They have two balconies. One is more like a terrace; it’s twice the size of the other one. That’s where they keep all their toys, her brother and her. They were born 18 months apart. When they play together, they usually have imaginary battles between armies of toy soldiers, or chase each other with toy guns in the apartment. Sometimes they play cards with their grandmother. When the girl plays alone, she solves puzzles, draws, cuts out images from mom’s magazines, lines up her dolls on the sofa, pretending they are her students and performing the role of a school teacher. One day they are on the terrace playing. She’s around 7, he’s around 6. That day she decides, for herself and for her brother, that they no longer need toys. She starts throwing them out the window and soon after her brother starts doing the same. That’s until their parents walk in. The parents seem upset, but also amused. They say they will give all the toys away in the village where the grandparents live. Their father goes out to collect the missing toys. What did the neighbors think at the site of falling toys? Their mother has a talk with them. They decide to keep the toys. Later they would gradually give them away.
A few years later, her brother starts getting more and more into hip hop music. Soon she starts liking it as well. They buy pirated music cassettes (and later CDs) from a stand on the street, in front of the market. It is now time to replace the old music cassettes. Only hip hop deserves to be in their collection. The girl sorts the cassettes and pulls out Ricky Martin, and everything else that is not hip hop. She takes out their father’s big wrench from where he keeps his tools. She places the unwanted cassettes on the kitchen floor and starts smashing them. Her brother then pulls out the tape from the cassettes. They throw it out the window and it gets stuck in the big tree next to the building entrance. Ricky Martin is left hanging from the tree.