Eye-opening

This past weekend, I made a trip to Iasi for the second time. Not for any particular reason, just to see my international friends and have fun. And we sure did have some fun! (Sorry Kyle, I could not get in touch with Anca to retrieve your stuffs...)

There was a Japanese trainee in Iasi, Yugi (his real name is Ryohei Oonishi), so we were talking with each other in Japanese most of the time. And I love people's reaction when they hear a language that they've never even thought that it's actually possible to use it for communication. It was cool when we were talking in four different languages on one table at one point (Yugi and I in Japanese, Sami and Yassin in Arabic, and of course Romanian and English). Yugi is from Kobe, Japan, so when I go back to Japan next time, I'm definitely visiting Kobe to see him and his home LC! Note: Kobe is pronounced as KO-BE like KO as in "cold" and BE as in "bend." Please do not pronounce it the same way as Kobe Bryant the basketball player, because it would mean "mating" in Japanese.

I also had a chance to watch a great documentary film called zeitgeist on Sami's computer on Sunday morning (I slept at Sami and Philip's place for the previous night). What we watched was the second part of it called "ZEITGEIST: ADDENDUM." In the movie, a project called The Venus Project is introduced. The idea of the project may sound totally impossible and ridiculous to realize, but I must say I was hooked by the idea...it really blew my mind. I recommend everyone to at least skim through the pages that explain what their project is about on their website. Also these movies are available on Google videos or Youtube, as well as for downloading via torrents utility, which are linked from their website.

My favorite question to ask people at random occasions is "what would you do for living if money is not a concern in your life?" And the answer is almost never the same thing as their actually work or what they plan to do for work. Why is money such a big factor in our lives? Won't we be much better off without it? I've always wondered about this topic, and now I see a possible solution: resource based economy. I have been sending emails with a quote by Mahatma Gandhi at the end, "There's enough on this planet for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed." There's enough for everyone. We just have to figure out how to distribute them evenly.

I'm going to dig into this project a bit more now to enlighten myself. Maybe you'd say that this is too idealistic, but I see nothing wrong with dreaming. We all know that something needs to happen.

I hope I didn't just give people in the US who are supposed to be studying for final exams an excuse to spend their precious time on browsing these websites and watching these documentaries...