I want to go there! The far east edition

My daughter loves to travel and see new places. Sometimes the places she wants to go are easily accessible, but recently she's been really agitating to New Zealand and China. Kind of hard to get from Central Europe.

I can't remember if I wrote about it here or not, but K has still been continuing to process our move from England to the Czech Republic - which happened a YEAR ago - in recent months. She asks repeatedly, most recently the day before yesterday, "But why did we move to Prague? Why don't we live in England any more?" I explained (the first time it came up) that we moved because of Apo's work so that we could be with him, that the move to England was never intended to be permanent, and that we might move again someday, too. K was upset at the idea that we won't go back to live in England (we spent so long living between the countries that she thought we were just on a particularly long visit here, I guess), but excited at my suggestion that maybe we will go back for a visit someday.

In the same conversation, I think, she wanted to know why not everybody speaks English in Prague, and why we do speak English. I talked about different languages spoken in different countries. She also wanted to know why her friend from New Zealand speaks English but the other friends don't. I said that New Zealand is a country far away where they also speak English, like in England and America. Her eyes lit up and she asked if we could go to New Zealand, please.

Then during the part of the conversation where I explained that if/when we move again someday, we'll have a new house, new school, new friends (...), she instantly joined the two topics by asking if we can move to New Zealand. Since then, the idea of moving to New Zealand has come up with surprising regularity!

And then, just to add to the list of places we can't actually feasibly go, K has had a slowly growing fascination with China in the last several months. We have some family who lived in China for several years, and on a visit they gave her a little doll and explained it is from China. K doesn't play with the doll really, but she started to mention China occasionally after that. Then recently we were looking at a children's atlas and she was very interested in the map of China (K loves maps in general, in fact).

And THEN she started to watch episodes of Ni Hao, Kai-Lan in the mornings before school (it and Dora come on back to back at about the time K wakes up), and now she keeps asking me things like, "Mommy, how do you say ___ in Chinese?" To which I have to answer truthfully that I haven't the faintest idea. If she were interested in Dora, I could actually help with Spanish vocabulary, but it seems K is only interested in repeating the phrases in Chinese. It's kind of funny.

I suppose if I were really on top of things I would actually find some materials to teach K some basic phrases in Chinese. It is pretty sweet that she is developing such an awareness of other countries and languages and interest in learning about them.

And now...she wants to visit China. I've had to tell her it is unlikely that we will go to China in the near future, though maybe we can someday. Like, it would be much closer to fly there from New Zealand once we move there. Sigh. :)

It does occur to me that New Zealand and China are possibly the only places K knows something about where she hasn't already been, so maybe I just need to increase her exposure to places like Vienna. Or Rome. You know, places on this continent.

Once we get back on our feet enough post-baby to contemplate taking a real vacation again, I think K would totally love somewhere like Paris or Rome. And China, well, maybe we'll make it there eventually, too.