When I was 16, I visited Australia with my frined. We got lost and had to walk on a high way for an hour. Suddenly, an apple was thrown from a car and we were surprised. I thought what a dangerous country it is. However, it was a good trip and quite memorable for me. Yukiko

I have an interesting trip to Switzerland three years ago. It lasted for eight days and I used trains for transporting. I visited alpe mountains and it was the first time in my life to see and touch snow. I enjoyed sailing by boat in many lakes and sometimes enjoyed talking with people. However, the best journey was by using a boat to cross two lakes on the boaders between switerland and Germany with fabulous sceneries. Mohammed Almalki

An Amazing Journey

One of the most extraordinary journeys that I have ever made was in 1988, when I was 19 years old, and I travelled from Pakistan to China across the Karakorum Highway. The highway snakes up into the Karakorum mountain range from Gilgit in Pakistan, until it reaches the Khunjerab pass, a mountain pass at an altitude of 4,639 metres, which acts as the border between Pakistan and China.

I remember that when we crossed (I was travelling with an English lad who was even younger than me and a very strong-willed Canadian woman), there was no public transport and we had to get a lift with local traders who had joined together to hire a bus that would take them across the border.

The first town in China that I stayed in was Kashger. I was very curious about visiting China, because it had always seemed like a very distant and exotic place to me. I was very pleasently surprised. It was a beautiful town with wide, well maintained roads and footpaths covered by vines to shelter afternoon walkers from the sun. In fact, one of the things that impressed me most about China was the fabulous infrastructure. In New Delhi, a major city in India, phoning England was time consuming, laborious and the line was unreliable. In Kashgar, on the other hand, 2500 kilometres from the capital, Beijing, making an international call was no hassle at all and the line was perfect.

The thing I enjoyed most was sitting in the market and drinking tea. Mind you, it was impossible to be inconspicuous! The local Uyghurs didn't often see Europeans and so they tended to stare at me in fascination as I sat drinking my tea. How ironic that I had gone to that part of the world because it struck me as exotic, only to find that I was the exotic one!

Have you been on an interesting journey? Why not tell your classmates about it on this blog. And even better if it is accompanied by photographs!

Art Reflects Cultures

Hi,

In my opinion, Art is a way expressing our ideas, feelings and beliefs as well as sending messages, which sometimes we cannot reveal directly. Therefore, Art reflects, to some extent, the cultures and charactrizes a way of comunicating between different cultures and societies.

On the other hand, I think we can use Art to transcend the bounderies and break the polotical barriers and give people an opportunity to think about global and common issues.

Mohammed Almalki

Art and Design

One of the themes for this week is art and design. We thought it would be interesting to look at examples of art and design from different countries and think about some of the similarities and differences between them.

Look at the following examples of art and design from Kenya, France, Thailand, the UK, Japan, the USA, the Arabic world (one from Saudi Arabia, the other I'm not sure), China and Taiwan. Can you guess which country each work of art is from? How old do you think each work is? How can you tell if it is recently painted or old? Which ones do you like? What do you like about them? And finally, do you think making art is a universal impulse, and if you do, what makes it universal? If you don't think it is universal, is there anything that connects all the images below?

As usual leave your comments, and this time it would be particularly good if you could post an image of an art work or an example of design that you particularly like and tell us why you like it.

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peaceful communication

We are comfortable to know each other and communicate peacefully as global village . However, we have to protect own cultures and enhance the global understanding which will help us to avoide the misunderstanging and to be better.

On the other hand, we think that global monoculture is developing. Therefore, we should be aware of keep the local cultures, customs and traditional aspects in the communities.

As far as we can say that we do not totally agree that the global village cannot spread around the world but might some parts in the world take time to develop.

Carry,
Mohammed Almalki

Culture Shock in the Global Village?

Throughout human history land, territory and space have been incredibly important to human beings. Human beings have always made their homes and developed their cultures within a territory that was limited by borders.

