NGO market and other stuff

Today, there was a NGO market, organized by Forum 2000. It took place in the Tyrs' house. At first, I should have gone with Aja, but then also Meldath and Lan joined us.
At first, I was browsing through all the booths of the present organizations; I'd had quite some expectations of it, as I'd maybe like to work as a volunteer in some; so I'd thought I'd get some information on volunteer opportunities. Nope. There was a lot of booths and so a lot of information, but in too little space. Everything was just too confusing. But it was interesting in that I saw a lot of various NGOs - some of them really obscure. It surprised me to see so many of them, from various fields.
Then there was a lecture by Phil Wood - "Intercultural city". He was kind of a city development consultant or like that. His thesis was that diversity is critical for dynamic city development. First he was drawing conclusions for the fact immigrants enrich cities (culturally, economically and in other ways). The most successful cities in the world are the "intercultural" ones (mentioned were Palo Alto, Singapore and one can come up with others); yet there are many cases when immigrants are causing grave troubles - how is that? The point was that the different cultural groups had to be intermingled (btw it seems there's been quite a lot of research on this topic in USA and, to lesser degree, in Britain) - while in most areas, the groups were segregated.
Then, Meldath went (with Lan and me) to buy the go game. He became interested in the game after playing it a few times. He managed to buy a nice set for quite a reasonable price. Meanwhile, I was looking around the game store. Splendid :-)