Tag Archives for child
Handwriting has never been a strength of Zac’s. He’s a lefty, and started writing aged three. Then, because current British thinking is that young children should be left to “experiment with mark-making” by themselves – which is ideal if children are “mark-making”, rather less so if they’re actually writing – he wasn’t taught how to [...]
First Day of Chinese School
We’re both fairly quiet in the taxi to the school. What had seemed like a really good idea at the time – put Zac in a Chinese school for a term or so so that he could improve his Chinese – now seems more and more unnerving. Not least since Huaze, out of the goodness [...]
We Find a Chinese School
A bit of English language Googling around bilingual schools in Harbin finds a site for teachers of English as a foreign language, and a job advertised at a bilingual school. I Google around the school’s name in English, plough through a lot of investment sites, and eventually dig up the Chinese language site for the [...]
In Glorious, Technicolor Drunkovision
The ringing of my phone jerks me into wakefulness in a room that is streaming with light. A cursory scan of what passes for my consciousness reveals that I am still EXTREMELY drunk, ergo do not yet have a headache, but have done something absolutely bloody terrible that will emerge from the fog in unsightly [...]
2012: A Year in Random Numbers
Wonders of the World: 5 Mount Everest Petra The Pyramids The Dead Sea The Blue Mosque Our favourite pyramid? The Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, not the famous ones at Giza), because we had the site to ourselves and could climb inside like Indiana Jones. I’d still take the Aya Sofya over the Blue Mosque any [...]
A couple of months ago, I unwisely signed up to The Travel Blogging Calendar. Yes, a travel blogging calendar. This is, as the name would suggest, a laudable initative whereby travel bloggers, male and female, pose for a calendar, which is then sold to raise money for charities (pre-order here!). I’m not, honestly, quite sure [...]
Zac is well on the mend from his surgery. But not enough to do many of his favourite things, or even ride a motorbike — and most of his friends are away. That sucks. You see, a lot of Zac’s favourite things for kids to do in Bali are on the active side. Neither of [...]
Bali — A GREAT Place to Lose a Child
When it comes to places to lose a child, I can confirm that Bali beats the hell out of Bulgaria and the UK. It’s not that I make a habit of losing children. Admittedly, I did once misplace someone else’s in the course of a sleepover. And I once inadvertently left my own child on [...]
In Which I Lose My Child. Again.
“Yeah,” I say to Z. “It’s too cold to walk a mile in this. Let’s catch the Metro…” After our chilly arrival, we are beginning to, umm, warm to Sofia a little. Or, at least, to accept that, given we only have a day here (I hate travelling fast), we should get out of our [...]
Two Dinners and Four Goodbyes
“You need a ticket to come in,” says the briby man at Denpasar airport. “I don’t have a ticket,” I say. “My son is flying. He has a ticket.” I wave the unaccompanied minor form. “You need a ticket,” he says. “Or a pass.” I switch to Indonesian, which always seems to work wonders on [...]
