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While watching the NBA finals with a friend last week, I realized that she argued any point that I made—whether the statement I made was for her team or against it, she argued the point. After feeling stressed throughout a game I wasn’t personally invested in, it occurred to me that the arguing might not have been personal, but more a result of her upbringing. My friend is Parisian, and while French is generally understood to be the language of love, I would argue that it is perhaps a language more suited to conflict.

In my previous article I explored some of the cultural quirks of airports, but I did not delve into what kinds of things differentiate cultures from one another.

Interview with Stephanie Beattie, Director of Communications at Plan Canada

Can you sum up Plan's mission in 2010?
Plan is one of the oldest agencies in the world. We started during the Spanish Civil War helping children, but our mission has evolved. We're a human rights organization, working to empower people to lead their own development. Our focus is on children and making sure that children in the poorest parts of the world have access to water and food and opportunities to contribute to the world.

While my 6’2” frame sat in my cramped window seat of an airbus a330 last night, two concepts related to airports and flying occurred to me. The first was how bizarre airport culture is, and the second is how time is abstracted while in the air.

Airports are often regarded as symbols of their location. They are gateways into our cities. But airports do not have a specific culture anchored to the place that they lie— A little ironic no? The physical architecture of the airport is important to the city, but the culture within the airport is disconnected to the location that it is synonymous with. The people who populate these gateways are from around the world, from different time zones, speaking different languages and having different cultural identities. Airports are mixing pots. All cultures are thrown together in one compact place, separated by boarding gates and flown from one place to another. I think that it’s funny how the only sign of the local identity are the people who work there, who are more often than not, dressed in generic uniforms, un-indicative of any culture whatsoever.

What do Kenya and Canada have in common? Both countries are filled with vibrant populations who truly care about creating a better future for their children.

There are also many differences between the two countries, including the culture and the weather, and of course, the poverty line. An unskilled worker in Kenya earns from $1 to $5 a day. In Canada, minimum wage goes from $8 per hour to $10.25 per hour. How can we even compare our lives to that of Kenyans?

The town of Arawa exists as a small square of suburbia, affixed like a postage stamp to the broader expanse of Bougainville, autonomous region of Papua New Guinea. Split-level housing uniformly line wide boulevards, running parallel to power-lines that have not carried electricity in over two decades.

Through the ‘70s and ‘80s, Arawa’s growth was explosive, quickly filling with the western amenities needed to satisfy an expanding population of ex-patriots. They were brought here to run Panguna copper-mine, in its time the biggest open-cast mine in the world, operating on one of the mountains that encompass the town. A once devoid of trees due to security protocols, Arawa is now post-apocalyptic in appearance – uninhabited houses collapse inwards, pavements and roads rupturing as the forest commences its reclamation of Arawa.