Monday, March 16, 2009

Back to the Grind...

Last week was a nice relaxing week, but all good things must come to an end...oh well.

Spent a couple of days with Tom - we went to Cannon Beach for lunch at Cranky Sue's and visited a couple of favorite spots before heading home. Tuesday was the big ride into Portland on Tom's route to and from work.

The rest of the week was spent pretty leisurely, with coffee with my friend Cathy, a ride (a little bit of a challenging ride) with Kristen and then some down time just relaxing and riding with Tom after his day at work both Thursday and Friday.

All good days, but I would have to say that my favorite day was Sunday - after spending the morning at worship we zipped out after class and made our way over to the Portland Art Museum for a Rick Steves Lecture. As a member of OPB my contribution "gift" was two tickets to this talk. Rick Steves shared his trip to Iran last Spring during a time where the political climate was even more iffy than usual. This trip was not about politics, bur rather about the culture of the Iranians/Persians and it was very fascinating. His point was to humanize the culture and not make them out to be monsters...to help others understand who they are as people and what they do and what their likes and dislikes are - they really are no different than Americans in that they enjoy family, friends and simple pleasures like going out to eat, have coffee...shopping etc. Also, he shared that they are fascinated with Americans in general and was curious as to why he and his crew spent days documenting their lives to educate people outside of Iran.

If I ever have the opportunity to visit a country such as Iran I think that I would go just to experience the people, just like going to Tijuana (even though it is just across the border) was all about going to connect with the people and to learn about their culture.

It amazes me that culture differences can vary greatly just across the border as close as Mexico or Canada or on the other side of the world or even in our own backyards.

This Rick Steves Lecture reminds me that I need to be open minded and understanding of the people that appear to be different than me - there is a lot of world out there!

The tickets that OPB members received
A cool shot of Persian school girls along with Rick Steves

Rick Steves at the end of the lecture

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Be kind...I know where you live (probably)