VICTOR 2003/2004

On the 18th of October, we celebrated my 10th birthday. My mother baked this cake for me, and some other nice food, since she is a great cook. We went to the bowling alley with my friends, and my brother and sister.  I managed to make two strikes!  Here to the right you see me with one of my parrots. I was not very lucky with the birds. The first two died of an unknown disease. The third one was very sweet so I let it fly loose in my room. When it did not want to come back to the cage, I decided to just leave it out there and left my little house. I totally forgot the whole in the window, big enough to let a bird fly through. The fourth one dies as well. But the fifth one, a very shy bird, lived and as far as I know still lives. When I was in grade 5 of German school, I also participated in Chemistry and Physic lessons of grade 6. Here you can see me with the class mates of Grade 6, Vincent, Sobir Jon and Aziza. I really liked those lessons and always had good grades. As you can see the classes are really small, in my grade there were five children at that time.Here I am demonstrating our biggest invention ever, the "Pleur 2000". Pleur in Dutch is slang for falling off something. 2000 does not mean the invention year, but how many times we intend to fall off. It took some skill to stay on the Pleur for more than 5 seconds really. We love to work with hammer and nails and we make many useful and even more useless things. For the World Cup semi-finals,  we developed a whole team of wooden players, cut out with our fret-saw and painted in real colors. Even though we did not win, our football players are really beautiful and awaiting their next chance of success. Don't think we ever watch football matches, or even play football - but a World cup is a different matter.
I like other sorts of sport, like tennis, swimming, and especially skiing.

In January of 2004 we went to Villars for a week for skiing holidays and I very much enjoyed it. I am now quite a good skier and I will overtake my mother anytime. In the Swiss ski classes we were forced to wear helmets. I thought that very stupid, but there was no way I could participate without them. We had a great time, the food was fantastic and there were a lot of "afterski" activities, also for children.

Here a picture of the "home team", myself, Vincent, Elodie and Anna. We play a lot together. Of course we fight sometimes, like all brothers and sisters, but not too often. Anna is still a bit too small to mingle into family dynamics, and I sometimes choose sides with Vincent, and sometimes with Elodie, but often we all  play together.In the beginning of September 2004, we moved from Uzbekistan to Bangladesh. The last day in Uzbekistan, we went to the Aquapark. That was great fun, because the school season had already started so we were all by ourselves. This slide for instance I tried about a hundred times. I had to do it 50 times anyway, before my mother had caught a picture of all three of us.
In summer, we went for three weeks to the Netherlands, in between Uzbekistan and Bangladesh. That was nice, even though the weather is always a bit mediocre, if you are used to sunny countries. We drove around in the old Bristol to visit friends, one of them in Limburg. We had to visit Maastricht, which we and the younger part of our friends' family thought a little bit boring. But it was nice to play with them.

So that was the end of our Uzbek period. We were all very excited to move and had no idea what to expect of Bangladesh. We knew it was supposed to be wet. And in the first week out there, we experienced more rain than in all four years in Uzbekistan. We actually entered the country in the year of the worst flooding since one hundred years! We even could not go to school, it was closed because the road up there was totally flooded. So this year our holiday was extended to three and a half months. A good start of a new period of our lives.

We came to Dhaka in the middle of September. We were allowed another week off to get used to the country. However, after that no more excuses could be found: we had to go to school. What a pity. I really enjoyed the free life. We entered the ISD (International School Dhaka), not prepared for the next shock: we had to wear uniforms. And since I, as a sixth grader, am already in secondary school, for me the uniform was long grey pants and a tie on top of that. I never wore a tie before in my life, only on Christmas Day! Some obligatory things suited me well on this school: the palm tops for instance (my mother was not so happy). Especially since there are nice games on it, like fish feeding. You are supposed to work on them all day, so that means that you can play forever without raising any suspicion. You don't want your fish to die of hunger, do you? First things must come first, my brain is already well developed.