Name: Alex Surname: Novikovski Address: Postal code: 249030 Russia Kaluga region, Obninsk, Lenin Ave., 32 - 6 City: Country: Russia Telephone: + 08439 5 90 27 E-mail: alexxxnew@rambler.ru Url: Home Description: I'm Alex Novikovski, born in 1963, live in Obninsk, Kaluga region, Russia. Since my school years I've been collecting chewing gum wrappers. That time it was quite a difficult hobby when no gums were produced in the USSR or imported officially. It was still more exciting, for example, to get a wrapper from a country like Chile or South Africa where nobody from the USSR was officially allowed to during the so called "iron curtain era". Despite caustic jokes from my fellows I continued to pick up tramped and dirty specks of paper in the street every time I saw them, even when I graduated from the university and had my family. Now my collection is about 6000 items from 78 countries (with inner comics and stickers totally about 7000 items). This hobby made me learn English, French, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Now I take lessons in Arabic to be able to separate Syrian wrappers from Algerian or Egyptian.