• Guess Where We Are??? Visit the international district in your city, take photos, and send them to friends and family to guess which “country” you’re visiting.
    • When in Rome. Go to your local farmer’s market and shop for ingredients to cook a foreign meal together. (A great resource for simple foreign meal planning can be found at realsimple.com.)
    • Pretend you’re from another country visiting your own city. Stay in character all day asking locals to recommend places for you to see and things for you to do. Try making an itinerary to include places you would take a friend visiting you, then just take the tour yourselves? Sometimes we live somewhere but never visit the "tourist attractions."
    • Drive to the airport and watch the planes take off. Talk about where you’d like to travel, or pretend you’re in one of the planes taking an adventure together. Where would you go? What would you do there? What would you eat? Wear? Get creative!
    • Spin the Globe. Spin your globe (or point to a map!). Spend the evening learning as much as you can together about this country. When was it founded? What do people eat there? What are they known for? How long would it take to fly there? Drive there? What do people do there for fun?
    • Take a virtual tour around the world at 360cities.net. You can even take turns choosing cities that your partner has to guess.
    • Get dressed up. Pretend like you are foreign tourists new to town, hunting for a neighborhood to live in, house to buy, car to buy, etc. You can take this as far as you want. Test-drive a car you never intend to buy, go tour elaborate homes, take a walk around an international school’s campus, etc. Make up names for yourselves and have fun playing your character. End the date with lunch at a restaurant that matches your new nationality. Of course, when using this idea, be respectful about portraying stereotypes.
    • Japan: Many cities have Japanese gardens. Start your date here, then follow up with restaurant at a Japanese restaurant. Research where in your city there is Japanese art or architecture to see! (Some public libraries carry reservable free cultural passes for places like this.)
    • Purchase a world map or print one for free online at printableworldmap.net. Do any of the dates above, and color in each country as you do a date focused on that country. Perhaps your goal for this date “series” could be “our route around the world," so you could plan your world travel dates in countries that connect, making a path around the world and back.
    • Plan your ideal international vacation. Choose a country, and play online travel agent! How long will it take you to get there? What will you see? How long will you need to do the trip? Which airline will you fly? Have fun fantasizing together about this dream vacation!
    • Maybe you can’t travel very far, but why not send something that can, and let it be an ambassador? You can do this two different ways:  #1: Contact friends who DO travel and ask them to agree to carry a small item for you. It could be a small toy like a bear or action figure, or send a photo of yourselves. Have them take a picture of whatever they carry in a couple places along their journey. Hopefully they’ll pick somewhere fun! And ask them to transfer it to someone else in THEIR world whom they think would keep the travel going; each person who participates agrees to hand it off. Once they have pictures, have them either e-mail it or snail mail, which is fun to get every so often if you feel ready to hand out your address.  #2: Open a Facebook page, dedicated to this specific date idea. AGAIN< make sure you’re dealing with friends or family, or their friends. Have a picture of the two of you ready to share. You don’t have to give out your location so it’s safe. You can also set your settings so that before anything posts, you have to okay it. Ask others to copy that picture, and again, take a picture of it while visiting somewhere or just near where they live.