Mansour Meeting 3

            On Thursday, Mansour and I met for the third time to talk about life, and such. The first thing both of us noticed was the weather; it’s amazing how nice it is outside right now. We figured it would be an injustice if we were meeting inside anywhere.

            Eventually, we got to catching up with each other on what had been going on since our last talk. A couple of weeks ago, Mansour started having car problems, which still seemed to be continuing. On Thursday, he had actually gone from having no car to three operating cars: his original one, a new one he bought because the engine in the old one was fried, and a rental. He had a couple stories of Craig’s List deals going wrong, but eventually he found a new car. I guess he is going to save his old one for his brother to buy.

            I’m not a big car person, but Mansour and I both knew well that him buying a Japanese car was a much better purchase than an American car; American cars are just meant to die after “x” amount of years, so that you have to buy another from them. I guess that American cars aren’t really prevalent in Saudi Arabia, anyways. He said the lack of longevity was why.

            Eventually, we got to talking about our upcoming weekends. I went to Houston for the weekend and went to a Rockets basketball game, U of Houston baseball game, the rodeo, and Luke Bryan concert. He said that my weekend sounded really eventful, but he had nothing planned.

            So, since he didn’t have anything going on, he said he wanted to go out and do something crazy. Like skydiving. I’m not sure if he ended up going, but he seemed pretty serious about it. This got us talking about doing crazy things and being spontaneous. He said that skydiving was something that he had always wanted to doing. I have the exact same desire.

That thought made me think about how crazy it is that our completely polar opposite cultures still desire the same sort of outlandish adventure. It seems that the human desire to do things that are out of the box and potentially dangerous is simply that: a human desire. Not affected by culture at all.

Next time that we meet, I want to sort of explore this idea even further. It makes me wonder what other desires are of the flesh and unaffected by culture.