The Orange Hat

Yesterday, I woke up at 12pm after a long night of partying, and staying up till about 6am. Go me.

The house was a bustle, and a mess – with only two showers working, and three toilets (both out of four) – I brought up the key point, that I was no longer under contract to stay in this place, that we were never getting any of these items fixed (hell my shower caught on fire two days ago) and that we were spending around 1000 USD on two people, while our parent organization was putting other people in here because we “had free space.” So the people who were playing (from my project) decided we needed to look for another place to stay for a month that would cost about 1/3 of the price.

Meaning: sorry we can’t have party’s here anymore but we can go out more with the extra 400USD we’re saving- we’ll have “were moving down the street” party.

Then Florent and I went to watch the Tour de France with Kevin (fellow American from LA working with the Clinton foundation) and went to a bar where.. once again they said they would change it to our requested sports channel after another event was on (some F1 race in Germany which wasn’t that bad), but instead when it was over they put on Golf.

It’s not that we care if you don’t put on our requested item, just tell us so we can leave- because otherwise you’re lying/ignoring me [which is kind of like a service not being provided so maybe I shouldn’t pay]

So after being slightly peeved, we walked to Bart’s house, a friend of Florent’s who works here with a Dutch Flower farm, and is moving to Ethiopia in a week or two.

Bart has a very different accent than Thomas, Roel, and Florent- that they told me is indicative of the “working class.” I didn’t mean to, but I did, the put Bart in a “working class” file of my highly indexed brain. I had met him at bars several times, and he was a nice – yet very quipy, but I had never had what one would call an “intellectual” conversation with him.*

So we walk into Bart’s house, where he is packing up, he invites us in, we turn on the Tour, have a few beers, explain the whole tactical and stage concept to Kevin (I’ll admit I didn’t know all of it either) then argue with Florent on the concept of competition in a bike race (being nice isn’t part of the game, so don’t lose respect for someone when they don’t wait for a fallen rider, it’s part of the game)

Then we started talking about the French sensory, and the aqueducts, and we don’t have anything like that in America, and how all the bridges in Europe were destroyed in WW2. Basically it evolved into an awesome history lesson.

Somewhere along the way the idea of the Technology Singularity come up- the concept that the rate at which we discover new technologies is growing shorter and shorter, and up until the point where (like a exponential curve) all technologies will be discovered at the same time ( 60 million years for fire, 40,000 for a bow and arrow, 200 years for the internet, 10 years for artificial limbs, 5 months for new drugs, 2 seconds for faster than light travel OMG we discover everything [ it’s a concept, go with it])

Then we talked about Farming, and what the new fertilizers are doing to the ground, and how it affects the whole ecosystem, but how it’s not really “that” bad, it’s really just leaving too much salt in the grown- and

Oh hey look it’s the last 2km of the Tour!

The point is, that I judged someone on what someone else told me, and later found out that it was very wrong.

And I have two or three topics which I will end up writing about in the next week ☺


*by the way, using Quotations is enjoyable, it means so little and so much at the same time that I think I’ll write about it later. – oh, and Habiba came up for a word for her recently perceived mood swings that I have (they usually doesn’t see me so wild at work) S.C.O.M. Sudden Change of Mood, which I made into an adjective, so I’m being “Scomy”