Traveling abroad with kids: A family sabbatical.: Boredom, the Family Sabbatical and the history of flip flops

Kids 'summiting' alone in the Sierra Nevadas outside of Granada

"A kid needs enough downtime to be bored, yes—bored enough to stare at the sky and study the imperfections in his own eyeball. That’s what makes for a childhood worth remembering for the whole of one’s life."
- Cristina Schwarz in an excerpt from "Leave Those Kids Alone" in the
March issue of The Atlantic

More on the subject here

One of the greatest things about a family sabbatical is enough downtime to be bored, yes- bored.

Now that we're back home those spaces on the trip that appeared to be a vacuum were in fact, a plenum- a state of fullness. Questions were asked, wonder sparked, jokes told, squabbles had, tears shed, silence shared. In retrospect, it's clear that life was being lived, one empty moment at a time.

One of those days of boredom on the trip yielded the following piece of writing from 11 year old Gigi. Never one to let an opportunity to be cheeky escape her, she wrote an essay about flip flops. It started out as a joke. Take a look at what it turned into. What was remarkable was the day after she finished it we saw this enormous thing in a Roman ruins museum. (Take a look at the strap and the toes, you'll be learning about it.)

The continuous slapping of flip-flops against cobblestone alleys is all I have heard for a month and a half. This sound is capable of masking the voices of souk inhabitants.

It can bounce around the ruins of a Roman temple and carry me across the stepping stones of a river.

My new-fangled flip-flops (which are actually a Greek design using a strap between the big toe and second toe) might have walked where a Roman flip-flop (a strap separating the second toe from the third) once crossed a pavilion.

The sound of my flip-flops followed me on a search for Moroccan slippers.

If I found some slippers in my size, then maybe I would hear a soft shuffling noise, not unlike a loyal dog following its master. We searched many shops. The only shoes that would fit my unusually gargantuan foot induced vomiting because they only came in fuchsia, black and brown.

After seeing my choices, I was quite contented with my flip-flops.

After hearing the sound of my flip-flops on noir-colored pavement, marble, grass, rocks damp with river water, and dirt sometimes as brown as my eyes, I now get to add cobblestoned alleys to my list.

Normally, you wouldn't find cobblestoned alleys in the U.S.

But here, in Spain and Portugal it is not uncommon.

While we were in Spain, the Egyptian president, Mubarak (who was 82 and having ruled for over 30 years) was forced to change his status from dictator to toppled leader.

In Egyptian murals there are depictions of early flip-flops. The murals are in both tombs and temples and some date back to around 4,000 B.C. I hope that during the conflict none of the ancient Egyptian masterpieces were destroyed.

The next place the sound of my flip-flops will accompany me might be over a little wooden bridge, with me dressed in a Kimono, where zoris are common.