Chuncheon really IS surrounded by mountains--and I have pictures to prove it.

I'm sitting here waiting for Julianne to get home from school so we can go eat dinner . . . and since I haven't been blogging regularly in a while decided to put up another post.

Something I still have a hard time believing even after living in Chuncheon for almost 2 years is that the city is SURROUNDED by mountains . . .

This is the view that Julianne and I see from our apartment door.

Mountains . . . everywhere . . .

Every time I go home to Canada it always strikes me how FLAT everything is where I live.

It also strikes me how much geography shapes a culture . . . in Korea vertical thinking is the paradigm. Rank and hierarchy dominate every facet of the culture.

In Canada things are much more horizontal--in the sense that there is a sense of 'equality' that allows for a little more negotiation of power in everyday situations, and less of a focus on rank and social rituals that must be observed between two people of different ranks.

Something I had to hammer home in a cross-cultural lesson I made about 'how to be polite in English' is that North Americans actually DO have a system of rituals and cultural rules for being polite. Many of the Korean trainees in my class had this general feeling that anarchy reigns in English culture, and that there is no respect for rank, etc. It was great for me to see how interested they were in learning about the general rules of politeness for some very common day to day situations . . .

Anyways . . . Julianne should be home soon.

J