101: Getting Started

I've lived in several foreign countries, and each time the first weeks were an unnerving rush of the unfamiliar. The parade of shuffling, singing men and women celebrating a newly circumcised boy in Madagascar or the electric shades of hair sported by pointy-booted Ukrainian beauties or the geckos swarming on my office walls in Cambodia were thoroughly strange, and they made me feel thoroughly a stranger. With each country, I worked harder and faster to become less of an outsider, to understand, and to fit in.