ed, and very easy for me to adapt to different situations. I attended four different primary/secondary schools in three different countries and high school in two different cities. By the time I was 18, I had received mail to nine different addresses. I don’t feel I have roots. I don’t really know my uncles, aunts or cousins. My oldest friendships date back from my time in university. Hard to say how it exactly affected me professionally. I am very comfortable in international groups. Don’t know if other triads are due to grow up like this or my character or other factors that were of influence in my life. In the Netherlands, I never felt really Dutch. I feel Dutch when I’m abroad. The funny thing about culture is that you can only experience it in contrast to another culture. How did you end up in Malta, and what aspects of the country made it significant for you professionally? I met my wife in Gijon in Spain while walking the Camino to Santiago de Compostela in late spring 2011. It’s a famous pilgrimage. Paulo Coelho, a famous Brazilian author, wrote a book about it called “The Pilgrimage,” which was actually the inspiration for me to walk it. My original plan was to learn Spanish in Spain and travel to South America. But as John Lennon once sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” So, faith seemed to have different plans. I ended up staying two years in Gijon. When I wanted to move on, she wanted a change of life and go with me and learn English. Obviously, South America is not the place to learn English so we decided to go to Australia instead. After seven months travelling (from Victoria up the east coast to Brisbane with a small camper van) and working a couple of weeks on farms, we had enough and missed Europe so we decided to go back, but didn’t know where. Not back to Spain at least, nor to the Netherlands. Growing up between different cultures made me question what is “normal” from a young age. It made me very open-minded, and very easy to adapt to different situations. 59 GPWAtimes.org
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