Family Travel

I was reading a post on World Hum (a very eclectic and fun travel Web site) that made me think about travel to Israel and whether or not it is too dangerous, which is always a topic of travel discussion.

My own trip to Israel as a single person was very brief; a Navy ship port visit to the city of Haifa, and a guided tour to some of the country’s highlights. I will confess that the entire time on the tour van was a bit nerve-wracking, as we were all US Navy Sailors and made a rather high-visibility and easy terrorist target.

Fortunately, as a woman I was not so obviously a military person (I can avoid the whole short-hair thing, and I don’t wear blinding white athletic shoes like the average American.) I decided that I had a very generous life insurance policy, so if it was my time to croak, my family would hopefully have one heck of a party after my demise.

We didn’t spend much time in Haifa, and the tour included highlights of Bethlehem, amazing sights of Jerusalem like the Wailing Wall and Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, the sobering Jewish stronghold of Masada, nightlife in Tel Aviv and a swim in the Dead Sea.

Here’s the deal, gals — DO NOT go swimming in the Dead Sea right after you shave your legs. The water has a super-high salt and mineral content (that’s what makes it so buoyant) and sticking freshly-shaved legs into it is like liquid styptic pencil. It’s like having your legs cauterized all at once. Ow.

If you’re considering a family trip to Israel (and here’s one family who made the trek) you will need to weigh the obvious dangers with the educational and spiritual benefit. Ironically, it’s very similar to my thoughts on travel with kids to Iran.

Keep abreast of the current situation, evaluate the dangers as unemotionally as possible, and make your best decision. As we so appallingly saw at Virginia Tech, there’s no hiding from nut-cases, so live your best and bravest life.

Next year, in Jerusalem….

Update 23 April 2007: Thanks to the very active and interesting Haveil Havalim blog carnival for featuring this post, and to Soccer Dad David Gerstman (the carnival host) for also recommending a book on family travel to Israel.

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, Israel, Middle East

What’s an expat? An “expatriate” is someone who lives away from his or her home country, usually for an extended period of time.

I’ve been an expat in Bahrain, Japan and the Netherlands, but the Web and expat Web sites/blogs weren’t all that widespread until my Netherlands stint. Since we lived in Limburg, near Maastricht, and most expat sites focused on Americans living in Amsterdam or Den Haag, I still didn’t get as much of a sense of community from them as I would have liked.

We were also on dial-up in our Dutch house (with a Belgian ISP) and local calls are not free in the Netherlands, so surfing was rather expensive. One of those things you learn only by living there.

Still, if you are going to travel to a country, even if you won’t live there, I can’t think of a better way to learn the nitty-gritty details than by surfing some of these links for insight:

There are directories of expat blogs here and here, and half-year expat Pam (some Seattle, some Austria) talks a little about expat blogging here.

Don’t miss the comprehensive Web site and magazine Transitions Abroad; their list of expat Web sites is here.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper Web site has a wonderful section written by and for expats in many different countries: Guardian Abroad. I’d never heard the term “expat” until I met British citizens on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia during a Navy port visit on my first ship. In many ways, the Brits wrote the book on being an expat.

Want family-specific stuff? Check out Family Life Abroad for all sorts of articles and tips. For Japan there’s a new site, Piqniq — the Piqniq blogs from people living in Japan are here (to access the full site you must register, but it’s free.)

When you live in a country for awhile, you draw experiences from everyday life, like watching local TV. My husband wanted to keep up with the golf scene, so he’d watch tournaments broadcast in Japanese because the patter from the commentator wasn’t that important to him and he could still follow the action. He did enjoy hearing the English golf terms mixed with Japanese; “something-something-something-Birdie des ka!”

We loved watching Japanese commercials, and so do the folks on this site. If you want to understand a nation’s sense of humor, their commercials are a great way to do it (so what does that tell people about Americans if they watch our Super Bowl commercials? Hmmmm….)

As a former Navy person, I love this blog, written by a Navy spouse stationed with her Sailor husband where I used to live: Sasebo, in Kyushu, near the city of Fukuoka. Reading it brings back so many memories for me — and for my husband, who REALLY lived in Japan since I was deployed on the ship all the time!

Some of the best books about living in another country are in the Culture Shock series; they’ll give you so much more information than a standard guidebook. It’s also useful to read English-language newspapers published in the country you’ll visit, especially their Life/Travel/Recreation section.

Our family hopes to live overseas again, but even if we’re just passing through a country as a visitor, we always see what those expats have to say.

Update just after posting: Thanks to an email from co-founder Andrea Martins, I’ve just learned of a brand-spankin’-new expat site, Expat Women. They released a newsletter here, and are collecting expat blogs to fire up a new blog section as well. Andrea is from Brisbane, Australia, with stops in Jakarta and Mexico City. There are all sorts of women here living in all sorts of places, so go check it out.

Update 13 March 2007: At a SXSW Interactive evening social event, I met and exchanged business cards with writer/photographer Wes Eichenwald. He lived as an expat in Slovenia for awhile, and I enjoyed his thoughtful impressions of how an expat feels when returning to the US after living overseas.

Technorati tags: family travel, expat

OK, not really, at least not now. I think it's a little dicey with kids given the current situation, though not ... [Continue reading this entry]