The Workshop

After taking advantage of a free lunch at the conference, I went out on my own. This is not something that I am known for doing. As a matter of fact, I may have gone somewhere that my classmates haven’t been! You proud?

The Workshop is a “mall” in the center of the city. After having been to the Gateway “Theatre of Shopping!”, this was quite a stark contrast. It was full of seemingly locally owned shops with the exception of the cell phone places and a couple of what we would call anchor stores such as Pick-and-Pay, a local grocery store.

It was odd. All of a sudden and for the first time in my life, I realized that perhaps I was the only white person around. At that point, I looked around and could see no others. This didn’t affect my perception of my personal safety, but it caught me off guard. I think that what I found odd was that nobody around me seemed to care; that is I was not a spectacle to be looked at, I was just different and it seemed that only I was aware of it. That is not what I would have expected somehow.

I think that I must be shopped out because I bought nothing but a nail file (which I had previously been unable to fine in the small random stores around the hotel). This too is good.

Perhaps seeing the conditions at that “orphanage” has made it difficult to continue to seek out more “stuff.”

Who knows . . . .