Dad in a Foreign Land

(Photo from Oiso beach in Kanagawa. My son is on the right.)

We’re going to Vietnam tomorrow! We’ll fly to Hanoi tomorrow morning and stay until July 6th. This was all decided very rapidly late last week, and we’re really excited to see how the boy reacts to everything. This will be the first time he’s traveled anywhere besides Japan and the American Midwest.

We need to be really careful about his egg allergy, as we don’t know any Vietnamese, but a good friend of mine who does gave me a few phrases I’ve printed out that should help with this.

I’ll need to keep up with a minimal amount of work while I’m there, so I’m bringing a 12.1″ laptop with me that weighs just under 3 lbs. Despite this, we’ve managed to fit all of our stuff into two largish backpacks. Hopefully the boy will agree to walk when we’re in transit do I don’t have to carry my sizable backpack and a squirming 16 kilo boy. We’ll see.

Why the sudden trip? We used to travel a lot more when we were younger, my wife even more than me. (India is the favorite destination for both of us, but we’re waiting for the boy to get a bit older for that.) Our son will start Japanese kindergarten (yochien) in April, so we’ve got until then to travel freely without worrying about taking him out of school. If this trip to Vietnam goes well we’re thinking of four weeks in Nepal this October/November.