Hi, I'm Andreas Lettow. I live in a small village 15 Miles southwest of Munich in Germany (the name is Poecking). Joining the group half a year ago I was happy to see that so many people sharing my love for hippos. My birthday is the 28th of June (more than 45 years ago now). It took a long time to discover the hippos for me and now I'm addicted to them. The first hippo I really liked was a label of a record company (I think it was the RSO Label), but it took some more years to get my first plush one.
It was the time when I met my wife Linda, and found out that she is fond of elephants. Soon we entered into a competition in collecting hippos and elephants. Now there are hundreds of each occupying our house. And the collecting competition goes on. Every kind of elephants and hippos will find their way into the family. (Our son left for university in Munich and so Hippos and Elephants have taken the free space)
Beyond Hippos: I work for a big telecom equipment manufacturer in Munich as a sales engineer.
This gave me the opportunity to travel a lot to other countries and of course get a lot of hippos
(and elephants) from all over the world. So it's a real international bloat we put together. When
starting in this company, they send me for a big project to Nigeria where I spent almost 4 years
in the middle of Africa (without seeing any Hippo). Last year I've been in South Africa and there
I spend a day in the Pilanesberg National Park seeing wild Hippos (Bakubung - Lodge "Home of the
Hippo" ), it was a great day !!
http://africantravel.com/sa/bakubung.html
Our holidays we try to spend in the warm areas of the world. Since more than 10 years we go regularly to a small island in the Caribbean called St. Lucia. This is almost our second home and even there we found something for our collection. I was not able so far to build my own homepage and so I placed some pictures of my collection to the photo area of the hippo group. I've seen that there is a lot of Hippo stuff is available in the US but also in Old Europe you can find enough as all the other European members can confirm. I hope that trading becomes more easier via the internet so that we have more access to the stuff offered in the states. Unfortunately most of the companies will not ship outside North America.
If you like to send me some mails , please write to alettow@yahoo.com
All the best Hippo greetings
Andreas & Linda
added December 16 2001