VICTOR SUMMER 2001

I am Victor Alexander Veenbrink, and I was born on the 18th of October 1993, in Amsterdam. The first half year of my life I spent in Saudi Arabia, then 5 years in the Netherlands, and then we moved to Uzbekistan, where this story starts. I was born almost three weeks late, and speed is still not my biggest virtue. At least if you believe my mother, who always complains that I can chew my food instead of waiting till it disintegrates inside my mouth. However, I prefer to eat my food and enjoy it too (as long as possible). I am also quick when it comes to watching television. I love television and if my mother would let me, I would watch all day. Unfortunately I can only watch an hour a day or so, unless there is a special occasion. On top you can see me, still in nightclothes, together with my sister Elodie early morning watching television in our "old old house" in Uzbekistan.
We call this our "old old" house, since in Uzbekistan we lived in three houses, this one, the "old" one and the last one. The old one was very big but also very cold in winter and hot in summer and on top of that very expensive - that is why we moved. To the right you see me with my brother Vincent, who is one year and nine months older than I am, and is one grade higher in school. I think we are just as smart, though, or almost. My mother calls me sometimes "Professor Sunflower", who is some scientific wizard in the "Kuifje" cartoon.

In the summer of 2001, we had a lot of friends visiting us, and traveling with us through Uzbekistan. On the left you can see us with Bas en Linda, who came in May with their parents, and went with us to Bukhara and Khiva. They were the ones to first use our pool, when the grown ups still thought we were "ice dipping". We loved it and thought they should get a bit tougher. To the right you see us with our cousins Milco and Kirsten. Milco has almost the same age like me, he was born only 5 days later, so you can believe we had a lot of fun. Kirsten is the same age as Elodie and Vincent was supervising our army, at least that is what he always tries to. With them, we rented a big van and drove to Bukhara via Samarkand. The car was brand new so the driver would not drive faster than 70 kilometers per jour and on the way back we had a flat tire, so we were longer on the road then in Bukhara. We still enjoyed our time, even went to a lake with a beach and swam and ate plov in the middle of the desert. We also went to Tashkent Lake with Gulya and her family. Gulya has been our nanny for a long time and she has four children. So we played and swam together, all of us, and had barbecue.

The picture on the right was taken in a dacha (mountain house) in Shakhimardon, an enclave of Uzbekistan in Kyrgyzstan, where we also went together with Milco, Kirsten and other friends. Through the garden ran a mountain stream, and since we had no showers or running water in the room, this is where we washed and brushed our teeth!