By Katya Andresen: Nov 21, 2007
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.
