Prequel

Today it is 1967, May 19th, and its my 6th birthday. I still go to kindergarden, but in 4 month time I will enter school. Thats nice, because than in the 6th course I will learn – among other things – English. But I will also learn maths and literature, and science. In 8 years from now, I will change school and enter Highschool. For another 4 years there I also have to attend lessons such as history and politics, which will be a pemanent fight with the teachers. They will always try to brainwash us and infiltrate communist ideology. The only two subjects I really surrender are sports and Russian language. This is funny, since 40 years later, i.e. sometimes in the new century, I will be the only one of all my former class-mates who is physically still very much in shape (can wear the same sized jeans as when I was 20) and the only one who decently speaks Russian.

But before this, in 1979 or 12 years onward from now, the army will call my duty and I will serve there for 3 horific years. At least I had plenty of free time there to read and to learn guitar playing. In  1983, 16 years from today on, I will be a proud freshman student of physics at Leipzig Karl-Marx-University (hip, hip, hooray). I will absorb everything about natural science, but still not enough to stop me from later on (in 1988) to add a biophysics and later a molecular genetics career. But first, between 1983 and 1988 I am a decently committed student, except that political activities almost caused my dismission from the Uni.

After graduating as a PhD in biophysics, my hobby activities as a political street fighter are somehow rewarded and the Berlin Wall comes down and exposes us to the free world with all its unknown wilderness. In 1992 I first go as a PostDoc to Groningen in the Netherlands. This is still a sort of intermediate state to allow a smooth transition from a social wellfare state to the free capitalism, which I experience the following three wundeful years in London.

Oh, I almost forgot, that in 1990 I will marry a young girl from Russia, and a year later I impress my young wife the most when I smuggel her in the car-boot through the German-Dutch border (In this years, the European borders are still existing, and they would not let Marina to come to me to Groningen without a month-long application procedure). So I solve the problem my way, as I use to do throughout life whenever I face some stupid obstacles.

I think in 1991 in Groningen it is also the first time that we see the Internet working, firstly to simply exchange e-mails with my parents-in-law in Russia.

In 2010, which I can’t believe is still 43 years from today on, I will start writing a Blog. Today, in 1967, nobody has ever heard about social media or blogs or Twitter. All these inventions will come down to us in the new century, and I am already keen to see what one can do with them. But today, I still have to be patient. I have just discovered that the steel tracks of my electric train give a funny prickling sensation if I lick them with my tongue. So many secretes are waiting to be discovered.