GOD, brilliant Lord, Your name echoes around the world! ~psalm 8:9 (The Message)

We fly to Tennessee tomorrow.

I used to think of myself as a pretty hospitable person. But that was before I met the Samuels… and the Stonemans… and the Carlsons… and the Bultemas….. and the Chaveses… and the Pughs… and the Eubanks… The list of guest presenters in my Hospitality 102 class this year is long.

I know I have written about it before, but the level of generosity and hospitality extended to us throughout this year is staggering and humbling, and it has taught me that I have so very much to learn. In studying for my take-home exam, I’m a little overwhelmed.

Here are a few nuggets from the syllabus this year:

• Talk to strangers.
• Invite strangers to dinner.
• Share holidays and Holydays.
• What you have is Enough To Share.
• A friend-of-a-friend is a Friend, even if you’ve only talked over email.
• Invite guests to just “do life” with you.
• Accept help from your guests (it’s even ok to ask!).
• Reach out to people in different life stages.
• A welcome note makes people feel especially loved.
• Don’t feel like the house must be perfect.
• You don’t have to constantly entertain your guests.
• Eat together.
• Play games together.
• Pray together.
• Tell family stories.
• Be spontaneous.
• Ask big questions, and listen to the answers.
• Offer your home even if you won’t be there.
• Thanksgiving Dinner with 24 hours notice is not as impossible as it sounds.

We Wildpeople 5 do not land lightly. Our family footprint is not small, no matter how big the house or how close the friends, which just elevates the status of the folks below even more to Generosity Giants.

For example, we were invited to spend the entire week of Christmas with the Bultema family in Turkey. They had never met us — we are friends with her brother in Virginia. Pastoring a church, hosting church family events and running a community cafe, Christmas is their busiest time of year– who would possibly consider taking in a sight-unseen family of five on top of that crazy schedule? Yet in advance of our boisterous arrival, the closing line of her email was “Our home is open to you.” Ridiculous, right?

Here are some of the giving folks who opened their homes to us throughout this year. They fed us, clothed us, housed us, laughed and cried with us, celebrated birthdays and holidays and lost teeth with us.

Blessings, every one.

(clicking on any photo will launch a larger gallery)

While planning for our year, both in advance and on-the-go, TripAdvisor became our sixth family member. We poured over reviews and suggestions of restaurants, apartments, hikes, hotels, trains, and self-guided tours. As a school writing assignment, we even studied what makes a good review and published some of our own.

Because it was so useful to hear from those who have gone before, we want to share some of our recommendations for YOUR trips abroad. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just many of the great things that come to mind when we look back on our year.

Sorry there are no helpful comments here, but we wholeheartedly recommend all of these places and activities linked below (we DID have some disasters and some less-than-ideals, we just left them off the list). If you want the full story, feel free to email us and we will talk your ear off!

