Erlangen

When I was a toddler, I lived with my parents in Erlangen, Germany, for a year. I obviously don't remember much of my stay, but the snaps taken then show me as a little kid with a mop of thick black hair, and cheeks the size and colour of apples. The indoor snaps usually show me eating or drinking something, and the outdoor snaps show me covered from top to toe in warm clothes, with only my cheeks popping out.

Aside 1: The mop of hair remains, but where did those cheeks go, do you ask? I used to wonder too, but now I know. They were in hibernation, and now they have come back and attached themselves to my baby's face.

Aside 2: Georg Simon Ohm - he of the Resistance fame - was born in Erlangen, and that's why he came back twenty years later to haunt me when I studied Electrical Engineering.

Well, though I am technically not supposed to remember anything about my stay in Erlangen, being very little, the point is that I do. I remember:

• Looking down from the window of our 19th storey apartment.
• Feeding bread crumbs to swans in the lake near our home.
• Playing with my Indo-German friend An in her water-filled inflatable tub, and crying when asked to get out because it was time to go home.
• Wanting to eat the beads on An's rubber band, because they looked like peppermints (Greedy pig right from childhood, yes).
• Feeling out of place at a children's gathering because all the kids spoke only German.
• Sitting on my mom's lap and eating something while she showed me pictures in a book.

Most other memories have probably come from snaps, so I won't add them here. These are the memories I am sure I remember without external aid. I remember these perhaps because all of them must have induced extreme (at that time) emotions in me - happiness, greed, loss, loneliness...

Ok, so why on earth did I start talking about Erlangen out of the blue? Well, I was looking at the Sitemeter of my blog and clicked on "Who's on", and found a reader from Erlangen. And that, I can tell you, gave me quite a thrill. I later realized that it was a "siemens.de" domain, so it could well be possible that my reader wasn't really sitting in Erlangen, s/he could have been elsewhere reading my blog through a server situated in Erlangen. So, anyway, if that reader is you, put your hand up, please, delurk, and let me know. JFK, as we would say in college - Just For Kicks. Thank you.