VICTOR 2004/2005
Another
year passed by again. On the 18th of October was my eleventh birthday, so
that is why I am blowing so hard here, to extinguish all those eleven
candles! My first birthday in Bangladesh. My best present was a group of
parrots, three even! One female and two male, so she is busy. I hope they
are going to have eggs. They have an enormous cage so there will be no
problem to keep them, even though I am afraid my mother might think
otherwise. Furthermore I got a book "The way things work", and I will
probably have a chip in my Playstation, so we can buy the illegal cheap
Playstation games here. You cannot believe it, here you can buy them for a
few dollars, and they are for sale in the shops. The legal ones are nowhere
to be found, however. So even if you would like to be a law obeying person,
it is impossible.
On Friday and
Saturday (Muslim weekend runs different from Dutch weekend) we go to the
Dutch Club to 
swim and play tennis. We are great swimmers now since we also
train two times a week at school. Here we are doing a swim competition with
our friend Danny. Since I am the smallest, of course I always loose; except
in diving, where I am an absolute champion.
Now
it is "winter" and it is too cold to swim in Dhaka. Actually, the
temperature is still often above 20 degrees Celsius, but we have become
spoilt. So in the Christmas holidays, we did not swim in Dhaka. After New
Year's, we went on a 5 day's holiday to the south of
Bangladesh, to
Chittagong,
Cox's
Bazar and
St
Martin's Island. We
visited some Hindu and Buddha monuments (to the left you see me sitting on a
Hindu statue with Elodie)
but most of the time we were on the beach. swimming. The temperature here in
the south was a little higher than in Dhaka, and we even caught a sunburn!
The picture to the left was taken on the boat to
Moheshkali
Island. We were on a
very fast speedboat, evading all sorts of boats at the very last moment. Big
fun!
St Martin's island I loved very much, since it was full of interesting
animals: sea turtles, cows (on the beach!), thousands of crabs (the beach
was full of traces), and we even saw a dead snake. Also we found very
beautiful sea shells.
And here we go on holiday again!
Seems like some people might think that we only make long expensive
holidays. Unfortunately, this is not at all true. I wish it were! This time
we left
Bangladesh
for
Thailand
for 10 days, 6 days
Chiang Mai
and 4 days
Bangkok. Some people
say you need to go out of Bangladesh every three months, well we are fine
with twice a year, I am quite happy there with all the club life and the
nice weather. The bad thing about Thailand were the temples. I completely agree with my brother Vincent, they are boring, boring, as are the Buddha statues. Well actually deep down I could see some interesting things about the history of these places, but well, if your two year older brother says they should be boring, you need to follow this advise in order to also look adolescent and impressive. So I grumbled along with him. Luckily during the whole trip we visited only one so that was not so bad.
The trekking trip we did in the north of Thailand was really nice, especially the rafting. I had a little accident though (what is the news). The not-so-smart girl behind me stuck her bamboo pole in the mud and could not get it up again, so she pulled very strongly and consequently hit my head with a big bang, so I landed face down on the raft and had a big bump on my head. I also lost two teeth shortly after that, but since they were milk teeth, my mother says this is just a coincidence.
The elephants were also really neat animals and the riding on their back was an interesting experience, especially if you descended the mountain you really had to hang on to the side of the little chair on top.
