B6 has had a whirlwind tour through the above countries, I wish I had been organised enough to provide authentic cuisine for each of the stops but I wasn’t. We did read some good books to give us some glimpses of life in South East Asia. I didn’t plan it that way but for each country I had a book which featured the daily life of a child. In Thailand we read of a small village where elephants are trained as work animals and the children who own one particular elephant. The book An Elephant in my Backyard by Richard Sobol had great photos to give us an idea of a child’s life very different from B6’s.

While in Vietnam we read about the twins, Huy and Vinh, in A Child’s Day in a Vietnamese City. Both B6 and I thought it sounded cool to buy a spicy noodle dish for breakfast on the way to school and visit the beach each afternoon after school. We were introduced to Yati in Malaysia while reading Children of the World: Malaysia. B6 enjoyed the Malaysian folk tale Kancil and the Crocodiles where a little turtle and a mouse deer outsmart a river full of crocodiles.

He’s off to Australia next, although he is an Australian citizen he has only spent one month there, much of which he doesn’t remember, he told us the other day. Believe it or not, I do have a few books and photos so perhaps I can jog his memory.