Over the last year we have really appreciated the rich and varied culture of the incredible continent of Asia. We have pretended to visit Japan, China (twice), Thailand, India and Turkey and yet there is so much more to see! I would love to pretend to visit Nepal, South Korea, Vietnam and Israel and Jordan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan among many others.
In this blog post I want to pick out my favourite moments from our pretend travels around Asia and link to the original Blog posts if you want to find out more.
Thailand
Before we pretend visit anywhere we have a think about what we already know about a country and we google ideas. The photos of the Lantern Festival were mesmerising and so we decided to fly our own lantern in our garden. We made it personal to us by writing messages to our lost loved ones on the Lantern and waited until as late as we could to release it. It was such a beautiful moment and the children still talk about it. Our day in Thailand was a day of delicious food, fun on the beach, coconuts and we even adopted a tiger! You can read all about it here!
China
Chinese New Year is the perfect time to celebrate China, and if you are lucky enough to live near a city with a thriving China town (as we are in Liverpool) you might just find that the celebrations are done for you and all you have to do is to show up ready to enjoy yourself. If not then there are a million ways to celebrate China at home, from finding out what Chinese ‘year’ you were born in, to ordering a Chinese takeaway or creating a Chinese dragon. One of our favourite days of the year and an absolute must now on our calendar. However you can celebrate Chinese culture any day of the year and if you have little ones they will love to watch Mulan! We love China so much we have pretend travelled there twice. Read all about it here and here.
Japan
Pretend Japan was memorable for many reasons from the incredible food to the fun game of Pokemon Go, but what I think Penny enjoyed the most was making origami with her granny. There are so many instructional videos out there and awesome shapes to make that its the perfect craft for little hands to do. We also had an amazing Japanese meal and it would be brilliant if visiting a restaurant wasn’t possible to make sushi – you can even make sweetie sushi for fussier little eaters. You can read all about our day here.
India
There was so much about India to love (and so much more to do in the future). Indian food is very accessible and always delicious; we also watched the jungle book and made toilet roll tigers and read all about this amazing place. But hands down – the best bit of all about this pretend visit was learning Bollywood dancing via a YouTube video. Every weekend should start this way! You can read all about our Indian adventure here.
Turkey
Parts of Turkey are in Asia and so I include it on our Asian adventure. We had actually visited Turkey recently and all fallen in love with the warmth of the people and the rich and vibrant culture. We had also fallen in the love with the food and so we had a wonderful day feasting on Turkish Delight, Turkish apple tea and visiting our local Turkish restaurant (which also does takeaway). We also had a beach visit, wove some dolls house carpets and we even took Freddie to a Turkish barber. If you are missing your holiday to Turkey read all about our recreation here.
