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Country of Friendship: multicultural and childlike travel – childrens edge

Last Updated on May 3, 2017 at 22:56

The everyday multiculturalism in which children grow up in our mobile and globalized world is a great thing. Anonymous spots on the map turn into colorful, exciting worlds of life as soon as you have friends who come from these areas. In our case, this has become the breeding ground for a profound desire to travel.

Better than travel guides: friends from other countries

Stuffed knowledge gaps

For myself, the geography began with friendships with a fish. It hung over the kitchen table in the student apartment of my Romanian-German friend, and you had to look carefully to recognize him as a fish. But once you’ve made it, you’ll see the outline of Romania on every map as a fish. Since that evening in the kitchen of my girlfriend, I have an idea of ​​where in the previously shamefully unknown Romania, the capital and the regions are, from which my Romanian German acquaintances come. And I really want to go back this evening.

A rounder world

Friends from other countries have played a major role in our family’s travel behavior over the years. They made sure that interesting sounding travel destination destinations and unfamiliar patches on the map made plastic environments full of idiosyncratic qualities that we found more exciting and exciting the more we heard about them. And that affects not least our children.

Finland: fascination at kindergarten age

Once to look like a real Sami child

Cultural openness at the age of three

If two sisters have a Finnish educator for a total of seven kindergarten years, then there is a possibility that not only can they count in Finnish to ten at the time of enrollment, but they also know how to behave when they come across a bear randomly How the current state of research on Northern Lights looks like and with what rhymes the Finnish kindergarten breakfast is introduced. If the younger sister in her last year of kindergarten for carnival even the real Lappish Sami children’s costume borrowed by the educator, then the floor is at maximum prepared for a trip.

Finnish vocabulary

Our little kid was six, our big ten when we spent a summer vacation in Helsinki and on the southern coast of Finland. From the beginning, the feeling was completely different from previous trips, when the parents had set a goal and tried to make it palatable to the children. Finland was not just any country, it was a place that for years had taken on an increasingly plastic form in their minds, a cosmos filled with countless positive associations, behind which was the image of a familiar person who embodied everything Finnish. And who had given them even in advance private Finnish lessons! Seldom have our daughters experienced a journey as awake as that to Finland.

Ice; Mom and dad; I’m from Germany: child-friendly Finnish lessons

“We want to go to Korea!”

Familial Korea virus

Until then you yourself put one on it. I must assume that we would not have been in Asia without our children until today. Or without my Korean girlfriend and her half Korean, half German daughter. The girl has a very close relationship with my two daughters, and during the many hours that our kids spent with the family over the years, they were sustainably infected with the Korea virus. The mother showed them Korean calligraphy and the Korean form of the tea ceremony. She put them in traditional holiday hanboks (Photo at the top) and let them try the tastiest Korean things again and again, while in the nursery there were crazy colorful products with faces to admire.

To Asia!

My big daughter explained that we should save the money for all the trips planned in the next few years and fly to Korea for them. The desire was so great with both sisters that as one of the journeys we should have saved ourselves according to the older ones, we used it as an unfair means of pressure: Show that you can behave yourself in the hotel, otherwise we can not go to Korea! – Classical case of an idiotic educational threat, which one does not realize in the end: The daughters behaved only moderately, we booked nevertheless flights to Seoul. Of course not only because our children wanted to go. But because our Korean girlfriend had also infected us with her homeland, of which I previously – shame on me! – had only vaguely known where on the atlas it was to be found. Now, however, Korea was a country of friends, with many exciting stories in our minds. The six days that we finally spent in Seoul were as enriching for all of us as some three-week trips are not – not least because of the Korean family connection on site.

Algae: met in Germany, enjoyed in Seoul free of contact fears

Multiculturalism and mobility

When the girlfriend moves away

It is not always the international mobility of our days that has such pleasing experiences. When the best friend moves abroad, as happened when our big daughter was in preschool, that’s sad, nothing can be talked into that. But although she is still missing: After all, my children have since been several times in Flanders, have an idea of ​​life there and now follow the Flemish teen everyday life through the Instagram accounts of her friends. And you know a girl who goes to a 16-speed Belgian high school! Such experiences make the world bigger and rounder – and that without informative cultural mediation on the part of the parents.

Good to know how the water tastes on a Belgian schoolyard

Into the blue planned

We will see how it goes on. The Hungarian friend of my younger daughter is planning a Budapest girl trip for the Abitur. That’s a while longer. In Chile, as we have heard, an elderly man waits for his granddaughter to come over from Germany after school on a world tour with a friend. She has already made vague plans with our big daughter. And then there’s our old Romania project. Until all this becomes reality at some point or another, we are happy that a family trip to Poland is being approached with great open-mindedness thanks to a Polish classmate. And nothing against Whatsapp: It’s nice to post sentences like “I’m in your country now”.

The majority of our travel-inspiring friends we met thanks to our children. That they grow up even in a small Swabian city with so much horizons-expanding multiculturalism, I think fantastic.

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Christina Cherry
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