The History of Youssouf

It's time to give my audience a bit of insight in my background. So here it goes.

My name is Youssouf. I was born in Jordan, in the Middle East. Well, born.. Do cuddly animals get born? The reproduction of cuddly animals - sheep in particular - is yet somehow a bit of a mystery to the world of science.
I'm.. Well, how many years old? Some people count in human years, some count in dog years or sheep years. And counting in cuddly sheep years is a whole different story. Cuddly sheep don't have fingers on their paws, so we evolved with a totally different counting system, including some function for the horns - if present - as well in our counting. By now I must have gotten you confused. So I can't really tell you how old I am, since I'm confused now as well.

Anyways.
There I was in Jordan. Hopping around a bit with a small flock of fellow cuddly sheep. One day I went out to a nice little market. That was back in 2000. Yep. A few years ago. At that market place a saw a friendly openminded woman. I tried to talk to her, but unfortunately she did not speak any Baahrabic. She spoke Dutch, which I did not understand at the time as well. We both happened to speak English, so we continued in English. Her name was DocD. We sat down and talked for quite a while. She told me about The Netherlands, where she lived. I told her about my plans to go and study abroad. To cut things short: it turned out that in Utrecht in the Netherlands they have the Utrecht University. At the Faculty of Arts you could study Language and Culture Studies with a major in Bleatology. As a cuddly sheep, I'm very much interested in Bleatology.
So, I decided to go to The Netherlands (aka. Holland) to go and study Bleatology. DocD arranged that I could accompany her from Jordan back to The Netherlands. And there I went. Leaving the dust and plush of Jordan behind.

The studies were really great. I was able to do a lot of fieldwork to - e.g. research for the human-plush interaction throughout several cultures. This research allowed me to travel abroad frequently. That's how it happened that since the fall of 2000 I've been travelling the world. I've finished my Master last year. No student anymore. Currently I'm doing research in the field of Bleatology, with some 'side dishes' in human-plush interaction and cultural manifestations of material-sheep.

Some people picked up my idea of material-animals, the not traditionally-living-animals (outdated concept...) travelling throughout the world, like those penguins or the Gnome from the movie Amélie. That's fine with me.

I like to write about my sheepish encounters, Bleatological sheep insights and of course about my travels. You've read about it here.

And now more recently I've started to post all of my photo's Flickr. I've got 100s of them in stock and I'll have to upload, tag and geotag them all. Quite an effort!

To give you an idea of where I traveled: Paris, London, Madrid, Antwerp, dozens of places in The Netherlands, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Trans-Siberia Express, China, Borneo, Cyprus, Malta, Belgium, Austria, France, Guatemala, Belize, Ohio (USA), Honduras, Italy, Isla Margarita, Egypt, diving in the Red Sea, Turkey, World Expo of 2000 in Hannover (Germany), Namibia, Houston (USA) and I'm forgetting some.

Thank you for your attention.