This week Sonia provides us with a presentation on the theme “Sharing a crosscultural experience”. She tells us about her family which, living in St Petersburg, lost their belongings during the Russian Revolution. Her grandfather died serving in the army as an engineer during the Second World War. Both her mother and father followed in his footsteps, working as engineers, her father doing highly secret work for the Apollo rocket project, her mother receiving a lot of publicity as the first female engineer building a “reactive” motor for cars. Contacts and travel were highly restricted, even Sonia’s letters to a Polish pen pal were not allowed. After Sonia’s mother became manager of the ballet academy in St Petersburg the family was intensely involved in St Petersburg cultural scene. Sonia spent some years working at the ballet Academy and studying English and Spanish before moving to the Netherlands to study Film, Television and Theatre. She now works in PR and communications for D66 in Utrecht.