Thursday, June 15, 2006

So Where Is My Book Deal?


We just spent the long beach weekend in Le Marche. The Adriatic side of Italy is unvisited by Americans but is teaming with Italians and some Germans on the hotter days of summer.

The weekend was spent with Fabio and his family in a little town named Grottamare just next to San Benedetto. It is a nice enough town and the beach was just a few hundred yards away from the centre of town. It turns out that Fabio, who is originally from Naples and now lives near Perugia, has many family members who have made their way to Grottamare so we spent many evenings bumping into Grandparents, Uncles, Cousins and the like.

Fabio is married to LoAn, a nice Vietnamese woman, who he met while studying in Perugia. They have a daughter Alice pronounced Alee-Che) who is the same age as Matteo, but almost as tall as Giacomo. We met Fabio through Santhu Nguyen and his wife Virginia who live in Santa Maria just below Assisi... which brings me to my point.

Several months ago, I was toying with the concept of buying a spot of beach near Hue, Vietnam. Hue is the ancient Capitol of Vietnam and Santhu's birthplace. I was inspired by seeing the Jim Thompson house in Bangkok on our recent Southeast Asia trip.

A place on the beach? Giacomo LOVES the beach. Our own beach? Why not? A more RIGID and DEMANDING educational structure? ABSOLUTELY. Warm weather? Average 27 centigrade ALL YEAR ROUND. Less restrictive building codes? Probably. Can the kids learn Mandarin? Probably. LoAn thinks that Danang, 70 miles South of Hue and 700 hundred miles South of Hanoi and 700 miles North of Saigon aka Ho Chi Min City is the the place we ought to be. Can we still get the kids trained at Shaolin? Why not? Can this be done?? A new challenge.

I have just finished Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat. Perhaps its just me, but his observations of the very recent and rapid changes in our world do impact my choices in where we can live and how we raise our children for the 21st Century.

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