Learning a lil' acceptance

This weekend for me was all about learning how possible it is for acceptance, even though nowadays it seems like such a foreign word. On Saturday I visited the District Six museum just down the street from where I live. For those unfamiliar with the history of Apartheid in S.Africa I would recommend you find yourself a computer and wikipedia it immediately. What I found the most inspirational was the museum guide himself, and his personal history associated with District Six. It was here that Cape Town really embraced all the different cultural backgrounds of the people living in this unique community. Our guide talked about how no matter what your religion, when a holiday came around everyone celebrated. Jews celebrated the Chinese New Year and Muslims celebrated Christmas, everyone celebrated together all the special occasions. How cool would that be, to have like 5 times the number of fun celebrations?!

Also, on Sunday some friends and I decided to go to an ISKCOM temple for a guest speaker, traditional worship, and then a delicious Indian feast. It was so wonderful to be invited into a new community so warmly. The cutest old woman decided to take us under her wing (us, stick out at Hindu temple? lol) and explain some of their practices and she even got us to the food line first (can anyone say AMAZING)! While eating we talked a little about how nice it is for my friends and I to be able to freely choose where and how we decide to worship because our parents had allowed us to think openly about religion and spirituality, something that was very uncommon in their generation. Thank goodness for hippie parents :)