Day 31: A Critical Eye On Canada

So I can't believe that I've been here a month already!!! Wow!!! That first week here was soooooo long and now 4 have flown by! One month down, only eleven more to go? Man this year is gonna go by so fast! I definitely gotta make the most of it...especially now that the weather has warmed up a bit and we've all defrosted from the weeks of cold weather that we had. Bring on spring I say!

So I've been able to make a lot of observations while I've been here in Korea. I've been doing a lot of comparing between Canada and Korea and have come up with some interesting questions/points to ponder/curiosities. I love my home country so much, and do miss it quite a bit, but there's a few things about life in Canada that I never really noticed until I came here. And they're not very pleasant. Here's some food for thought:

1) Obesity - I've read a thousand studies and heard a million times in the media about how North Americans are alarmingly overweight, and how the percentage of obese persons in Canada and the USA has just skyrocketed over the last few decades, but I never really paid attention much to it. Now that I've been here in Korea a month, I've really noticed it. The amount of overweight people that I've seen in Korea I can count on one or two hands. Why is that? Do the Koreans have a healthier diet or lifestyle than we do? Do they eat less fast food? Do they just have really good genes that predispose them to slimmer waistlines? I'm really curious about this, because Koreans are like Canadians in that the majority of them live in cities, eat out a lot, and don't often get a lot of exercise (or so I've been told, I could be wrong) so why is there such a sharp difference?

2) Homelessness - Now this is something that I definitely noticed while living in Vancouver (a city notorious for its problems with homelessness.) I don't think I have seen a single homeless person at all anywhere here in Seoul. In a city of 20 million you'd think there would be THOUSANDS, as all the major North American cities seem to be a magnet for homeless people. Why not here in Korea? Do they not have any? Or are they just really well-hidden? Do they have better social nets that protect people from having to live on the streets here? Do all the would-be homeless people just live with their relatives in those common multi-generation family homes? Again, a question in which I don't have any answers, but it was something that I was really surprised about here in Korea.

3) Transit - It is SO WONDERFUL to live in a city that has an efficient (and inexpensive) transit system. Seoul's subway system has eleven lines with hundreds of stations, stretching across hundreds of kilometres across this gigantic metropolis. Busses run absolutely everywhere here, and I've never had to wait longer than 2 minutes (during the day) for a bus. And several more new subway lines are being constructed/planned to connect even more neighbourhoods of the city. Add on a high-speed express subway that will connect the airport to downtown, opening in 2006, (sound familiar? can we say RAV line?) and you have the makings of an excellent and thorough transit system. And the best part is, to ride from end of the city of the other (which would take at least 3-4 hours cause it's so damn big) would never cost me more than about $1.50 CDN. WOW! I don't know if mass transit and infrastructure in Korea comes under municipal, provincial, or federal responsibility, but whoever is running (and building it) is doing a fantastic job! (now if only it was open a little later...oh well.) Either way, as an urban planning student, it's thrilling to be in a city where transit is so efficient and so...massive. In Vancouver people scream and whine about not wanting more rapid transit lines in the city, because 'the construction will disrupt my lovely 3-hour morning commute to work and might make the road too bumpy causing me to spill my soy latte' or 'why are we wasting our taxpayers dollars on rapid transit that only the riff-raff will use - I'm rich and love my suburban cul-de-sac monster home and am addicted to my gas-guzzling SUV! I want more roads - lets build more freeways!' Meanwhile, our governments bicker back and forth about who's going to pay for these lines that should have been built 30 years ago. Toronto and Montreal have similar woes with their transit system - the need is there, but where is the money for it? Canada really needs to do some major reprioritizing when it comes to how it manages and constructs mass urban transit.

Anyways, there's a lot more that I could go on and rant and rave about, but I think that's good enough for now. (And besides, I get too dizzy if I stand up on my soapbox for too long...hehe! But I must admit the view *is* awfully nice from way up here...) Expect sequels on this kind of stuff in the future, and 'A Critical Eye On Korea' in tomorrow's edition of the internationally renowned S2H World Tour blog. :-)