GENERAL TRAVEL

AirTreks Round-the-World Airfare

Renault Eurodrive Lease/Buyback Program

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor CityGuides App

HomeAway Rentals

Holiday Lettings Rentals

AirBnB Apartment Rentals

Rick Steves Audio Europe

ICELAND

Iceland Camping Card

Hotel Keilir, Keflavik

Northsailing Whale Watching, Husavik

FRANCE

Hotel Esmeralda, Paris

Le Manoir Quinquis, Bannalec

Cro Bique, rental in Beynac-et-Cazenac

Font-de-Gaume Cave Paintings, Les Eyzies

Beynac Castle, Beynac-et-Cazenac

Transmanche Ferries

ENGLAND

Broadhembury Campground, Kent

Dover Castle, Kent

Farriers Arms Pub, Kent

London Eye

Tower of London

Blenheim Palace, Oxford

Helm Lune Cottage Rental, Bowness

Holiday Inn Maidstone, Seven Oaks

Car train through the Chunnel

BELGIUM

Maison Antoine Frites, Brussels

European Union Visitors Centre

SWITZERLAND

Chalet Im Batzenboden, Wengen

Trummelbach Falls, Lauterbrunnen

CROATIA

Montona Gallery Pizza, Motovun

Perfectly Charming House, Viganj

Antony Boy Camping and Windsurfing, Viganj

Jadrolinja Ferries

ITALY

L’Arcobaleno Apartment, Rome

Il Sorpasso Ristorante, Rome

MOROCCO

Riad Safir, Meknes

Rough Tours Company, Sahara

TUNISIA

Novotel, Tunis

GREECE

Hotel Phaedra

TURKEY

Villa Blanca Rental, Davutlar

Ephesus Archaeological Site, Izmir

Perge Archaeological Site, Antalya

Flintstones Cave Hotel, Cappadocia

Red and Rose Valley Trails, Goreme

Sedef Restaurant, Goreme

Hitchhiker ATV Rental, Goreme

Sahkulu Place Apartment, Istanbul

TANZANIA

Nomad Tanzania Safaris

RWANDA

Solace Guesthouse, Kigali

Kigali Memorial Centre, Kigali

Meze Fresh Burritos, Kigali

MALAYSIA

Petrosains Science Museum, Kuala Lumpur

Novotel City Centre, Kuala Lumpur

THAILAND

Thailand Elephant Conservation Center

Sojos Cafe, Chiang Mai

Khaomao Khaofang Restaurant, Chiang Mai

Free Burma Rangers

Medici Restaurant, Bangkok

Navalai River Resort, Bangkok

Bumrungrad Hospital, Bangkok

VIETNAM

V’Spirit Cruise, Ha Long Bay

Hanoi Charming 2 Hotel, Hanoi

CHINA

New Day Foster Home Guesthouse, near Beijing

Huanghua Great Wall of China

Olympic Water Cube Water Park, Beijing

Xian HQ Apartments, Xian

Mt Huashan Hike, Xian

Terra Cotta Warriors, Xian

JAPAN

Japan Railpass

Sakara Kyoto Guesthouse, Kyoto

Sakara Gion Machiya Rental, Kyoto

Musashi Sushi, Kyoto

Hiroshima Memorial Park, Hiroshima

Andersen Kitchen, Hiroshima

Toyota Plant Tour, Toyota City

Pepper Lunch, Tokyo

KOREA

Cozy Residence Apartment, Seoul

… AND SOME ORGANIZATIONS WE HAVE GROWN TO LOVE

St. James Muswell Hill, London

Friends of the Lakes District, Kendal, UK

Lakes Christian Centre, Bowness, UK

St. Paul’s Cultural Center, Antalya, Turkey

World Relief Rwanda

Sonrise School, Musanze, Rwanda

Akiba School, Nairobi, Kenya

Light and Power Centre, Nairobi, Kenya

The Ocean Church, Tanzania

Kenya Connection, Kenya

Dave and Lucy Chaves, Nairobi, Kenya

Christ Church Westlands, Nairobi, Kenya

International Justice Mission Thailand, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Grace International School, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Free Burma Rangers, Chiang Mai, Thailand

New Day Foster Home, China

HAPPY ADVENTURES TO YOU ALL!

“Writing writing prompts”???? Sheesh, I sure am glad J is teaching them writing instead of me!

W is practicing for his Algebra End-of-Course exam in a park in Seoul. H and E are back at the apartment with J working on writing writing prompts.
Tomorrow is our last day of school!

The perfect place for a date excursion here in Seoul later this week: I plan on cake and wine, he plans on bread and cheese. Happy together!

I had the most beautiful ice cream cone the other day. The rain was just stopping, and the Kyoto street colors were accentuated by the wet. Red lanterns, dark wood, carefully arranged potted plants, flocks of bright umbrellas.

As I savored both the green tea color AND flavor, I remembered other brilliant and meaningful colors from our year. Each of these colors is packed with memories and emotion — of growth, joy, loss, wonder, hope, friendship — that Benjamin Moore would covet to create.

Here are just a few of my ColorFull encounters (clicking on any thumbnail will launch a larger gallery):

So thankful to have these ColorFull memories added to my palette for my NEXT year.

Ah, the joys of the universal language of….. Adele??

Last July, during the first week of our adventure, our family cozied up for pizza around a tiny wooden table in one of only two restaurants in a little coastal town of southern Iceland.  We were giddy with anticipation of our year — and with the addition of E’s new stuffed puffin, Sven — so when Adele’s “Rollin’ in the Deep” came over the restaurant speakers, we could only barely stop ourselves from bursting into song.  Fortunately for our pre-teens, our sense of propriety won out and we were satisfied with only a strong lip-synch of the song.

After that pizza dinner, we went for a fabulous hike with a mind-blowing view.  It was just the beginning of a year chock-full of gaining a new perspective.

So…

…fast forward nearly 11 months.  Yesterday we took in the crazy and electric Shanghai skyline, from both the bottom and the top.  Imagine our delight when, at the Hyatt lounge on the 91st floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center, Adele got our toes tapping — and our lip-synch going — with “Rumor Has It”.  Anyone care to dance?

More than a few of us did.

J has a cool app on his phone that will speak Chinese for us. It has helped us out on several occasions, ordering tea, sorting out larger numbers, settling a time when a driver would pick us up.

It is not super sophisticated — it is more of a phrasebook than a translator — and has worked great for most of our needs, but it is also limited in scope.

For example, this app can request or declare many wonderful, but possibly unnecessary, things:

• May I have a seat next to the toilet?
• I would like 2 eggs.
• Pasta without tomato sauce.
• My camera has been stolen.
• I would like to buy a swim cap.
• I would like to rent a beach chair.
• May I have a piece of cake?

However, it has no translation for:

• Will you please stop the van so I can go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW?!?!?

Usually when people ask us where we are heading next, the reply is a long and somewhat vague list of countries, sights, plans. But this week in China, our answer is…. um, Korea. And then home.

This answer is shockingly short to me. How can it be that there is just one more country? Did we really already do all those things and go all those places and meet all those people? I am surprised that the answer is yes.

It is coming — the return is inevitable.

Things I crossed off my list this week include scheduling summer pediatrics appointments, calling the dentist, reactivating school enrollment (what?? the middle schooler doesn’t want to continue homeschooling?), pre-ordering camp tshirts, faxing health insurance forms.

So as July approaches with its school placement tests and medical assessments, my mind easily drifts to evaluate our “progress” this year, as it were. There has been lots of it! But since the boys’ notebooks are in the checked luggage that was lost somewhere between Guangzhou and Beijing (drat!!), instead of evaluating their schoolwork this week, I’ve been laughing about our seeming LACK of progress in some other areas.

We are not the well-oiled traveling machine I thought we would be by now. Practice apparently does NOT make perfect.

We still get uptight and snippy while we are packing. People still argue about who will carry what and whether that bag really needs to go through the security screening. Our water bottles still get confiscated at security checkpoints (and our peanut butter once). Can anyone make their bed without being asked? Should your wet towel be left on the floor in the middle of the room? At what point will the instinct kick in to make eye contact with an adult while they are asking your questions? In addition to being involuntarily separated from our belongings by either thieves or airlines, we routinely manage to leave a thing or two behind on our own volition. Several of us still bite our fingernails.

And it seems most of us will be returning home half-learned and out of shape, with increasingly worse handwriting.

But ah, we do have some stories to tell — And we have another whole country to gather more. Onward!