I always wished that my parents would speak different mother tongues and I would grow up with them in a different country. At best someone with again a different language would have lived in our household. That way I could have learned several languages without accent along the way.

Unfortunately I grew up monolingual. 

When travelling one sees many things. During my holidays in Thailand I met Maria. Maria is 75 years old and lives in Australia. More than 50 years ago a young man, who had emigrated to Australia on his search for work, visited the Italian village where she was living. Three weeks later she married him and travelled with him. They were together for 50 years, he died last year. The reason why I am telling the story is her granddaughter Sabrina. Sabrina is speaking English, Italian like her grandparents, German like father, an emigrated Austrian, and at school she learned French and Mandarin. This wakens a hidden longing in me. 

Now I am busy learning Thai: “sawaddi kha and khoop khun kha”. Funnily, the language I am using in Thailand as much as English was Russian. Signs, menus, information sheets, everything was available in Cyrillic alphabet. Who would have thought at school, when I was learning Russian, how useful this would be decades later in Asia.