Life around the world of Asia

A day around the world: school, food, homes, games, weather and getting around, in real places.

9 to explore

Watch Life around the world A school day in Tokyo In Tokyo, many children walk to their local school in neighborhood groups. Lessons are 45 minutes long in elementary school. At lunchtime, pupils set and clear the table in their classroom, and they share the job of cleaning their school. The school year starts in April.
Watch Life around the world Breakfast noodles in Hanoi Pho is a soup of rice noodles, meat and a fragrant broth, and in Vietnam it is mostly eaten for breakfast. In Hanoi, near where pho is thought to have begun, cooks focus on a clear broth simmered with bones, meat, ginger, shallots and spices, served at street stalls from early morning.
Watch Life around the world Living in a ger in Mongolia A ger is a round, portable home with lattice walls, roof poles and a crown at the top, covered in layers of wool felt and canvas and tied with ropes. Herding families in Mongolia take it down and move it with their animals, and many families also live in gers around the capital, Ulaanbaatar.
Watch Life around the world Living in a vertical city: Hong Kong Hong Kong is hilly, and only about a quarter of its land is built on. Its 7.5 million people live close together, many in apartment buildings. A long chain of outdoor escalators climbs one hillside, ferries cross Victoria Harbour, and trains carry millions of passengers every day.
Watch Life around the world Living root bridges of Meghalaya In the hills of Meghalaya, in northeast India, Khasi and Jaintia villagers guide the hanging roots of rubber fig trees across streams on bamboo frames. Over many years the roots take hold, thicken and grow together into living bridges that can carry people across rivers swollen by monsoon rain.
Watch Life around the world Living with snow in Yakutsk Yakutsk, a city of more than 300,000 people beside the Lena River in Siberia, is one of the coldest cities in the world: in January, the average daily high is about -35°C. People dress in layers, many buildings stand on stilts above frozen ground called permafrost, and young children stay home from school on the coldest days.
Watch Life around the world Lunch at a Singapore hawker center A hawker center is a building full of small food stalls, each cooking its own dishes, with shared tables in the middle. Singapore built them to move street cooks indoors, and today they are where people from Chinese, Malay, Indian and other communities eat side by side. UNESCO calls them community dining rooms.
Watch Life around the world Lunchbox delivery in Mumbai Every working day, Mumbai's dabbawalas collect home-cooked lunches in metal tiffin boxes, carry them by bicycle, on foot and on the city's local trains, and deliver them to offices by lunchtime. Colored letters, numbers and symbols painted on each box tell them where it goes, and the empty boxes travel home in the afternoon.
Watch Life around the world Riding the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka The Tokaido Shinkansen, Japan's first bullet train line, opened in 1964 between Tokyo and Osaka. Today its trains reach 285 km/h, the fastest take 2 hours 21 minutes from Tokyo to Shin-Osaka, and in fiscal year 2023 the average delay was just 1.6 minutes per train.