It was very liberating, living in a foreign country, a place where everything was new and strange - the food, the customs, the climate, everything.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was living in Paris, which is a very beautiful, very wonderful place, but a tight place as a city, a tight place culturally. Its people are very brilliant, thoughtful, the place functions, but it's a historical place in some ways, like a big museum.
There was a generation of people who moved here to make something of themselves. They had to really struggle and created really something on their own apart from a lot of attention. It was a really exciting time here.
Switzerland felt incredibly narrow, growing up. It was good, in a way. There were so many museums. But it was always a no-brainer that I would have to leave, and I'm grateful for that.
I loved everything about Spain - the people, the language, and the food!
It didn't get any more glamorous than Havana, Cuba, in the 1950s. I used to go there when I was a waiter on a cruise ship.
Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.
I wanted to see how flavors, spices, and grains traveled back and forth along the Silk Road and were interpreted by a multitude of cultures' palates.
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
I did have a very restricted, regimented life. There was a kind of happiness there, a contentment, but it was a small happiness within very clear and delineated borders.
I'll tell you what colonial experience is.