Highrise Brainstorming

     I wandered around the Highrise for some time and decide to compare my life with the life of Benoit who is from the city of Montreal in Canada. Before seeing the video clips, I briefly searched about the city of Montreal. Montreal is the largest city in the province of Quebec which is the center of the French culture in Canada. It was somewhat similar to my situation, because I lived in a big city in Korea for almost all my life.

     First, I want to compare his job choosing and mine. When I watched the video clip that shows his life as a pastry chef, he just liked cooking since he was young. He liked and wanted to do cooking, thus he found a job as a pastry chef. This is also what I want to do and trying to do. In the future, I want to do something for my job that I like and enjoy doing. I want to follow his way of choosing a job. If I choose a job that I don’t want to do, then regardless of how much money that I can earn, my life will not be happy. Instead, I would live a happy life by doing what I really like.

     Next, I want to compare with his neighborhood with mine. He introduces that he usually uses public transportation in order to meet his neighborhood much more often. Also, he describes his environment around him in a very impressive way. He uses the highway between his house and the formerly best apartment across the highway. The apartment across the highway was regarded as the best, but for some reason it was deteriorated and finally demolished. He says that there’s a highway that separates him from it. This is very similar to my environment in my hometown, Bundang. Bundang was originally a planned city and I am living in one of the apartments. Then, there’s a highway and a small river that separates us from the newer planned city Pangyo which is still developing. However, people are not gathering in Pangyo as expected. It is very low that Pangyo will deteriorate as the apartment across from Benoit’s apartment, because the city is planned and controlled by the government. Still, not many people are living in that area, and if it continues this way, nobody knows for sure.

     Last thing is that there is a very different culture in the same city. Benoit introduces the Arabic culture around him. He sometimes can’t communicate that well, because of the language difference. However, it seems that he is doing a pretty good job going along with the people from a different culture. In contrast, I am living in a rather simple society. In my hometown, Bundang, it is not easy to find a major different culture. In Montreal, Arabic culture and the French culture is pretty major, thought they are foreign cultures. However, in my town and the whole country Korea, is still somewhat reluctant to accept foreign cultures. We imported certain cultures, but the foreign cultures can’t develop more in our society. Therefore, there is very little variety in our society and also it rarely occurs that we can’t communicate because of the language difference as Benoit and the Arabic.

     This Highrise thing was pretty impressive. It was interesting to look inside some aspects of a person that I don’t know. In my essay, I will compare and contrast myself with Benoit from Montreal adding some of my experiences.