russia), Poffertjes (Netherlands) and Bulgogi (Korea).

Food at the Indian stand

The elderflower lemonade from Sweden certainly made an interesting – and refreshing – alternative to the usual type of drinks at such festivals.

With the school celebrating its 50th anniversary this year as well, the festival was particularly well visited, with alumni swelling the numbers to an estimated 3,000 visitors!  In the entrance, a selection of vintage cars were on show from the 1960s and 1970s – the early years of the school, accompanied by their owners who were happy to explain their cherished automobiles.

Amongst the first visitors were (more…)

I suppose it was inevitable that once my daughter started school I would be comparing the school system in Germany with that in England – at least with the one I experienced at the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s.

But I wasn’t quite prepared for the cultural shock that followed, and am still often left trying to work out whether it is a difference between the national systems that I am observing, or whether times have just simply moved on.

When I went to to primary school in England… (more…)

Ask almost anyone child in England who is learning German at school and there is one thing that they can tell you about German schools: they don’t have school uniforms.

Whilst some may like the sound of this more liberal attitude towards clothing, for the children it can mean the hard decision of what to wear each day, with conflicts arising among peers over designer labels, colours, and so on.

This, coupled with the fact that Germany has a general problem with uniforms anyway as a result of its past, meant that it was never going to be easy to introduce one into German schools.

But some are trying it out, and one of them is not far from us.  The new Grammar School in Rüsselsheim has opted for a “standard school clothing” rather than a “school uniform”, consisting of a standard blue T-Shirt, pop shirt, jumper with hood and a jacket.  A set costs around 90EUR.

Actually school T-Shirts are nothing new, but most children only have one that comes out for special occasions.  This extension of that idea may be sufficiently flexible (and “non-uniform”?) to catch on.