…on notes from afar

So we throw ourselves into a different culture… and it’s a shock. And we start out by clocking all the differences. The ‘quaint’ peculiarities with the tendency if we’re not careful to be ever so slightly patronising and even derogatory!. And then we spent some more time and start seeing all the similarities and we find it harder to see the differences. And before long the unfamiliar becomes familiar and we can’t see anymore what we saw before. And that’s an awfully difficult thing to write about. Writing about what’s become incredibly normal but may be totally unfamiliar to many.