My little Star of the Week

My little Star of the Week is head of the class line at assembly.  Quite possibly his favourite part about being Star!

Yesterday he came home with another honour – the librarian has chosen him as the class reader of the week!

As for me, I’ve paid an overdue parking fine, paid about 15 overdue e-tag notices, and opened the huge pile of mail that has been glaring at me since before Christmas.  The joy is that I overpaid a few bills before Christmas, so nothing was overdue, and I am even still a couple of hundred dollars ahead on the water!

So planning for our trip to Vietnam continues apace.  We will spend most of July in Vietnam, and possibly a bit of time in Cambodia.  Mark and I have both dreamed of seeing Angkor Wat, so we may get there this trip.  We’d also like to show him Halong Bay, and Whale Island (where we were staying when we decided to stat a family).  Although we’ll have a couple of nights in relatively posh hotels, I am hoping for the bulk of this trip that we will be able to stay in homestays.  Although Squish is relatively well traveled for a five year old, I would like him to see a bit more of the world, and the way other people live – not to make him appreciate life here more, but to educate him about the struggles that some people live with that you can’t always see.  Right now he is having conflicts with kids in his class – I know that these are kids who have some issues at home, but I don’t want to explicitly tell him about that, just build a general idea around always being kind because we don’t know what the  other person is going through.

Of course that is over simplifying, and I don’t expect him to get all that at age five!  But I traveled the world when I was only a few years older than Squish is now, and I know that it definitely changed the person I became.  And I also think that we will have a much more real experience of Vietnam and have more real connections this way.  Staying in a luxury hotel and only taking tourist transport isolates you from experience.  One of the most memorable experiences of our last trip was ordering boiled eggs on an overnight train and finding unhatched chickens inside the eggs.  I later found out is is a real delicacy, but not to our innocent vegetarian palates!  That sort of thing doesn’t happen on the luxury track!

As a kid my parents took me all around the world, we had to sleep in buses and trains, carry our own back packs, learn to use squat toilets, eat whatever was available (I had porridge for the first time in Thailand, I thought it was disgusting), and climb hills, walk through dusty towns, read maps, try to communicate in a foreign language, and NOT COMPLAIN.  I’m sure we did complain, but clearly it didn’t put me off budget travel!

Mum has paid for our tickets, we have to pay for accommodation and travel.  I don’t have a strict budget worked out yet, but I hope not to have to spend more than $20US a night for accomodation for the three of us(unless we are splurging).  We’ll eat a lot of plain rice unless we can perfect our Vietnamese “we are vegetarian”.

So I need a new passport.  And I am sick of not having my official paperwork match the name I use every day.  I decided to officially change my name, and I began the process today by making an interview for late next month.  After I attend the interview and pay my money, it takes around five weeks for paperwork to come through.  And then I get to apply for my new passport.

And say goodbye to my old name forever.  I won’t legally be able to use my old name at all.  Now I can use either, but after I change it is gone for good.  I feel strangely uncomfortable about severing the tie, despite the fact that the name issue has been a millstone for me for many years.