Are you smarter than a third grader?!

We have now received all the home schooling materials that we ordered. We are going to concentrate on language kills, world history and math. The math books are very cool. They have exercises in making fractions, using sets, etc. I am not sure who is more excited about this, us or the kids!


The books on history are also very interesting. The one that we will be studying is called "The Story of The World - Ancient Times", and goes through the ancient civilizations of Egypt, India, China, Greece, Persia, etc. The book is written more as a narrative than a text book, so it is more intresting reading as well.

The English books have a lot of grammar execises, sentence structure, vocabulary, etc. It should be fun to have the kids do research on historic places that we will be visiting and write reports on their visits. That way, they can learn their history and practise their writing skills. We will also encourage them to stay in touch with family and friends through e-mail and snail mail.

Travel medicine (2)

Back to the travel clinic for booster shots... The girls knew what to expect this time, but they were brave and didn't make a fuss. So we got our booster shots for Hep A and B. It was combined into one needle so the girls were happy. This time we came away with the cool Shrek band aids. The not so cool ones went back in the box for the doctor's next victim!

We have one more booster for Hep A and B, but that isn't for another few months. We also need Japanese Encephalitis, but rather than pay $115/shot and we would each need three shots we think we may get it in China and pay only $5/shot. Amazing what happens when you mass produce something! We got the e-mail address of a clinic and will see what we can arrange.

We also need Malaria pills. It's not likely that we would get it, but better be safe than sorry. Those can wait until we are closer to our departure date.

Home schooling

When we decided we would live somewhat more like nomads and not just have one place as a home base for the year, our ideas of enrolling the girls in a foriegn school were given up and in thier place home schooling ideas began to grow. At first I thought how difficult could it be? So I started quite confidently looking at the Ontario curriculum guides online. No issues there. Then I started to look for lesson plans. That seemed a little harder. There were so many lesson plans! The free ones seemed like a lot of work to put them into a program that would flow and there were so many choices for the ones that you could purchase. I didn't really know where to start. So I was starting to get a little more nervous about pulling together the program... luckily I spoke with some friends about it and they put me in contact with a mom in the neighbourhood who was homeschooling her children. This was her first year doing it and she was very excited to share a ton of information. She had just finished grade three with one of her daughters so it was good timing.

We sat down and talked for a few hours and I came away with a much better idea of how she had structured her approach to home schooling and once again it didn't seem too bad. She lent me a book "The Well Trained Mind - A Guide to Classical Education at Home" by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I flipped through her copy and ended up getting my own copy. It helped me figure out what materials I wanted to purchase and how to structure my home schooling program. After reading it, I was totally pumped up. It's going to be so much fun to teach the girls. It will be hard work too, but I hope it will be very rewarding.

As I was reading I made notes on what workbooks and things I would need and also on how I would do the various subjects. I recently went online and tracked down all the items that I wanted and some of the things have already arrived! Yay.

I think we will be able to manage the various subjects Monday-Thursday mornings and leave Friday for spelling tests and projects. Mostly I am going to focus on English and Math. I've got the Rod & Staff, English 3 Beginning Wisely lesson plans and workbooks and the MCP Spelling workbooks. I have ordered the Saxon Math program, but they haven't come in yet. We will also be doing world history. The Ontario program calls for Ontario history in grade three, but forget that when we will be seeing things like the Great Wall of China! I also thought I would add in a religion class where the girls can study prayers, writings and the history of the Baha'i faith.

I wonder how I'll feel when we come back. Will I be glad to send them back to the public system or will I want to continue home schooling? One thing at a time I guess.

Tickets, get your tickets!

So apparently you need to buy tickets to go anywhere! We had budgeted approximately $20k for airline tickets for the 4 of us. That was the estimate we had arrived at based on our review of various websites, including some "world traveller" sites. It was now time to meet with a travel agent to discuss airline tickets. It was very exciting to actually sit down with a travel agent and talk about the trip - it made it more real somehow, because all our rsearch until then was done at home on the internet! Also, the fact that they had a huge map of the world on their wall was very cool - we got up and mapped out the trip on the big map!

