Genesis

“What did you do within the last week, say, that was a global experience?”

This is the question that prompted the creation of this website. It was asked by one of my professors for a class about globalization.

When she posed the question, my classmates were hesitant at first, but someone finally called out: “I saw the new James Bond movie.”

“OK, good. Anybody else?” she said as she wrote ‘James Bond’ on the dry erase board.

“My friend from New York came to visit,” I said, glad that I could think of something that seemed global.

“I had Italian for dinner on Saturday,” one of my classmates called out.

That got me thinking: “I’m not sure that I should admit this here, but on Sunday night I ate at Burger King in Leicester Square. Oh, and I had a spicy bean veggie burger, which I think could be construed as a global experience.”

“So your friend comes in from New York and you take him to Burger King?” my professor retorted.

“Oh no, I went with another friend from the US…who I know from China…who’s studying at another university here…before we went to an Italian opera with English surtitles at the English National Opera…and it was an opera about India at that.”

“That’s interesting, having the high culture and the low culture together like that,” she commented.

“Oh, and on Saturday night I went to a Brazilian bar with a Canadian friend who happens to be a student here but who I know through a mutual friend from China. We watched capoeira and tried to samba.”

And the funny thing is, I could keep going with this. The more I thought about it, the more actions I realized fit in to the global context. All this without even having mentioned anything to do with the Internet—and believe me, I had Skyped, blogged, and chatted with the best of them over that week.

“You did this all this week? You’re not just projecting all this into this week, right?” the teacher asked with some concern.

“Oh, all this week. Otherwise I’d be talking to you about my trip to France.” I smiled coyly.

But what to make of this flurry of activity? It shocked me how much of this global activity I take for granted, or don’t even think about. When my professor first posed the question, I couldn’t really think of anything that I had done that would qualify as global, and then I got started.

And so, I leave this to you as an open question: what global moments have you had?