June 9, 2008 at 7:00 am | In Behind the Scenes, Travel Reading | Leave a Comment
I’ve been reading a book called The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World.
The author is a man named Eric Weiner. In the book, he is traveling around the world, stopping in countries where the people have a reputation for being “happy.”
He is trying to discover whether or not there is something about the landscape, the climate, the economy or the culture that makes those particular people happier than others.
In many of the countries to which he travels, he meets ex-pats, or people who weren’t born there but have decided to live there.
For example, he meets an American woman in Bhutan that had been living there for decades. In Iceland, he met an American man who decided to sell off his life in the United States and declare Iceland his home.
I was always interested when he ran across these characters. For a while, way back in 1998, I was an ex-pat of sorts. I lived in Buenos Aires and taught English. But I wasn’t as hard core as some of the other English teachers I met. Some of them had been living in Buenos Aires for years. And some were living and working Buenos Aires, but they’d only moved there after living and working in Japan, in Thailand, in England. I was just playing at being an ex-pat. They were serious about it.
I developed a deep fascination and respect when it came to ex-pats. I wondered just how long I would be able to last living outside of the United States. That trip was the longest I’ve been away – eight months.
And so, when I started Global Roam ink, it felt only natural that I would include a regular series of articles about ex-pat life. I was very excited to publish the article “Is There More to Colombia Than Kidnappings and Cocaine?” which is about an American couple that moves to Cartagena.
And now Global Roam ink is working on it’s second issue. This second time around we’ll publish a story about a bi-cultural family living in the United States. The mom is from South Dakota, but the dad is from Honduras.
It will be appearing shortly.
Kid Chat: Let the Imagination Travel. Part 1
June 4, 2008 at 7:00 am | In Just For Fun, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
It’s June, which means that kids across the country are anxiously awaiting the closing school bell. But June also means that family road trip season is just around the corner.
When I was growing up, my parents were avid fans of the family road trip. Once classes let out, my mom and dad piled me and my brother and our two dogs into the trusty family station wagon and set off for Missouri, the state all my grandparents called home.
It was a long drive from Minnesota to Missouri — eight hours to visit one set of grandparents and twelve hours to reach the other pair. And of course, because we were kids, my brother and I peppered the trip with petty arguments and the ultimate of all annoying questions:
Are we there yet?
Perhaps, if my parents had stuffed the glove box with a copy of Kid Chat: 204 Creative Questions to Let the Imagination Travel, my brother and I would have had something else to occupy our minds.
The book’s authors, Bret Nicholaus and Paul Lowrie, came up with more questions than the summer is long to keep road tripping families from falling prey to the Are-We-There-Yet complaints. The book is overflowing with fun travel-related discussion starters that will pique everyone’s attention and encourage all bodies in the car to chime in.
For example, question 59 reads:
If you had to carry a suitcase with you everywhere you went and it always had to contain the same things, what would you put in it?
Or try question 196:
If you could do something to a rest area to make it really cool, what would it be?
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