On my bucket list is to go to Sao Paulo Brazil someday. It's exciting that they are one of the host cities of the World Cup this year. I wouldn't go during the games, but it would be fun to go some other time.
Events such as the Olympics and World Cup remind us that this planet has humans all around it. There are many things we have in common (biology) and many things which are dissimilar (culture).
I recently watched the documentry Girl Model, which tells the story of young girls (age 13) from rural Russia (Siberia) who are flown to Japan to supply fresh faces to the modeling industry. It was heartbreaking.
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| Blue = USA (midwest), Red = Brazil, Orange = USA (west coast), Purple = Japan, Green = USA (east coast) |
I remember times when I traveled abroad. I felt culture shock and isolation. My first trip was when I was 20 years old, so I cannot imagine doing that at age 13.
I made a graph showing population density (people per square mile) but then I got to thinking that didn't tell the whole story. This graph makes it seem like Glendale and Los Angeles are comparable.
It doesn't matter how densely populated an area is if you can walk from one end to the other (like Glendale). Threre is a factor for sprawl which puts a city like Sao Paulo in a different category than Los Angeles, for example.
I was impressed to find out that New York City is so large AND densely populated, while San Diego is large but not as densely populated. For some reason I thought Tokyo was more densely populated, but obviously it is also very spread out. This data has been normalized to Sao Paulo. I remember seeing a satallite image of "the valley of the sun" aka. Phoenix metro area and being shocked at how sprawled out into the open desert it was. It didn't seem right to encroach on nature so much for our concrete jungles. I wonder what effects population density and sprawl have on wellness. This will have to be a topic for another post!
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