Why "Hello In 100 Languages"??

I am terrible at picking names for the long haul. I pick a name for something (dog, blog, email address) and 2 years later not only is it stupid, it also no longer makes sense.  So when it came time to start a new blog and pick a new name I put more than my usual 2 seconds of thought into it. I actually wrote a list and stared at it for a couple of weeks before I settled on this one.

So why would someone who didn’t step foot out of the USA until she was 26 (Canada doesn’t count for someone from Montana since the cultural differences between Montana and Alberta are probably only discernible to those of us from here, not to offend my neighbors to the north eh!) and only speaks one language with any level of proficiency want a travel blog that emphasized multilingualism?

Well, because it is one of my biggest life regrets that I don’t speak another language fluently. And I want my daughter to have the opportunity to learn another language. Ideally I would want her to learn Cantonese because I assume that is the language her biological family speaks, but unless we move to a different place I doubt that will happen unless she wants it to happen. I would probably be fluent in French if I had any language ability, but apparently a year and a half immersion in West African Frambara (the mix of Bambara and French spoken in Mali) was not enough to get me there.

My dream is to be able to spend an extended time when Jas is older living and learning a different culture. I want to wait til she is old enough to really engage in this type of experience but not so old that she is not excited about it. So I am thinking when she is about 8-10 years old.

But until then I am hoping that we can travel and experience as many different places as our time and budget will take us to. Maybe even reach my arbitrary goal of visiting enough places to hear 100 different languages are spoken. So I picked “Hello In 100 Languages” as an inspiration and motivation for me to remember where I want to end up and strive for it. It makes all those months of bare bones saving worth it knowing that we will get to visit another great place.