Miroslav Holub

"It was unfortunately at a time when there was a pretty nasty civil war raging in that Colombia between the rebels who were ultra-leftist - FARC - and I don't know what the other ones were called, but FARC was the main one. So there was a time, also, the drug cartels were connected to it, Pablo Escobar. There was so much turmoil, there were all kinds of explosions, they had a plane blown up, an Avianca plane, bombs in shopping malls and things like that. We lived there at the time, so my parents on both sides were always like terrified. We always had to, when something happened, we had to make quite complicated phone calls home to say we were okay."

"There was a class meeting about a month after I started going to the Russian school, where everyone's parents were invited, even the parents of the foreigners, because we were foreigners to the Russians. Well, and when my dad came back from the parents' meeting, he said to me, 'If you want, we'll end this and you'll go home and go to boarding school, because this is crazy.' He told me how they lined up the parents just like in the army, just like at the regimental roll call, and now they were just individually reproaching those parents for all the misdeeds of their kids - in public, in front of everybody else. And every single one of those parents had to say, like, what are they going to do about it, how are they going to fix it. So it was really a big surprise even for him that you can deal with the parents of children in that way. Well, but I didn't want to leave there. I liked it there in Cuba, I was with my parents, I was thirteen years old, I didn't want to go to boarding school, so I kind of got over it and really stuck with it, which was good."