Flat Ben

Night time in Shanghai with Flat Ben

The Backstory

It all started with an email (which, for some reason, I can’t find) back in 2005. The email was from my brother-in-law’s sister. She was putting together a birthday present for our mutual nephew, Ben. The idea was kind of like the Flat Stanley Project, but with our nephew instead of Stanley - and so Flat Ben was born. Having recently moved to Korea, the plan was for me to take photos of Flat Ben around the different places I visited in the year before his birthday. Little did I know that Flat Ben would become my little paper companion for the next six years.

Next month, (nephew) Ben will be starting his third year of university, so I thought it was time to finally give these photos a proper home[1]. I sincerely hope that not only Ben, but my six other nieces & nephews, as well as my own kids will draw some inspiration from this and get out of their comfort zone to explore the world.

The Map

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The Highlights

In case you don’t feel like exploring the map, here are a handful of highlights from Flat Ben’s travels.

**Outside the Korean National Assembly, Seoul:** This was the first Flat Ben photo; seen here with Fat Uncle John

**Coffee Shop in Amsterdam:** Flat Ben enjoying the local Dutch delicacies

**Nordkapp, Norway:** The most northern point of mainland Europe

**Ushuaia, Argentina:** The southern tip of South America

**Mt. Kumgang, North Korea:** Flat Ben's head fell off somewhere in the mountains of the DPRK! No joke, I thought they were going to find it and put me in a prison camp for littering.

**The Laguna Cejar, Chile:** At a large, yet shallow salt water sink hole lake in the driest place on Earth

**Stonehenge, England:** Every year, on the Summer Solstice, people are allowed to touch the stones at Stonehenge. Flat Ben touched the stones in 2009.

**Norway:** Flat Ben popping into Hell (Norway) for a few minutes

**Blue Lagoon, Iceland:** Relaxing in the thermal pools of Iceland

**New York, USA:** Visiting One World Trade Center when it was under construction

**Buenos Aires, Argentina:** Watching Argentina trounce Spain 2 months after Spain won the World Cup

The Footnotes

[1] I’ll admit that a secondary motivation behind this page is the classic “look where I’ve been” traveller one-upmanship. For any other travel jerks out there, this map doesn’t encompass all the places I’ve travelled, just the ones where I remembered to bring Flat Ben 😜