The agent said the world travel tickets start at approximately $4k per person, not including taxes. You get 26,000 miles of air travel with that type of ticket. Then he suggested we look at one of the major airlines to map out a basic route and then plan side trips. To make a long story short, this is the plan we came up with:

We could fly British Airways from Montreal to Beijing (through London), and return from Delhi to Montreal (again through London). This would be the main trip. We then book flights from Beijing to Hanoi, Hanoi to Bangkok and Bangkok to Bangalore (India), using regional airlines. Flights from Hanoi to Bangkok are $40 per person! You can't even get a bus ticket for that here. Then, once we fly from Delhi to London, we make another side trip to Bucharest, and return from Warsaw. We will probably rent a car in Bucharest and return it in Warsaw. That way we can do the eastern european leg of the trip by car. This scenario ends up costing us approximately $3,000 each, including taxes! Now that is great news! We get to save some money on flights - woohoo! And we can book all our flights right here in Ottawa, with the flexibility to change dates if we have to. We'll have to wait until late January or February 2008 for next year's ticket schedules to be released though.

Going through London is also exciting because we will have a chance to stop over for a few days and do some sight seeing. We may even get to visit some relatives in the area. Maybe drop in on the Queen if she's in town, and have some tea!

The Travel Clinic

So Nadim and I told the girls that we were going to the travel clinic and that we were going to just get some advise on the type of shots and medication we would need. Roya asked us, in that shy worried voice that kids sometimes have... 'are we going to have to get a needle?'. So first we told her that she would get a needle that was about a foot long and it would go right through her arm if she moved. Luckily she knows we are a bunch of jokers, so she didn't believe us. We then told the kids that we would get shots, but not at this visit. So off we went!

We had to wait a little while, but got in fairly quickly. I didn't notice it, but Nadim and Roya brought it to our attention afterwards - the doctor provided information in the form of questions. He would ask something like "So you could get Hep A, how bad is it?" then he would answer his own question. There were all sorts of questions "So will it kill you? No, but you could have symptoms like...." So we were asked lots of funny questions that thankfully we didn't have to answer, and we got all sorts of good info. We also were told that we needed Hep A and B shots and Typhoid, along with a bunch of others that would need to be ordered. He said he could give us the first shot of Hep A/B and Typhoid today if we wanted. Nadim and I looked at each other, shrugged and said why not!

The doctor said that he had one combo shot of Hep A/B for a child, but that the other girl would have to get separate needles since he only had one combo. Who was the braver of the two. We volunteered Yasmin. So the sleeves were rolled up and Roya went first. There were a few crocodile tears, but she survived with her Barbie Band-aid. Yasmin got her shots and also got a special Band-aid. It had Dora on it. Of course with the girls getting special Band-aids Nadim had to have one too. His was a Surfer Barbie. I was lucky enough to get one with My Little Pony on it.

So we have to go back and get a booster and then we are good for life for Hep A/B and for ten years for Typhoid. We also have to go back for Japanese Encephalitis shots and Malaria pills and whatever other good advise the doctor can give us. I hope I don't start laughing when the rhetorical questions start!

What's the plan?

So we narrowed it down to China, Vietnam, Thailand, India and some eastern European countries, but now what? Where to be begin... We started to think of all the things that would need to be done and we ended up dropping them into a few categories:

• Our house (rent, house sitter...)
• Travel & Accomodations (places to visit, what to see, where to stay)
• Budget
• Health (research, shots, etc.)
• Schooling for the kids
• Social Contacts and getting in touch with the locals
• Keeping in touch with those at home

I'll leave out all the details and bring you up to speed on each.

We've managed to arrange with friends of Nadim's sister-in-law that they will rent our house at a decent rate. It takes a load of our minds to know that we can trust the people who will be in our house while we are away.

We've not booked accomodations yet, but we have done some research on what to see and which cities to stay in. We've also found that there are service apartments in certain areas that can be had at reasonable rates and would work well for us. Booking places will have to wait until we are a bit closer to our departure date.

We recently visited a travel agent and had our draft budget reviewed. Happily we had over budgeted in a few places, but not under budgeted.

We did some research about the healthcare situation. The availability of healthcare in each area that we would stay was part of our selection criteria, but we also knew that we would need certain shots before we go. We have visited the travel clinic recently. That was a story in itself. I'll tell you about it later. To make a long story short, we had some shots and have some more to come.

