The joy of travel is to let different cultures seep into your identity. It's not to bring your own culture with you so you can inflict it on the native populace.
Recently, while circling the earth for a travel book, I experienced one of my greatest thrills as a globe-trotter: I was mistaken for a German. Don't misunderstand. I am no Germanophile. It's just that wherever I journey, I try hard to blend in with the locals. So when a German woman stopped me in the town square in Cologne and asked me for the time—in German! clearly assuming I was also German!—I couldn't help but congratulate myself on a job well done. I'd successfully melted into my surroundings, shedding my Americanness the way a snake sheds a sheath of dead skin.http://www.newsweek.com/id/236032
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