Day 23: Hunger Game

One of the points of travelling with your children is to educate and expand their experiences.  To this end Fianna has organised (with great foresight) visits of key sites (Coliseum, Vatican, St Peter's).  Today we "enjoyed" the Vatican.  After being herded around a series of rooms and corridors for an hour and half we were finally squeezed into the Sistine Chapel, where we shared an ecstatic 10 mins with 100 other tourists and got a crick in the neck in the process.  The whole experience was unforgettable (NB: Fianna reads this blog).

For my part I have decided to educate the Boys on the more prosaic aspects of travelling i.e. the cost of feeding four people (of which two teenage boys) in restaurants every day.  To this end borrowing from the great Domesco© game (invented by my father) we have been playing the Hunger Game© the principles are as follows:  Whenever we have a meal at a restaurant we calculate who's meal was the most expensive and who's was the least.  The winner is the least expensive meal and the loser is the most expensive meal.  At the next meal the previous loser must ensure that his or her meal is the least expensive and the previous winner gets a spending bonus of the difference between the loser and the winners meals.  The learning opportunities are numerous (aside from providing an instant topic of conversation every time we sit down to a meal):

• Cost consciousness: attention to all items in the menu (drinks, starters, desserts, wine, ...)
• Advocacy: try to convince others to have desserts or wine
• Value for money: how big will this dish be for this cost?
• Sharing:  offering to share a dish to reduce your costs
• Mathematics: calculation of the different shares of the meals
• Strategy: thinking ahead of which meals you want to win or lose and by how much
• Health: eating and drinking less (water is excluded)
• Competitive spirit: who will win or lose

I am happy to report that of the three meals we have had so far I have not lost yet.  Fianna, Theo and Eliot have each lost once. (In addition my wallet is definitely winning).  

I know you are all keen to add this game to your future travel experiences and soon you will be able to thanks to the Smartphone App that Theo will be releasing in the near future.