I've been busy researching home-schooling. I met with a mom in our neighbourhood who has three children and home schools them. She was a great help and gave me some great tips. I'm well on my way and feel much more confident than I did originally.

We've been trying to reach the Baha'i community in various areas. We've had some luck with the Baha'is of Thailand, but haven't succeeded much elsewhere. We did get some great material that is yet to be read completely yet from the National Baha'i center in Canada. Hopefully that will help. We've also been looking at how we could volunteer or work in the various areas. We still have some figuring to do in this area.

We are quite pleased to have stared this blog and hope that it will keep everyone informed of what is happening with our trip. We also plan to take a lapop to help us keep in touch with those at home. Beyond that we keep suggesting that people meet us across the world in whichever country we happen to be in!

So this brings us up to date. I've managed to condense all our plans and excitement into few short blogs.... From here on in, we'll try to keep you in the loop as it happens.

So many places...

We started with a long list of countries in Asia and began rating them based first on healthcare, crime rate, and pollution/congestion and secondarily on cost of living/job opportunities, attitude towards foreigners, and weather conditions. We used consular information sheets from the US, lonely planet websites, and other travel sites and fairly quickly came up with a short list.

The list was so very exciting that it was difficult for us to settle on just one. As we began to look at each country and the possible side trips that we might do, we began to re-evaluate the original plan of staying in just one country. We began toying with the idea of becoming nomads for a year. This presented a different set of challenges.

• Were we prepared to home-school the girls?
• How could we experience the culture deeply and connect with the locals if we were just passing through?
• Living out of a suitcase for a year was not that appealing.
• Could we afford extra travel costs without part-time work?

After many discussions we came up with the following:

• With a little research we felt sure we could home-school the girls. How hard could grade 3 be?
• As members of the Baha'i Faith in Canada we felt we could connect with other Baha'is in different parts of the world. We also felt that extended stays in a few places would be in order.
• We decided to rent apartments in at least two countries for a 3 month period and use those places as home base. We would also have some shorter stays, but not too many in a short period of time.
• Given the low cost of living in Southeast Asia we were quite pleased to find that we could afford the travel without extra income from part-time work.

Ultimately we decided upon one month in China (Beijing area), two weeks in Vietnam, three months in Thailand, four months in India, and simply because it was "on the way" we decided on two or three months in Eastern Europe!

Where in the world?

We started dreaming about our trip... What was the main purpose and what would be our guiding principles? After many long discussions we decided that it was the chance to fully experience a different culture that was driving us. It was also important for us to try to link volunteer work or some sort of community service into the experience, but really it was the new cultural experience that was motivating "The Big Trip". We wanted to experience something really new and we wanted to expose our two girls, Yasmin and Roya, to more than just Canadian culture. Beyond the new cultural experience, we also set a few more principles to guide us. The places that we went would have to be safe and have access to health care.

So we began to look at the globe and narrow the possibilities. It was fairly easy to rule out the United States, Europe, and Austrailia as we decided they weren't different enough, and besides we'd already spent some time in the US and Europe. We were then left with Africa, Asia, and South America. After a bit of research we ruled out Africa, in part because of the high HIV-aids rates and high rape statistics. From there we narrowed the trip to Asia, simply because it seemed the most different to us.

Our first idea was to pick a country, find part-time work and live there for pretty much the entire year with the excepton of some side trips to neighbouring areas for site-seeing purposes. We initially thought we would enroll Yasmin and Roya in a local school so that they too could meet new friends and deeply understand a new culture.

So we began to research the countries in Asia...

How it all started.

It all started with a book... A friend of mine had recommended that I read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. So I read it and early on it has a section where it talks about imagining the end of your life and looking back. What do you want to see? I've always wanted adventure and travel. I knew that somewhere in there I would want to see "The Big Trip", or perhaps one of many. It would however, take some planning.

So Nadim and I got to talking and we decided that we should do a "Big Trip". Through work I could do a self-funded leave, where I set aside a quarter of my salary for three years and then the fourth year take a leave of absence and live off of the savings. So in 2005 we started saving and dreaming about what the trip would be like.