3/6

Today was a lax day. I woke up early again and read/made breakfast/showered before anyone else was awake. Then we went to the Internet Café and I spent a few hours figuring out the whole blog thing, facebook, etc. Brittany cut and dyed her hair during this time (it was dark brown and almost reached her butt, now it is black and is a little longer than shoulder length). It looks great and very natural! Then we walked around Long Street, since we hadn’t explored there yet. We were going to hit up a museum, but it got to be too late. We found an amazing African music store where we’ve spent a lot of time (Freshly Ground and Hot Water are Cape Town based bands that are sooooo good!!! Look ‘em up). Then we walked around an African goods store, which we will definitely have to return to for souvenirs and gifts near the end of our trip. There was a market set up on a walking only street, but it was closing down right as we arrived. We’ll have to go back next week. When we got home we made dinner and then went up to the bar in our hostel to spend the night chatting with the owner, workers, and other guests.

It turned into the most interesting night since I’ve been here. We stayed in and talked with two women from Florida, both of who were very educated, highly opinionated, and politically invested in the youth of our country. They had been traveling for over 8 months now, around Southeast Asia and here, and just arrived back from a 26- day safari across southern Africa. They quit their jobs to be able to travel the World. I soooo envy them, and soooo hope I can find a job that allows me to travel (maybe not to that extent, but some). We met a gay Zimbabwean who had lived and trained in the U.K. (so many UK people here, no?) in English. He is planning on becoming an English teacher to people who hope to teach English in the future, though really he is a philosopher. I wanted to mention a few of his thoughts before I forgot them. The first is that each one of us has our own paths. If we spend time looking at others, either out of jealousy or judgment, we will miss our own footing and fall.  We spent much time talking about happiness, how we and only we can decide our own happiness, which soon led into a discussion on free will/ what is happiness? It is a state of mind, so of course it makes sense that we should be able to alter it by altering our state of mind- mind over matter. He also made an extremely interesting comparison between himself as a gay person and someone living in absolute poverty. We are born into this body, and by luck he was born gay. He had no choice in the matter, the same way someone born into a family living in a township (for example) has no choice. But you have the choice to make something out of it. You must deal with everything that you were lucked into and make something of yourself. Everyone has hardships and unlucky circumstances, but it is the ability to overcome those that truly define a person. You can choose to be gay, or you can choose to be so much more than that. You can choose to embrace your poverty, or you can accept that is where you came from and grow and take what you were born with and evolve into something more. I’m not even sure where the conversation moved after that, it got extremely philosophical, I got a little too scientific, talking about Dale Purves empirical theory of the mind, and it just spiraled down into a talk of where does happiness originate? What is free will? How is chemical and electrical signals interpreted as happiness, and can you alter these (probably not) or can you alter your interpretation? Mind over matter. Are you what your body tells you you are, or can you rise above that and become what you imagine yourself to be? Hmmmmmm………