There are a little over seven billion people in the world. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining that many people. Before this trip I never really gave much thought to that number. I just accepted it without any real comprehension. It seems any number involving several places quickly becomes just really big or really small depending on which side of the decimal point the digits fall. But traveling to what seemed like a whole other world opened my eyes to the diversity as well as the sheer size of our planet’s human population. Thailand was a journey within itself. We spent almost a full day hopping between three different flights, and I cannot imagine what it must have been like traversing the country without modern transportation. As I have mentioned before I have never travelled very far from my country, or my home, for that matter. So landing in Asia and seeing Bangkok for the first time was definitely a shock to my perspective. We arrived there at night, so all the buildings and streets were lit up. This was the largest city I had ever visited. There was a sky train for getting people from one part of the city to another. The enormous size just of this one city and the super long plane ride it took to get there made me think about how huge our planet really is. It gives you a whole new perspective and respect for community.
Having taken Philosophy and Sociology last semester I was able to make a real life connection to the idea of globalization that is impacting our world in so many ways today. At sometime during the trip I remember Dean Ransom pointing out the use of US company names for other foreign business. The owners were hoping that the name recognition would grant them more trusting customers and overall more business. An example we saw was the GM Motel that had a strikingly similar logo to the American car company, General Motors.