Memories #1
August 20th, 2006We are about to start a new AB round robin on Express Yourself! called ‘Around the World’, each player chooses a country for his or her book, and so far we have Tibet, Spain, Italy, India, Japan and Sri Lanka. Yep, you guessed right, mine is Sri Lanka. For one of the pages, Miles has urged me to to use some of my own thoughts and memories of Sri Lanka, and this has been quite difficult to put on paper.
I left Sri Lanka as a two-year old, together with my Mother and Father, leaving behind me four sisters aged between eleven and sixteen. I don’t have any memories of when I lived there, only false memories inspired by years of listening to stories of what life was like. My first story would be about the journey to England where on the plane I threw up on my Mother’s sari, now you know how small air-craft toilets are, right? Did you know that a sari consists of 6 yards of fabric? Well you do the maths and you will see that getting changed must have been lots of fun for my Mother 
One of our stops on the way here was in Moscow, where we had a few hours to kill. As I understand it, I screamed and screamed and screamed the whole time we were there, do you want to know why? Well imagine your horror when as a two-year old, having lived your short life in a country where every person you’d ever seen had a warm brown skin tone, you suddenly see lots and lots and lots of people who must have looked terribly frightening - white people! The things that nightmares are made of in a young mind! 
My other Moscovian story involves a couple with a small child, and flight announcements made in a foreign language. My parents spoke good English, but their Russian just didn’t make the mark. No, they didn’t miss the connecting flight, but I understand that flight-attendants were running around the airport like head-less chickens, trying to find them and hurry them along to their flight, which was being held until their arrival.