Another important feature of human civilisations is that they have often tried to extend those borders. The most obvious way this has been done is through war and colonisation, but it has also been done in other ways such as trade or religious conversion.

So the Romans, who originally occupied a small territory in what we now call Italy, expanded their territory, until they occupied most of Europe and all the land surrounding the Mediterranean. The Islamic religion extended the territory in which Islam was the main religion until it occupied an area that stretched from India in the East to Spain in the west and the Aztecs originated in the centre of what we now call Mexico to occupy all the surrounding land, from the east coast to the west coast.

In the past, territorial expansion has always been limited by the level of technological development of the civilisation in question. Until the British empire was established, no civilisation had had the technology to maintain a territory that was global. The British Empire, like all empires before it, didn't last. However, the technologies that allowed it to be global have continued to develop, forcing cultures that had previously existed exclusively within a relatively small territory to recognise that they actually share a much larger territory, the Earth, with a multitude of other, quite different, cultures. Indeed, the idea of the Earth, that is so familiar to us, is relatively new, no more than a few hundred years old. Before that humans had no idea that, in fact, they all shared the same territory- a small planet suspended in the enormity of Space.

Now, not only do we know that we share a common territory, but our technologies have made it possible for us to travel from one side of that territory to the other in a matter of hours and to communicate across that territory in an instant. Fashions spread quickly around the world, overcoming cultural barriers. Products that can be bought in Leeds can also be bought in Riyadh, Shanghai, Tokyo or New York. We live in a globalised world- or what the thinker Marshall McLuhan called, "The Global Village".

How do you feel about the emergence of this Global Village?

Do you think that a 'global monoculture' is developing? If you do, do you think this is to be welcomed or is it a threat to the richness of local cultures and traditions?

Do you think there really is a global village, or do you agree with those people who say that we cannot talk about a global village when so many people on the planet have no access to the technologies that would allow them to participate in the life of this village (for example, according to some estimates, a third of the world's population has never even used a telephone!).

If the global village is a reality, do you think it's going to be possible for people to put aside their differences and co-habit peacefully or are we going to see an increase in the number of wars.

And finally, do you think there is a genuine dialogue taking place in the global village, or do you think that this process of globalisation is being driven and shaped by commercial and business interests?

Please tell us what you think- leave a message with your point of view. It can be long or short, serious or lighthearted. You can even leave a photograph, if you think it's relevant.

Equality in the Workplace

The government recently announced that it was going to abolish the compulsory retirement age of 65 in the UK. This means that, while people can retire at 65 if they want to, they do not have to retire if they want to carry on working. Many people thought that forcing people to retire at 65, when they are perfectly healthy and capable of doing their jobs, was an example of "ageism", or discrimination against older employees in the workplace.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/1170047.stm

The last 50 years has seen a lot of legislation in the UK intended to force employers to treat their workers, and prospective workers, equally. For example, it is now illegal to pay an employee less because she is a woman. Also, when firms interview applicants for a job, they can not discriminate against a prospective employee on the grounds that they are a woman, or disabled, or gay, or anything else that is not directly connected with how capable they are of doing the job.

What's more, a lot of pressure has been put on employers to get rid of the "glass ceiling" whereby there is an invisible limit on how high in the organisation an employee can rise, if they are from one of the aforementioned groups.

Another target of legislation has been nepotism, a practice whereby the family members of high ranking employees are given jobs within the organisation, not because they are qualified to do the work, but simply because they are family members.

Successive governments in Britain have set themselves the target of turning Britain into a meritocracy- in other words a society in which people progress and do well not because they belong to a particular group or class, but though their own hard work and ability. How well they have succeeded is open to question, but the importance of creating a meritocracy has been widely accepted.

What do you think? Is a meritocracy the best way to organise the workplace, or are there sometimes other considerations? Perhaps you believe that a private company has the right to employ whoever they want? What is the situation in your country? Is it a meritocracy? Does it try to be, or is this not considered so important?

Write a comment or a new posting and tell us what you think.