I've been back for a month and have been contemplating the notion of travel. You meet people of similar background as you when you travel because they are the ones who are - like you - priviledged enough to earn enough money to buy an air ticket and be idle (no working) for the time they spend on the open road. Yes, it's the big dollar bill grinning straight at you. (That's interesting, when I first typed "big", I typed "buy" instead. . .same, same but different?) All the Northern countries of the first world going off to explore the world, be it on Scandinavian farms, tourist havens on African coastal towns or on rugged mountains overlooking Chinese gorges. You can easily meet British travellers clinking beers at a foreign pub, Germans ordering schnitzels from menus, Americans chowing down on a Big Mac or sipping a Starbucks latte.

Countries that were once considered poor and second/third world have a burgeoning middle and upper class who are able to immigrate and travel. Chinese from the Mainland have been arriving into Canada at a high rate for the past few years and with the economy newly opening up to welcome new tourists and merchants, people are able to afford travelling outside of the People's Republic of China. I was on a Southern China flight from Kunming to Shenzhen and browsed through a magazine. There was an interesting fact that stated that the top reason why Chinese tourists are travelling is shopping! Yes, a once Communist state is going out into the world to discover what it has been missing as its children were growing up deprived of the variety that capitalist countries were able to enjoy and afford.

Going out to see "new" shops may be exciting for Chinese tourists but many of these shops are not as unique as many might like to imagine when they go to places such as Australia, England or Japan. Specialty shops unique to countries and cities are slowly becoming extinct. These days you can find Gaps, Benetton and Esprit everywhere. All chains popular in capitalist states. I watched a film at the Vancouver International Film Festival called Chain that told stories of two women. One women almost lives in a shopping centre. The interesting thing is that shopping centres spaces of her story were filmed in various parts of the world including the USA, Canada and Germany! It could be anywhere in the world, it was so generic. I was taken to The Pavilion, apparently the biggest shopping Mall in the Southern Hemisphere while in Durban and recognized many shops or many local copy-cat ones.

The world is becoming so small. Everything is an airplane ride away. Even South Africa, a country that is probably one of the places farthest away from Vancouver, BC is two flights away. All you need is a way of paying your way there. Meeting people from different parts of the world is wonderful, but it also means that cultures and languages are quickly disappearing into the void. More Europeans can speak more than two languages fluently but how many of North Americans even Canadians who are supposed to have functional French do? We have English and that's all we need to know, we have it easy.